“We are told that the odor of petroleum is perceived at a distance in approaching the spring. This may be true in particular states of the wind, but we did not distinguish any peculiar smell until we arrived on the edge of the fountain. Here its peculiar character became very obvious. The water is covered with a thin layer of petroleum or mineral oil, as if coated with dirty molasses, having a yellowish-brown color.
“They collect the petroleum by skimming it like cream from a milk-pan. For this purpose they use a broad, flat board, made thin at one edge like a knife; it is moved flat upon and just under the surface of the water and is soon covered by a coating of petroleum, which is so thick and adhesive that it does not fall off, but is removed by scraping the instrument upon the lip of a cup. It has then a very foul appearance, but it is purified by heating and straining it while hot through flannel. It is used by the people of the vicinity for sprains and rheumatism and for sores on their horses.”
The “muddy, dirty pool” was included in an Indian reservation, one mile square, leased in 1860 by Allen, Bradley & Co., who drove a pipe into the bog. At thirty feet oil began to spout to the tune of a-barrel-an-hour, a rhythm not unpleasing to the owners of the venture. The flow continued several weeks and then “stopped short, never to go again.” Other wells followed to a greater depth, none of them proving sufficiently large to give the field an orchestra-chair in the petroleum-arena.
It is told of a jolly Cuban, wearing a skull innocent of garbage as Uncle Ned’s, who “had no wool on the top of his head in the place where the wool ought to grow,” that he applied oil from the “dirty pool” to an ugly swelling on the apex of his bare cranium. The treatment lasted a month, by which time a crop of brand-new hair had begun to sprout. The welcome growth meant business and eventually thatched the roof of the happy subject with a luxuriant vegetation that would have turned Paderewski, Absalom, or the most ambitious foot-ball kicker green with envy! Tittlebat Titmouse, over whose excruciating experiences with the “Cyanochaitanthropopoion” that dyed his locks a bright emerald readers of “Ten-Thousand a Year” have laughed consumedly, was “not in it” compared with the transformed denizen of the pretty village nestling amid the hills of the Empire State. Those inclined to pronounce this a bald-headed fabrication may see for themselves the precise spot the mud-hole furnishing the oil occupied prior to the advent of the prosaic, unsentimental driving-pipe.
Captain de Joncaire, a French officer in colonial days, who had charge of military operations on the Upper Ohio and its tributaries in 1721, reported “a fountain at the head of a branch of the Ohio, the water of which is like oil.” Undoubtedly this was the same “fountain” referred to in the Massachusetts Magazine for July, 1791, as follows:
“In the northern part of Pennsylvania is a creek called Oil Creek, which empties into the Allegheny river. It issues from a spring on which floats an oil similar to that called Barbadoes tar, and from which one may gather several gallons a day. The troops sent to guard the western posts halted at this spring, collected some of the oil and bathed their joints with it. This gave them great relief from the rheumatism, with which they were afflicted.”
OIL-SPRING ON OIL CREEK.
The history of petroleum in America commences with the use the pioneer settlers found the red-men made of it for medicine and for painting their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted its medicinal use and retained for various affluents of the Allegheny the Indian name of Oil Creek. Both natives and whites collected the oil by spreading blankets on the marshy pools along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep hill-sides or of mountain-walls that hem in the valleys supporting coal-measures above. The remains of ancient pits on Oil Creek-the Oil Creek ordained to become a household word—lined with timbers and provided with notched logs for ladders, show how for generations the aborigines had valued and stored the product. Some of these queer reservoirs, choked with leaves and dirt accumulated during hundreds of years, bore trees two centuries old. Many of them, circular, square, oblong and oval, sunk in the earth fifteen to twenty feet and strongly cribbed, have been excavated. Their number and systematic arrangement attest that petroleum was saved in liberal quantities by a race possessing in some degree the elements of civilization. The oil has preserved the timbers from the ravages of decay, “to point a moral or adorn a tale,” and they are as sound to-day as when cut down by hands that crumbled into dust ages ago.
Scientists worry and perspire over “the mound-builders” and talk glibly about “a superior race anterior to the Indians,” while ignoring the relics of a tribe smart enough to construct enduring storehouses for petroleum. People who did such work and filled such receptacles with oil were not slouches who would sell their souls for whiskey and their forest-heritage for a string of glass-beads. Did they penetrate the rock for their supply of oil, or skim it drop by drop from the waters of the stream? Who were they, whence came they and whither have they vanished? Surely these are conundrums to tax the ingenuity of imaginative solvers of perplexing riddles. Shall Macaulay’s New-Zealand voyager, after viewing the ruins of London and flying across the Atlantic, gaze upon the deserted oil-wells of Venango county a thousand years hence and wonder what strange creatures, in the dim and musty past, could have bored post-holes so deep and so promiscuously? Rip Van Winkle was right in his plaintive wail: “How soon are we forgotten!”