To such a sudden flood of mutiny,
And, as it looks like rain,
The pallbearers will please place the body in the wheelbarrow
And we will proceed to bury Cæsar,
Not to praise him.”
Edwin C. Bell, a son of the Pine-Tree state, landed at Petroleum Centre in 1866, spent 1869 in the west, returned to Oil Creek in 1870 and for three years punched down oil-wells. In 1874 he started a job-printery at Pioneer, using a press he built from iron-scraps and an oak-rail and learning the trade without an instructor. That fall he transplanted his kit to Titusville and continued in the jobbing-line fourteen years. Early in 1878 he published the Leader, a weekly that petered out in two months. Mr. Bell in 1882 flew the flag of the Republic, a campaign-oracle of the Greenbackers and supporter of Thomas A. Armstrong for governor. The Republic, like the Argus, the Observer and others of that ilk, didn’t attain old age. Bell’s first grists—stories and sketches—went into the Courier hopper in 1872, supplemented from 1878 to 1882 by bundles of live matter in the Meadville Vindicator and the Richburg Echo. He edited the Republican at Casselton, N. D., in 1882-3, and during the nine years following his return to Titusville sent a news-letter almost daily to the Oil-City Blizzard. He has long contributed to the Sunday World and in 1888-9 was its assistant-editor. In 1892 he began a history of the Pennsylvania oil-regions, instalments of which the Derrick printed, and he hopes to finish the task on a comprehensive scale befitting the subject.
GEORGE A. NEEDLE.
STEPHEN W. HARLEY.