“Oh, thank you a thousand times! It is fifteen years since I have seen a paper and this will be such a treat!”
He seized the sheet eagerly, dropped upon the grass and glanced over the printed page. In an instant he jumped to his feet and tears coursed down his wrinkled cheeks.
“I did not mean to be rude,” he said earnestly, “but you cannot imagine how my feelings mastered me, after so many years of separation from the world, at sight of a paper from the city of my birth!”
The next moment the good-byes were uttered and we had left the hermit of South Fork, to meet no more this side of eternity. He stood peering after us until the woods shut us from his wistful gaze. Six years later death, the grim detective no vigilance can elude, claimed the guardian of the Beatty Well. His family removed to parts unknown. He rests in an unmarked grave, beneath a spreading oak, near the murmuring stream. The lonely exile has reached home at last!
Who on earth was this educated, courteous, gentlemanly personage, and how did he drift into such a place? This perplexing problem beat the fifteen-puzzle, “Pigs in Clover,” or the confusing dogma of Freewill and Predestination. Our guide enlightened us. The old man was reared in Louisville, graduated from college and entered an office to study law. In a bar-room row one night a young man, with whom he had some trouble, was stabbed fatally. Fearing he would be accused of the deed, the student fled to the woods. For years he shunned mankind, subsisting on game and fruit and sleeping in a cave. Every rustling leaf or snapping twig terrified him with the idea that officers were at his heels. Ultimately he gained courage and sought the acquaintance of the few settlers in his vicinity. Striving to forget the past, he cohabited with the woman he called his wife, erected a shanty and brought up three children. Fire destroyed his hut and its contents, leaving him destitute, and he located where we met him. The fear of arrest could not be shaken off and he supposed we had come to take him a prisoner, after twenty-five years of hiding, for a crime of which he was innocent. This explained his retreat under the bed and violent trembling. He carried his secret in his own bosom until 1873, when he was believed to be dying and disclosed it to a friend, our guide, with a sealed letter giving his true name. He recovered, the letter was handed back unopened and the fugitive’s identity was never revealed. What an existence for a man of refinement and collegiate training! What volumes of unwritten, unsuspected tragedies environ us, could we but pierce the outward mask and read the tablets of the heart!
Eight or ten years ago J. O. Marshall, a Pennsylvania oil-operator, cleaned out the Beatty Well and drilled another a half-mile north. Neither yielded any oil, although the second was put down nine-hundred feet. Mr. Marshall leased a great deal of land in Wayne and adjacent counties, expecting to operate extensively, but he died without seeing his purposes accomplished. He was a genial, enterprising, whole-souled fellow, whose faith in Kentucky as an oil-field never faltered.
Dr. Hunter, my esteemed associate on many a delightful trip, was practicing at Newcastle, Pa., when the civil war broke out. He sold his drug-store, offered his services to the Government and was placed in charge of a medical department, where he made a first-class record. He amputated the leg of General James A. Beaver, subsequently Governor of Pennsylvania. At the close of the war he settled in Cumberland county, married a prominent young lady, built up an immense practice and acquired a competence. He served with signal ability and credit in the Legislature and in Congress, elected time and again in a district overwhelmingly against his party. He was chairman of the Republican State-Committee[State-Committee], and ought to be the successor of Blackburn in the United-States Senate.
Seventy years ago William Morris, a practical driller, whose name oilmen should perpetuate, invented the contrivance that culminated in “jars” for drilling-tools. This contrivance, which enabled the Ruffners and other salt-borers to go a thousand feet or more for brine, renders it possible to drill a mile for oil, if ambitious operators desire to get so far towards the antipodes. The manner in which the oil-resources of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky were thrown away by the early pioneers is a surprising feature in the history of human affairs. Fifty years before Pennsylvania oil-wells had been heard of the Kanawha salt-seekers were drilling what to-day would be paying oil-wells. Instead of saving the oil, which is enriching West Virginia operators now, they wasted it and saved the salt-water. They wasted the natural gas, the best fuel of the century, and boiled their salt-water with wood, the most expensive and least satisfactory fuel of the valley. That is often the way humanity gropes in the dark. The men who rushed to California drove their ox-wagons past the big bonanzas of the Comstock lode, while the men who later went to the Comstock went past the rich carbonates of Leadville, just as later prospectors ran over the Cripple-Creek silver and gold-leads in the search for things farther distant and the crowds hurrying to Alaska ignored the teeming ledges of the Black Hills. The Kanawha salt-men scorned the oil, yet drilled the first oil-wells, and in doing it invented the methods which have come into use throughout the entire oil-territory. If Joseph and David Ruffner and William Morris had displayed half the wisdom in utilizing the oil they manifested in inventing tools to find salt-water, theirs would be the familiar names in Oildom down to the end of time.
“Fellow-citizens,” shouted a free-silver orator to a host of starving coal-miners three months after the last Presidential inauguration, “they tell us Major McKinley is the advance-agent of prosperity, but, if so, he seems to be a deuce of a way ahead of the show!” In like fashion the Ruffners were a long way ahead of the petroleum-development, but the show got there at last, heralded by salt-wells that pointed unerringly towards the dawn.