But I had definitely left the coal region behind, now I was striking north, for oil. In three days I came into Oil City, so wonderfully situated on the wide and stately Alleghany river—the river having brown rings here and there, glimmering with wandering oil. The city is built up five or six hills, and is only a unity by virtue of its fine bridges. It is a clean town compared with Scranton, as oil is cleaner to deal with than coal. But the houses are more ramshackle. The poor people's dwellings suggest to the eye that they were made in a great hurry many years ago, and are now falling to bits; they are set one behind another up the hills, and you climb to them by wooden stairways. Some seem veritably tumbling down the hill. There were a fair number of foreign immigrants there, mostly Italians; but the oil business seems to be worked by Americans, the foreigners being too stupid to understand. Oil City is a cheap town to live in. I was boarded at a hotel for a dollar a day; and when I bought provisions for my next tramp to Erie Shore I found everything cheaper than in Eastern Pennsylvania. There appeared to be little cultured life, however, no theatre but the cinema, and little offered for sale in the shape of books.
I set out for Meadville on the "Meadville Pike." A feature of the new landscape and of the road and fields was the oil-pump, working all by itself, the long cables, connecting the pump with the engine, often coming across the roadway, the jig, jig, jig of the pumping movement, the clump, clump, clump, stump of the engine—the pulse of the industrial countryside.
I met a Dutchman. He asked:
"What's on? What is it for?"
I told him I was studying the emerging American, and he told me what a menace the fecund Slavs were to the barren Americans. According to him the extinction of the American was a matter of mathematics.
I came upon an enormous gang of Americans, Russians, Slavs, Italians at work on the highroad, digging it out, laying a bed of mortar, putting down bricks; some hundreds of workmen, extending over a mile and a half of closed road. Many of the American workmen were dressed as smartly as stockbrokers' clerks and city men, and they kept themselves neat and clean—a new phenomenon in labouring. Americans, however, were working together, Italians together, and Russians together. A fine-looking American workman said to me knowingly, "You can photograph me if you like, but the Guineas won't want to be photographed—most of them shot some one sometime or other, you bet!"
ITALIANS WORKING WITH THE "MIXER" ON THE MEADVILLE PIKE.
Near Cochranton I made the acquaintance of four little girls—Julia, Margaret, Elinor, Cora, and Georgiana—scampering about in bare legs and week-day frocks, whilst father and mother, with gauze bags on their heads, were "boxing the bees." It was the first swarm of summer; two lots of bees had been boxed, but the third was giving much trouble. Julia, aged twelve, was a very pretty girl, and when at her mother's recommendation she went indoors, washed her face and put on a Sunday frock, she looked a very smart young lady. She was conscious of that fact, and informed me in course of conversation that she was going to travel when she was grown up. She was dying to see Paris, and she wanted to visit all the European towns!