The advantages of Franklin heavy-oil as a lubricant were quickly recognized. It possessed a “body” that artificial oils could not rival. In the crude state it withstood a cold-test twenty degrees below zero. Here is where it “had the bulge” on alleged lubricants which solidify into a sort of liver with every twitch of frost. The producing-area of heavy-oil is restricted to a limited section, where the first sand is thirty to sixty feet thick and the lower sands were entirely omitted in the original distribution of strata. For years operators hugged the banks of the streams and the low grounds, keeping off the hills more willingly than General Coxey kept off the Washington grass. The famous “Point Hill,” across French Creek from the Evans well, went begging for a purchaser. At its southern base Mason & Lane, Cook & Co., Welsby & Smith, Shuster, Andrews, Green and others had profitable wells, but nobody dreamed of boring through the steep “Point” for oil. J. Lowry Dewoody offered the lordly hill, with its forty acres of dense evergreen-brush, to Charles Miller for fifteen-hundred dollars. He wanted the money to drill on the flats and the hill was an elephant on his hands. During the Columbian Exposition an aged man alighted from a western train at the union-depot in Chicago. His rifle and his buckskin-suit indicated the Kit-Carson brand of hunter. He gazed about him in amazement and a crowd assembled. “Wal,” ejaculated the white-haired Nimrod, “this be Chicago, eh? Sixty years ago I killed lots ov game right whar we stan’ an’ old man Kinzey fell all over hisse’f to trade me a hunnerd acre ov land fur a pair ov cowhide boots! I might hev took him up, but, consarn it, I didn’t hev the boots!” [Illustration: J. LOWRY DEWOODY.] [Illustration: WILLIAM PAINTER.] [Illustration: EDWARD RIAL.]