“Derricks peered up behind the houses of Oil City, like dismounted steeples, and oil was pumping in the back-yards.”—_London Post, A. D. 1865._ “From this place and from this day henceforth commences a new era.”—_Goethe._ “The chandelier drives off with its splendor the darkness of night.”—_Henry Stanton._ “The onlookers were struck dumb with astonishment.”—_Charles Kingsley._ “Either I will find a way or make one.”—_Norman Proverb._ “I bid you look into the past as if it were a mirror.”—_Terence._ ---------- Forty-three farms of manifold shapes and sizes lay along the stream from the Drake well to the mouth of Oil Creek, sixteen miles southward. For sixty years the occupants of these tracts had forced a bare subsistence from the reluctant soil. “Content to live, to propagate and die,” their requirements and their resources were alike scanty. They knew nothing of the artificial necessities and extravagances of fashionable life. To most of them the great, busy, plodding world was a sealed book, which they had neither the means nor the inclination to unclasp. The world reciprocated by wagging in its customary groove, blissfully unconscious of the scattered settlers on the banks of the Allegheny’s tributary. A trip on a raft to Pittsburg, with the privilege of walking back, was the limit of their journeyings from the hills and rocks of Venango. Hunting, fishing and hauling saw-logs in winter aided in replenishing the domestic larder. None imagined the unproductive valley would become the cradle of an industry before which cotton and coal and iron must “hide their diminished heads.” No prophet had proclaimed that lands on Oil Creek would sell for more than corner-lots in London or New York. Who could have conceived that these bold cliffs and patches of clearing would enlist ambitious mortals from every quarter of the globe in a mad race to secure a foothold on the coveted acres? What seventh son of a seventh son could foresee that a thousand dollars spent on the Willard farm would yield innumerable millions? Who could predict that a tiny stream of greenish fluid, pumped from a hole on an island too insignificant to have a name, would swell into the vast ocean of petroleum that is the miracle of the nineteenth century? Fortune has played many pranks, but the queerest of them all were the vagaries incidental to the petroleum-development on Oil Creek.