Perhaps you decide to stay all night at Shaffer and start on foot early in the morning. A chair in a room thick with tobacco-smoke, or a quilt in a corner of the bar, is the best you can expect. By rare luck you may happen to pre-empt a half-interest in a small bed, tucked with two or three more in a closet-like apartment. Your room-mates talk of “flowing wells—five-hundred-thousand dollars—third sand—big strike—rich in a week—thousand-dollars a day,” until you fall asleep to dream of wells spouting seas of mud and hapless wights wading in greenbacks to their waists. Awaking cold and unrefreshed, your brain fuddled and your thoughts confused, you gulp a breakfast of “ham ’n eggs ’n fried potatoes ’n coffee” and prepare to strike out boldly. Encased in rubber-boots that reach above the thighs, you choose one of the two paths—each worse than the other—pray for sustaining grace and begin the toilsome journey. Having seen the tips of the elephant’s ears, you mean to see the end of his tail and be able to estimate the bulk of the animal. Night is closing in as you round up at your destination, exhausted and mud-coated to the chin. But you have traversed a region that has no duplicate “in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,” and feel recompensed a thousand-fold for the fatigue and exposure. Were your years to exceed Thomas Parr’s and Methuselah’s combined, you will never again behold such a scene as the Oil-Creek valley presented in the days of “the middle passage” between Shaffer and Oil City. Rake it over with a fine-comb, turn on the X-rays, dig and scrape and root and to-day you couldn’t find a particle of Shaffer as big as a toothpick! When the railroad was extended the buildings were torn down and carted to the next station.