much to cherish and little to regret. Frederick Crocker drilled a notable well on the McElhenny, near the Foster line, jigging the “spring-pole” in 1861 and piercing the sand at one-hundred-and-fifty feet. He pumped the well incessantly two months, getting clear water for his pains. Neighbors jeered, asked if he proposed to empty the interior of the planet into the creek and advised him to import a Baptist colony. Crocker pegged away, remembering that “he laughs best who laughs last.” One morning the water wore a tinge of green. The color deepened, the gas “cut loose,” and a stream of oil shot upwards! The Crocker well spurted for weeks at a thousand-barrel clip and was sold for sixty-five-thousand dollars. Shutting in the flow, to prevent waste, wrought serious injury. The well disliked the treatment, the gas sought a vent elsewhere, pumping coaxed back the yield temporarily to fifty barrels and in the fall it yielded up the ghost. Bennett & Hatch spent the summer of 1861 drilling on a lease adjoining the Fountain, striking the third sand at the same depth. On September eighteenth the well burst forth with thirty-three-hundred barrels per day! This was “confusion worse confounded,” foreigners not wanting “the nasty stuff” and Americans not yet aware of its real value. The addition of three-thousand barrels a day to the supply—with big additions from other wells—knocked prices to twenty cents, to fifteen, to ten! All the coopers in Oildom could not make barrels as fast as the Empire well—appropriate name—could fill them. Bradley & Son, of Cleveland, bought a month’s output for five-hundred dollars, loading one-hundred-thousand barrels into boats under their contract! The despairing owners, suffering from “an embarrassment of riches,” tried to cork up the pesky thing, but the well was like Xantippe, the scolding wife of Socrates, and would not be choked off. They built a dam around it, but the oil wouldn’t be dammed that way. It just gorged the pond, ran over the embankment and greased Oil Creek as no stream was ever greased before! Twenty-two-hundred barrels was the daily average in November and twelve-hundred in March. The torrent played April-fool by stopping without notice, seven months from its inception. Cleaning out and pumping restored it to six-hundred barrels, which dropped two-thirds and stopped again in 1863. An “air blower” revived it briefly, but its vitality had fled and in another year the grand Empire breathed its last.