Improved methods of handling and new uses for the product advanced crude to five dollars in the spring of 1864. Operations encroached upon the higher lands, exploding the notion that paying territory was confined to flats bordering the streams. Pioneer Run, an affluent of Oil Creek, bisecting the western end of the upper McElhenney and Foster farms, panned out flatteringly. Substantial wells, yielding fifteen barrels to three-hundred lined the ravine thickly. The town of Pioneer attracted the usual throngs. David Emery and Lewis Emery, Frank W. Andrews and not a few leading operators resided there for a time. The Morgan House, a rude frame of one story, dished up meals at which to eat beef-hash was to beefashionable. Clark & McGowen had a feed-store, offices and warehouses abounded, tanks and derricks mixed in the mass and boats loaded oil for refineries down the creek or the Allegheny river. The characteristic oil-town has faded from sight, only the weather-beaten rail road-station and a forlorn iron-tank staying. John Rhodes, the last resident, was killed in February of 1892 by a train. He lived alone in a small house beside the track, which he was crossing when the engine hit him, the noisy waters in the culvert drowning the sound of the cars. Rhodes hauled oil in the old days to Erie and Titusville, became a producer, met with reverses, attended to some wells for a company, worked a bit of garden and felt independent and happy. Matthew Taylor, a Cleveland saloonist, whom the sequel showed to be no saloonatic, took a four-hundred-dollar flyer at Pioneer, on his first visit to Oildom. A well on the next lease elevated values and Taylor returned home in two weeks with twenty-thousand dollars, which subsequent deals quadrupled. A Titusville laborer—“a broth of a b’y wan year frum Oireland”—who stuck fifty dollars into an out-of-the-way Pioneer lot, sold his claim in a month for five-thousand. He bought a farm, sent across the water for his colleen and “they lived happily ever after.” The driver of a contractor’s team, assigned an interest in a drilling-well for his wages, cleaned up thirty-thousand dollars by the transaction and went to Minnesota. Could the mellowest melodrama unfold sweeter melodies? “The jingle of gold is earth’s richest music.” Although surrounded by farms unrivaled as oil-territory and sold to Woods & Wright of New York at a fancy price, James Boyd’s seventy-five acres in Cornplanter township, south of the lower McElhenny, dodged the petroleum-artery. The sands were there, but so barren of oil that nine-tenths of the forty wells did not pay one-tenth their cost. The Boyd farm was for months the terminus of the railroad from Corry. Hotels and refineries were built and the place had a short existence, a brief interval separating its lying-in and its laying-out.