Mrs. McClintock, like thousands of women since, attempted one day in March of 1863 to hurry up the kitchen-fire with kerosene. The result was her fatal burning, death in an hour and the first funeral to the account of the treacherous oil-can. The poor woman wore coarse clothing, worked hard and secreted her wealth about the house. Her will, written soon after McClintock’s exit, bequeathed everything to the adopted heir, John W. Steele, twenty years old when his grandmother met her tragic fate. At eighteen he had married Miss M. Moffett, daughter of a farmer in Sugarcreek township. He hauled oil in 1861 with hired plugs until he could buy a span of stout horses. Oil-Creek teamsters, proficient in lurid profanity, coveted his varied stock of pointed expletives. The blonde driver, of average height and slender build, pleasing in appearance and address, by no means the unlicked cub and ignorant boor he has been represented, neither smoke nor drank nor gambled, but “he could say ‘damn’!” Climbing a hill with a load of oil, the end-board dropped out and five barrels of crude wabbled over the steep bank. It was exasperating and the spectators expected a special outburst. Steele “winked the other eye” and remarked placidly: “Boys, it’s no use trying to do justice to this occasion.” The shy youth, living frugally and not the type people would associate with unprecedented antics, was to figure in song and story and be advertised more widely than the sea-serpent or Barnum’s woolly-horse. Millions who never heard of John Smith, Dr. Mary Walker or Baby McKee have heard and read and talked about the one-and-only “Coal-Oil Johnnie.”