Rich pickings, luscious as the clustering grapes beyond the fox’s reach, were not limited to the wonderful Valley of Petroleum. Live operators quickly learned that big wells could be found away from the low banks of Oil Creek. Anon they climbed the hills, ascended the ravines and invaded the near townships. Very naturally the tributary streams were favored at first, until experience inspired courage and altitude failed to be a serious obstacle. In this way many juicy streaks were encountered, broadening men’s ideas and the area of profitable developments to a marvelous degree. Alaska nuggets are fly-specks compared with the golden spoil garnered from oil-wells on scores of farms in Allegheny, Cherrytree and Cornplanter. Tales of the petroleum-seesaw’s ups and downs, without any “mixture rank of midnight weeds” that savor of “something rotten in Denmark,” need no Klondyker’s imagination, measureless as the ice-floes of the Yukon, to awaken interest and be worthy of attention. By the side of the romance, the pathos, the tragedy and the startling incidents of the oil-regions thirty years ago the gold-excitements of California and Australia and the diamond-fever of South Africa are tame and vapid. Prior to the oil-development settlers in the back-townships lived very sparingly. Children grew up simple-minded and untutored. The sale of a pig or a calf or a turkey was an event looked forward to for months. Petroleum made not a few of these rustics wealthy. Families that had never seen ten dollars suddenly owned hundreds-of-thousands. Lawless, reckless, wicked communities sprang up. The close of the war flooded the region with paper-currency and bold adventurers. Leadville or Cheyenne at its zenith was a camp-meeting compared with Pithole, Petroleum Centre or Babylon. Men and women of every degree of decency and degradation huddled as closely as the pig-tailed Celestials in Chinatown. Millions of dollars were lost in bogus stock-companies. American history records no other such era of riotous extravagance. The millionaire and the beggar of to-day might change places to-morrow. Blind chance and consummate rascality were equally potent. Of these centers of sin and speculation, strange transformations and wild excesses, scarcely a trace remains. Where hosts of fortune-seekers and devotees of pleasure strove and struggled nothing is to be seen save the bare landscape, a growth of underbrush or a grassy field. Sodom was not blotted out more completely than Pithole, the type of many oil-towns that have been utterly exterminated.