Ben Hogan was one of the motley crew that swarmed to Pithole “broke.” He taught sparring and gave exhibitions of strength at Diefenbach’s variety-hall. He fought Jack Holliday for a purse of six-hundred dollars and defeated him in seven rounds. Four-hundred tough men and tougher women were present, many of them armed. Hogan was assured before the fight he would be killed if he whipped his opponent. He was shot at by Marsh Elliott during the mill, but escaped unhurt. Ben met Elliott soon thereafter and knocked him out in four brief rounds, breaking his nose and using him up generally. Next he opened a palatial sporting-house, the receipts of which often reached a thousand dollars a day. An adventure of importance was with “Stonehouse Jack.” This desperado and his gang had a grudge against Hogan and concocted a scheme to kill him. Jack was to arrange a fight with Ben, during which Hogan was to be killed by the crowd. Ben saw his enemy coming out of a dance-house and blazed away at him, but without effect. The fusillade scared “Stonehouse” away from Pithole and on January twenty-second, 1866, a vigilance committee at Titusville drove the villain out of the oil-region, threatening to hang him or any of his gang who dared return. This committee was organized to clear out a nest of incendiaries and thugs. The vigilants erected a gallows near the smoking embers of E. B. Chase & Co.’s general store, fired the preceding night, and decreed the banishment of hordes of toughs. “Stonehouse Jack” and one-hundred other men, with a number of vile women came under this sentence. The whole party was formed in line in front of the gallows, the “Rogue’s March” was played and the procession, followed by a great crowd of people, proceeded to the Oil-Creek Railroad station. The prisoners were ordered on board a special train, with a warning that if they ever again set foot upon the soil of Titusville they would be summarily executed. This salutary action ended organized crime in the oil-region. North of Pithole the tide crossed into Allegheny township. Balltown, a meadow on C. M. Ball’s farm in July, 1865, at the end of the year paraded stores, hotels, a hundred dwellings and a thousand people. Fires in 1866 scorched it and waning production did the rest. Dawson Centre, on the Sawyer tract, budded, frosted and perished. The Morey House, on the Copeland farm, was the oasis in the desert, serving meals that tickled the midriff and might cope with Delmonico’s. Farms on Little Pithole Creek were riddled without swelling the yield of crude immoderately. Where are those oil-wells now? Echo murmurs “where?” In all that section of Cornplanter and Allegheny townships a derrick, an engine-house or a tank would be a novelty of the rarest breed.