Twenty-nine years ago a stout-hearted, strong-limbed, wiry youth, fresh from the Emerald Isle, asked a man at Petroleum Centre for a job. Given a pick and shovel, he graded a tank-bottom deftly and swiftly. He dug, pulled tubing, drove team and earned money doing all sorts of chores. Reared in poverty, he knew the value of a dollar and saved his pennies. To him Oildom, with its “oil-princes”—George K. Anderson, Jonathan Watson, Dr. M. C. Egbert, David Yanney, Sam Woods, Joel Sherman and the Phillips Brothers were in their glory—was a golden dream. He learned to “run engine,” dress tools, twist the temper-screw and handle drilling and pumping-wells expertly. Although neither a prohibitionist nor a prude, he never permitted mountain-dew, giddy divinities in petticoats or the prevailing follies to get the better of him in his inordinate desire for riches. Drop by drop for three years his frugal store increased and he migrated to Parker early in the seventies. Such was the young man who “struck his gait” in the northern end of Armstrong county, who was to outshine the men he may have envied on Oil Creek, to scoop the biggest prize in the petroleum-lottery and weave a halo of glittering romance around the name of John McKeown. Working an interest in an oil-well, he hit a paying streak and joined the pioneers who had sinister designs on Butler county, proverbial for “buckwheat-batter” and “soap-mines.” At Lawrenceburg, a suburb of Parker, he boarded with a comely widow, the mother of two bouncing kids and owner of a little cash. He married the landlady and five boys blessed the union of loyal hearts. His wife’s money aided him to develop the Widow Nolan farm, east of the coal-bank near Millerstown. Regardless of Weller’s advice to “beware of vidders,” he wedded one and from another obtained the lease of a farm on which his first well produced one-hundred-and-fifty barrels a day for a year, a fortune in itself. This was the beginning of McKeown’s giant strides. In partnership with William Morrisey, a stalwart fellow-countryman—dead for years—he drilled at Greece City, Modoc and on the Cross-Belt. He held interests with Parker & Thompson and James Goldsboro, played a lone hand at Martinsburg, invested in the Karns Pipe-Line and avoided speculation. He agreed with Thomas Hayes, of Fairview, in 1876, to operate in the Bradford field. Hayes went ahead to grab a few tracts at Rixford, McKeown remaining to dispose of his Butler properties. He sold every well and every inch of land at top figures. No slave ever worked harder or longer hours than he had done to gain a firm footing. No task was too difficult, no fatigue too severe, no undertaking too hazardous to be met and overcome. Avarice steeled his heart and hardened his muscles. Wrapped in a rubber-coat and wearing the slouch-hat everybody recognized, he would ride his powerful bay-horse knee-deep in mud or snow at all hours of the night. It was his ambition to be the leading oil-operator of the world.