While putting money into Baltimore blocks, bank-stocks and western ranches, he always retained enough to gobble a slice of seductive oil-territory. Plunging into the northern field “horse, foot and dragoons,” he bought out Hayes, who returned to Fairview with a snug nest-egg, and captured a huge chunk of the Bingham lands. Robert Simpson, agent of the Bingham estate, fancied the bold, resolute son of Erin and let him pick what he wished from the fifty-thousand acres under his care. McKeown selected many juicy tracts, on which he drilled up a large production, sold portions at excessive prices and cleared at least a million dollars in two or three years! As Bradford declined he turned his gaze towards the Washington district, bought a thousand acres of land and at the height of the excitement had ten-thousand barrels of oil a day! His object had been attained and John McKeown was the largest oil-producer in the universe. Down in Washington, as in Butler and McKean, he attended personally to his wells, hired the workmen, negotiated for all materials and managed the smallest details. He removed his family to the county-seat and lived in a plain, matter-of-fact way. It had been his intention to erect a forty-thousand-dollar house and reside at Jamestown, N. Y. Ground was purchased and the foundation laid. The local papers spoke of the acquisition he would be to the town, one suggesting to haul him into politics and municipal improvements, and McKeown resented the notoriety by pulling up stakes and locating at Washington. It often amused me to hear him denounce the papers for calling him rich. He was more at home in a derrick than in a drawing-room. The din of the tools boring for petroleum was sweeter to his ears than “Lohengrin” or “The Blue Danube.” Watching oil streaming from his wells delighted his eye more than a Corot or a Meissonier in a gilt frame. For claw-hammer coats, tooth-pick shoes and vulgar show he had no earthly use. Democratic in his habits and speech, he heard the poor man as patiently as the banker or the schemer with a “soft snap.” Clothes counted for nothing in his judgment of people. He enjoyed the hunt for riches more than the possession. In no sense a liberal man, sometimes he thawed out to friends who got on the sunny side of his frosty nature and wrote checks for church or charity. Hard work was his diversion, his chief happiness. His wells and lands and income grew to dimensions it would have strained the nerves and brains of a half-dozen men to supervise. He had mortgaged his robust constitution by constant exposure and the foreclosure could not always be postponed. Repeated warnings were unheeded and the strong man broke down just when he most needed the vitality his lavish drafts exhausted. Eminent physicians hurried from Pittsburg and Philadelphia to his relief, but the paper had gone to protest and on Sunday forenoon, February eighth, 1891, at the age of fifty-three, John McKeown passed into eternity.