The history of petroleum in America commences with the use the pioneer settlers found the red-men made of it for medicine and for painting their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted its medicinal use and retained for various affluents of the Allegheny the Indian name of Oil Creek. Both natives and whites collected the oil by spreading blankets on the marshy pools along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep hill-sides or of mountain-walls that hem in the valleys supporting coal-measures above. The remains of ancient pits on Oil Creek-the Oil Creek ordained to become a household word—lined with timbers and provided with notched logs for ladders, show how for generations the aborigines had valued and stored the product. Some of these queer reservoirs, choked with leaves and dirt accumulated during hundreds of years, bore trees two centuries old. Many of them, circular, square, oblong and oval, sunk in the earth fifteen to twenty feet and strongly cribbed, have been excavated. Their number and systematic arrangement attest that petroleum was saved in liberal quantities by a race possessing in some degree the elements of civilization. The oil has preserved the timbers from the ravages of decay, “to point a moral or adorn a tale,” and they are as sound to-day as when cut down by hands that crumbled into dust ages ago. Scientists worry and perspire over “the mound-builders” and talk glibly about “a superior race anterior to the Indians,” while ignoring the relics of a tribe smart enough to construct enduring storehouses for petroleum. People who did such work and filled such receptacles with oil were not slouches who would sell their souls for whiskey and their forest-heritage for a string of glass-beads. Did they penetrate the rock for their supply of oil, or skim it drop by drop from the waters of the stream? Who were they, whence came they and whither have they vanished? Surely these are conundrums to tax the ingenuity of imaginative solvers of perplexing riddles. Shall Macaulay’s New-Zealand voyager, after viewing the ruins of London and flying across the Atlantic, gaze upon the deserted oil-wells of Venango county a thousand years hence and wonder what strange creatures, in the dim and musty past, could have bored post-holes so deep and so promiscuously? Rip Van Winkle was right in his plaintive wail: “How soon are we forgotten!” [Illustration: FIRST OIL “SHIPPED” TO PITTSBURG.]