Reference is sometimes made to a letter said to have been written by the commander of Fort Duquesne (Pittsburg) to General Montcalm, describing a grand scene of fire worship on the banks of Oil Creek, where the whole surface of the creek, being coated with oil, was set on fire, producing in the night season a wonderful conflagration. But there is room for the suspicion that this account is apocryphal. Such scenes as are there described have been witnessed on Oil Creek since the beginning of the modern oil trade. During the continuance of several accidental conflagrations, the scene has been awfully grand and impressive. It has been strongly suggestive of the conflagration of the last day, when 'The lightnings, barbed, red with wrath, Sent from the quiver of Omnipotence, Cross and recross the fiery gloom, and burn Into the centre!--burn without, within, And help the native fires which God awoke, And kindled with the fury of His wrath.' But this was when thousands of barrels of petroleum had been stored up in vats, and when the combustible fluid was spouting from the wells at the rate of many hundred barrels per day. Before the present deep wells were bored, oil was not produced in sufficient quantities to cause such a conflagration, and there was never seen upon the creek a stratum of the fluid of such consistency as to be inflammable. The remains of the once powerful confederacy of Indians known as the Six Nations still linger in Western Pennsylvania, in a region not very remote from Oil Creek, but they can throw no light upon the origin of these pits. In regard to their history, they can give no more information than they can concerning the mounds and fortifications, ruined castles, and dismantled cities, that tell us of a once glorious past, of a mysterious decadence, and of the utter vanity of all earthly glory. There are men still living in the oil valley, who were on terms of familiar intimacy with Cornplanter, a celebrated chief of the Seneca tribe of Indians--the last of a noble and heroic line of chieftains that had borne sway from the Canadas to the Ohio River, and who was living at the time of the French occupation. But in reciting his own deeds and memories, and those of his fathers, who had gone to the silent hunting grounds of the spirit land, he could say nothing of early oil operations, any further than the collection of it in small quantities for medical or ornamental purposes.