The fight now going on in Kansas between the people and the Oil Combine has forcibly illustrated the methods of the Standard. When the Kansas oil fields began to show signs of large prosperity the Standard went into the State, put up refineries and storage tanks, laid pipe lines, and began to build a through pipe line from Kansas to its Chicago station at Whiting. By getting the railroads to raise their rates on oil, compelling producers to agree to sell their oil only to the Combine, resorting to cut-throat competition to drive them out of any market they attempted to enter, they practically captured the oil business of the State and were able to put the price of crude oil down and squeeze the independents until many of them were ready to sell out to the Combine at the victor’s own price. The power of the Trust over the railroads is illustrated by the case of Mr. I. E. Knapp of Chanute, who went to the field in 1899 and secured a number of paying wells. He also obtained a market for his crude oil with the Omaha and Kansas City gas companies, transporting the oil in tank cars of his own. In the recent investigation in Kansas it appeared that he had enlarged his business till he had 20 tank cars in transit. He paid the railroads 10 cents per hundred lbs. to Omaha and Kansas City, and they counted the weight at 6.4 lbs. per gallon. With this rate and ¾ of a cent mileage on his cars he was able to make a good profit, but suddenly in May, 1902, two weeks after he had signed a year’s contract with the gas companies, the railroads changed the weight classification to 7.4 lbs. per gallon, adding thereby $7.50 per car to the freight, while the freight on the products of crude remained unchanged. That is, the Standard could still ship gas-oil as a product of crude at the old weight of 6.4 lbs. a gallon.[299] Mr. Knapp protested and the railroad agents, admitting that the classification was arbitrary and not general even on their own roads, succeeded in getting the order reversed, but only for a short time, when back it went, and in reply to further protest from the Kansas agents their superior officers wrote that they were tired of the correspondence and declined to discuss the matter further. So for 11 months Mr. Knapp had to fulfil his contract with a handicap of $7.50 per car more cost than he had figured on. The result was that in May, 1903, he turned over his crude oil to the Standard which thereafter supplied the Omaha and Kansas City gas companies, while Knapp’s 20 cars were side-tracked and in the spring of 1905 were still idle at Chanute.