The shut-down was a great disappointment in prices. The average price of petroleum at the wells for October, the month before the shut-down, was 70-7/8 cents a barrel. The highest monthly price reached during the restriction was 93-5/8, in March, 1888. The average for October, 1888, the last month of the year originally agreed upon, was 90-5/8. By a subsequent understanding the restriction was continued until July, 1889. The price then was 95-1/8. At no time during the shut-down was the coveted dollar mark maintained, and it was barely touched in March, 1888, after which there was a sharp decline to 71-3/8 in June, with savage losses to "the lambs." High prices did not come until the accumulation of 6,000,000 barrels set aside "for the use" of the producers had been sold out. After that there were in the winter following--1889-90--a few months in which the price rose, as to $1.12-1/2 in November, 1889, but it sank the year following to 60-3/4 in December, 1890, and it continued to go down until crude oil reached 50 cents in October, 1892, the lowest point known since there was an oil market.[293] The men with whom the producers made their bargain, shrewder than they, and versed in the dynamics of the markets, knew that the effect of setting apart 6,000,000 barrels of oil would be ultimately depressive to prices, not stimulating. Not knowing when or at what price this vast amount would be unloaded, buyers, both for use and for speculation, would be made timid, and prices would be held in check. The shut-down produced a great gambling mania. Untold millions were lost by men in the oil country, who gambled on the exchanges to make the profits of the expected advance. Local panics, bank failures, ruin in all its shapes, were the escort of shame and loss which marched with the shut-down. Curiously enough, it was those who speculated for the rise who were the losers. There was against them an element which knew better than they what prices were going to be, for it made them. It is this ability of insiders to bet on a certainty which has been the destruction of the oil exchanges. From Pittsburg to New York they are now practically all dead. The amount of the reduction effected by the shut-down, independent of a natural decline which had set in some months before, has been estimated at 11,000,000 to 15,000,000 barrels. The production ran down from 25,798,000 barrels in 1886 to 21,478,883 in 1887, and 16,488,688 in 1888. In 1889 it was up to 21,487,435 again, and in 1890, 29,130,910.