But never have the railroads failed to compel an independent pipe line to fight through the courts for every crossing it needed. It has made no difference how often or emphatically the law has sustained the right of the people to make such crossings. The next attempt would be resisted on the same ground, and with the same desperate determination "to overcome competition" for the favorite. The local line laid by the independents in 1892 between Coraopolis and Titusville had to pass under the Erie, the Lake Shore, the Pan Handle, the Western New York, and the Pennsylvania railroads, and in every case had to encounter needless litigation to do so. It was victorious, for the roads did not dare go to trial, though the managers, one after the other, to help cripple competition, spent the money of the stockholders in what was perfectly well known to be a hopeless opposition. A correspondent of the Bradford _Record_ wrote: "When the news reached Bradford that the Erie Railroad had sold her independence to the combination, that the latter might defeat honorable competition and continue to rob the people, that one hundred men and a cannon confronted the United States Pipe Line at Hancock, who could have censured the outraged producers of Bradford for blowing the great Kinzua viaduct out of the Kinzua valley? Who could blame the bankrupt producers of the oil country for destroying every dollar's worth of the combination's property wherever found? The people are getting desperate; they are ready, like the blind Samson, to pull down the pillars of the temple, even though they themselves fall crushed to death amid the ruins." These are wild, even wicked words, but is it not a portent that such words rise out of the heart of an honest community? This opposition, with show of force and threats of violence, was successful. In February, 1893, after months of facing the cannon and the private army which the railroad maintained for the oil combination, it was publicly announced by the president of the new pipe line that the route by Hancock must be abandoned. Many thousands of dollars and time worth even more were lost. "Suppose," said a daily paper of Binghamton, "that a body of laboring men had unlimbered a cannon and stationed armed men to suppress competition, what denunciation of the outrage there would have been!" A new way through Wilkes-barre was chosen after the retreat from Hancock, and by that route the independent producers and refiners, with hope long deferred, are now seeking to finish their march to the sea.