There was a free market for the oil as it came out of the wells and out of the refineries, and free competition between buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, manufacturers and traders. Industries auxiliary to the main ones flourished. Everywhere the scene was of expanding prosperity, with, of course, the inevitable percentage of ill-luck and miscalculation; but with the balance, on the whole, of such happy growth as freedom and the bounty of nature have always yielded when in partnership. The valleys of Pennsylvania changed into busy towns and oil fields. The highways were crowded, labor was well employed at good wages, new industries were starting up on all sides, and everything betokened the permanent creation of a new prosperity for the whole community, like that which came to California and the world with the discovery of gold. But shadows of sunset began to creep over the field in its morning time, and the strange spectacle came of widespread ruin in an industry prospering by great leaps. Wherever men moved to discover oil lands, to dig wells, to build refineries or pipe lines, to buy and sell the oil, or to move it to market, a blight fell upon them. The oil age began in 1860. As early as 1865 strange perturbations were felt, showing that some undiscovered body was pulling the others out of their regular orbits. Before the panic of 1873--days of buoyant general prosperity, with no commercial revulsion for a cause--the citizens of this industry began to suffer a wholesale loss of property and business among the refineries in New York, Pittsburg, Cleveland, and elsewhere, the wells of the oil valleys, and the markets at home and abroad. To the building of refineries succeeded the spectacle--a strange one for so new a business--of the abandonment and dismantling of refineries by the score. The market for oil, crude and refined, which had been a natural one, began to move erratically, by incalculable influences. It went down when it should have gone up according to all the known facts of the situation, and went up when it should have gone down. This sort of experience, defying ordinary calculations and virtues, made business men gamblers. "We began speculating in the hope that there would be a change some time or other for the better," testified one who had gone into the business among the first, and with ample capital and expert skill.[46]