Pithole, “the magic city,” had little in its antecedents to betoken the meteoric rise and fall of the most remarkable oil-town that ever “went up like a rocket and came down like a stick.” The unpoetic name of Pithole Creek was applied to the stream which flows through Allegheny township and bounds Cornplanter for several miles on the east. It empties into the Allegheny River eight miles above Oil City and was first mentioned by Rev. Alfred Brunson, an itinerant Methodist minister, in his “Western Pioneer” in 1819. Upheavals of rock left a series of deep pits or chasms on the hills near the mouth of the stream. From the largest of these holes a current of warm air repels leaves or pieces of paper. Snow melts around the cavity, which is of unknown depth, and the air is a mephitic vapor or gas. A story is told of three hunters who, finding the snow melted on a midwinter day, determined to investigate. One of them swore it was an entrance to the infernal regions and that he intended to warm himself. He sat on the edge of the hole, dangled his feet over the side, thanked the devil for the opportune heat, inhaled the gas and tumbled back insensible. His companions dragged him away and the investigation ended summarily. Seven miles up the creek, in the northeast corner of Cornplanter, Rev. Walter Holmden was a pioneer-settler. Choosing a tract of two-hundred acres, he built a log-house on the west bank of the creek, cleared a few acres, struggled with poverty and died in 1840. Mr. Holmden was a fervent Baptist preacher. Thomas Holmden occupied the farm after the good old man’s decease, with the Copelands and Blackmers and James Rooker as neighbors. Developments had covered the farms from the Drake well to Oil City. Operators ventured up the ravines, ascended the hills and began to take chances miles from either side of Oil Creek. Successful wells on the Allegheny River broadened opinions regarding the possibilities of petroleum. Nervy men invaded the eastern portion of Cornplanter, picking up lands along Pithole Creek and its tributaries. I. N. Frazer, fresh from his triumph on Cherry Run as joint-owner of the Reed well, desired fresh laurels. He organized the United-States Oil-Company, leased part of the Holmden farm for twenty years and started a well in the fall of 1864. The primitive derrick was reared in the woods below the Holmden home. At six-hundred feet the “sixth sand”—generally called that at Pithole—was punctured. Ten feet farther the tools proceeded, the drillers watching intently for signs of oil. On January seventh, 1865, the torrent broke loose, the well flowing six-hundred-and-fifty barrels a day and ceasing finally on November tenth. A picture of the well, showing Frazer with his back to the tree beside his horse and a group of visitors standing around, was secured in May. Kilgore & Keenan’s Twin wells, good for eight-hundred barrels, were finished on January seventeenth and nineteenth. The unfathomable mud and disastrous floods of that memorable season retarded the hegira from other sections, only to intensify the excitement when it found vent. Duncan & Prather bought Holmden’s land for twenty-five-thousand dollars and divided the flats and slopes into half-acre leases. The first of May witnessed a small clearing in the forest, with three oil-wells, one drilling-well and three houses as its sole evidences of human handiwork.

Ninety days later the world heard with unfeigned surprise of a “city” of sixteen-thousand inhabitants, possessing most of the conveniences and luxuries of the largest and oldest communities! Capitalists eager to invest their greenbacks thronged to the scene. Labor and produce commanded extravagant figures, every farm for miles was leased or bought at fabulous rates, money circulated like the measles and for weeks the furore surpassed the frantic ebullitions of Wall Street on Black Friday! New strikes perpetually inflated the mania. Speculators wandered far and wide in quest of the subterranean wealth that promised to outrival the golden measures of California or the silver-lodes of Nevada. The value of oil-lands was reckoned by millions. Small interests in single wells brought hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago measured purses in the insane strife for territory. Hosts of adventurers sought the new Oil-Dorado and the stocks of countless “petroleum-companies” were scattered broadcast over Europe and America. An ambitious operator sold seventeen-sixteenths in one well and shares in leases were purchased ravenously. A half-acre lease on the Holmden farm realized bonuses of twenty-four-thousand dollars before a well was drilled on the property and the swarm of dealers resembled the plague of locusts in Egypt in number and persistence!

Everything favored the growth of Pithole. The close of the war had left the country flooded with paper currency and multitudes of men thrown upon their own resources. Hundreds of these flocked to the inviting “city,” which presented manifold inducements to venturesome spirits, keen shysters, unscrupulous stock-jobbers, needy laborers and dishonest tricksters. The post-office speedily ranked third in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Pittsburg alone excelling it. Seven chain-lightning clerks assisted Postmaster S. S. Hill to handle the mail. Lines of men extending a block would await their turns for letters at the general-delivery. It was a roystering time! Hotels, theaters, saloons, drinking-dens, gambling-hells and questionable resorts were counted by the score. A fire-department was organized, a daily paper established and a mayor elected. Railways to Reno and Oleopolis were nearly completed before “the beginning of the end” came with terrible swiftness. In November and December the wells declined materially. The laying of pipe-lines to Miller Farm and Oleopolis, through which the oil was forced to points of shipment by steam-pumps, in one week drove fifteen-hundred teams to seek work elsewhere. Destructive fires accelerated the final catastrophe. The graphic pen of Dickens would fail to give an adequate idea of this phenomenal creation, whose career was a magnified type of dozens of towns that suddenly arose and as suddenly collapsed in the oil-regions of Pennsylvania.

Pithole had many wells that yielded freely for some time. The Homestead, on the Hyner farm, finished in June of 1865, proved a gusher. On August first the Deshler started at one-hundred barrels; on August second the Grant, at four-hundred-and-fifty barrels; on August twenty-eighth the Pool, at eight-hundred barrels; on September fifth the Ogden, at one-hundred barrels, and on September fifteenth Pool & Perry’s No. 47, at four-hundred barrels. The Frazer improved during the spring to eight-hundred barrels, while the Grant reached seven-hundred in September. On November twenty-second the Eureka joined the chorus at five-hundred barrels. The daily production of the Holmden farm exceeded five-thousand barrels for a limited period, with a proportionate yield of seven-dollar crude from adjacent tracts. John A. Mather, the veteran Titusville photographer, discarded his camera to become a full-fledged oilman. He bored a well that tinctured the suburban slope of Balltown a glowing madder. The frenzy spread. J. W. Bonta and James A. Bates paid James Rooker two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand dollars for his hundred-acre farm, south of the Holmden. Rooker, a hard-working tiller of the soil, lived in a kind of rookery and earned a poor subsistence by constant toil. He stuck to the money derived from the sale of his farm, and he is still living at a goodly age. The Grand Dutch S well would have given Lillian Russell new wrinkles in her delineation of the “Grand Duchess of Gerolstein.” A neighbor refused eight-hundred-thousand dollars for his barren acres. “I don’t keer ter hev my buckwheat tramped over,” he explained, “but you kin hev this farm next winter fur a million!” He kept the farm, reaped his crop and was not disturbed until death compelled him to lodge in a plot six by two.

Bonta & Bates did not linger for “two blades of grass to grow where one grew before.” Within two months they disposed of ninety leases for four-hundred-thousand dollars and half the oil! They spent eighty-thousand on the Bonta House, a sumptuous hostlery. Duncan & Prather leased building-lots at a yearly rental of one-hundred to one-thousand dollars. First, Second and Holmden streets bristled with activity. The Danforth House stood on a lot subleased for fourteen-thousand dollars bonus. Sixty hotels could not accommodate the influx of guests. Beds, sofas and chairs were luxuries for the few. “First come, first served,” was the rule. The many had to seek the shaving-pile, the hay-cock or the tender side of a plank. Some mingled promiscuously in “field-beds”—rows of “shake-downs” on attic floors. Besides the Bonta and Danforth, the United States, Chase, Tremont, Buckley, Lincoln, Sherman, St. James, American, Northeast, Seneca, Metropolitan, Pomeroy and fifty hotels of minor note flourished. If palaces of sin, gorgeous bar-rooms, business-houses and places of amusement abounded, churches and schools marked the moral sentiment. Fire wiped out the Tremont and adjoining houses in February of 1866. Eighty buildings went up in smoke on May first and June thirteenth. Thirty wells and twenty-thousand barrels of oil went the same road in August. The best buildings were torn down, to bloom at Pleasantville or Oil City. The disappearance of Pithole astonished the world no less than its marvelous growth. The Danforth House sold for sixteen dollars, to make firewood! The railroads were abandoned and in 1876 only six voters remained. A ruined tenement, a deserted church and traces of streets alone survive. Troy or Nineveh is not more desolate.

In July of 1865 Duncan & Prather granted Henry E. Picket, George J. Sherman and Brian Philpot, of Titusville, a thirty-day option on the Holmden farm for one-million-three-hundred-thousand dollars. Mr. Sherman arranged to sell the property in New York at sixteen-hundred-thousand! The wells already down produced largely, seventy more were drilling and the annual ground-rents footed up sixty-thousand dollars. The Ketcham forgeries tangled the funds of the New-Yorkers and negotiations were opened with H. H. Honore, of Chicago. After dark on the last day of the option Honore tendered the first payment—four-hundred-thousand dollars. It was declined, on the ground that the business day expired at sundown, and litigation ensued. A compromise resulted in the transfer of the property to Honore. The deal involved the largest sum ever paid in the oil regions for a single tract of land. The bubble burst so quickly that the Chicago purchaser, like Benjamin Franklin, “paid too much for the whistle.” Col. A. P. Duncan commanded the Fourth Cavalry Company, the first mustered in Venango county, every member of which carried to the war a small Bible presented by Mrs. A. G. Egbert, of Franklin. Tall, erect, of military bearing and undoubted integrity, he lived at Oil City and died years ago. Duncan & Prather owned one of the two banks that handled car-loads of money in the dizziest town that ever blasted radiant hopes and shriveled portly pocket-books.

The Pithole bubble was blown at an opportune moment to catch suckers. Hundreds of oil-companies had come into existence in 1864, hungry for territory and grasping at anything within rifle-shot of an actual or prospective “spouter.” The speculative tide flowed and ebbed as never before in any age or nation. Volumes could be written of amazing transitions of fortune. Scores landed at Pithole penniless and departed in a few months “well heeled.” Others came with “hatfuls of money” and went away empty-handed. Thousands of stockholders were bitten as badly as the sailor, whom the shark nipped off by the waist-band. It was rather refreshing in its way for “country Reubens” to do up Wall-street sharpers at their own game. Shrewd Bostonians, New-Yorkers and Philadelphians, magnates in business and finance, were snared as readily as hayseeds who buy green-goods and gold-bricks. There are no flies on the smooth, glib Oily Gammon whose mouth yielded more lubricating oil than the biggest well on French Creek. His favorite prey was a pilgrim with a bursting wallet or the agent of an eastern petroleum-company. A well pouring forth three, six, eight, ten, twelve or fifteen-hundred barrels of five-dollar crude every twenty-four hours was a spectacle to fire the blood and turn the brain of the most sluggish beholder. “Such a well,” he might calculate, “would make me a millionaire in one year and a Croesus in ten.” The wariest trout would nibble at bait so tempting. The schemer with property to sell had “the very thing he wanted” and would “let him in on the ground-floor.” He met men who, driving mules or jigging tools six months ago, were “oil-princes” now. Here lay a tract, “the softest snap on top of the earth,” only a mile from the Great Geyser, with a well “just in the sand and a splendid show.” He could have it at a bargain-counter sacrifice—one-hundred-thousand dollars and half the oil. The engine had given out and the owner was about to order a new one when called home by the sudden death of his mother-in-law. Settling the old lady’s estate required his entire attention, therefore he would consent to sell his oil-interests “dirt-cheap” to a responsible buyer who would push developments. The price ought to be two or three times the sum asked, but the royalty from the big wells sure to be struck would ultimately even up matters. The tale was plausible and the visitor would “look at the property.” He saw real sand on the derrick-floor and everything besmeared with grease. The presence of oil was unmistakable. Drilling ten feet into the rich rock would certainly tap the jugular and—glorious thought!—perhaps outdo the Great Geyser itself. He closed the deal, telegraphed for an engine—he was dying to see that stream of oil climbing skywards—and chuckled gleefully. The keen edge of his delight might have been dulled had he known that the well was through, not merely to, the sand and absolutely guiltless of the taint of oil! He did not suspect that barrels of crude and buckets of sand from other wells had been dumped into the hole at night, that the engine had been disabled purposely and that another innocent was soon to cut his wisdom-teeth! He found out when the well “came in dry” that Justice Dogberry was not a greater ass and that the fool-killer’s snickersnee was yearning for him. Possibly he might by persistent drilling find paying wells and get back part of his money, but nine times out of ten the investment was a total loss and the disgusted victim quit the scene with a new interpretation of the scriptural declaration: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Butler anticipated Pithole when he wrote in Hudibras:

The methods of “turning an honest penny” varied to fit the case. To “doctor” a well by dosing it with a load of oil was tame and commonplace. In three instances wells sold at fancy prices were connected by underground pipes with tanks of oil at a distance. When the parties arrived to “time the well” the secret pipe was opened. The oil ran into the tubing and pumped as though coming direct from the sand! The deception was as perfect as the oleomargarine the Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture pronounced “dairy butter of superior quality!” “Seeing is believing” and there was the oil. They had seen it pumping a steady stream into the tank, timed it, gauged it, smelled it. The demonstration was complete and the cash would be forked over, a twenty-barrel well bringing a hundred-barrel price! A smart widow near Pithole sold her farm at treble its value because of “surface indications” she created by emptying a barrel of oil into a spring. The farm proved good territory, much to the chagrin of the widow, who roundly abused the purchasers for “cheatin’ a poor lone woman!” Selling stock in companies that held lands, or interests in wells to be drilled “near big gushers”—they might be eight or ten miles off—was not infrequent. On the other hand, a very slight risk often brought an immense return. Parties would pay five-hundred dollars for the refusal of a tract of land and arrange with other parties to sink a well for a small lease on the property. If the well succeeded, one acre would pay the cost of the entire farm; if it failed, the holders of the option forfeited the trifle that secured it and threw up the contract. It was risking five-hundred dollars on the chance, not always very remote, of gaining a half-million.

Sometimes the craze to invest bordered upon the ludicrous. Sixteenths and fractions of sixteenths in producing, non-producing, drilling, undrilled and never-to-be-drilled wells “went like hot cakes” at two to twenty-thousand dollars. A newcomer, in his haste to “tie onto something,” shelled out one-thousand dollars for a share in a gusher that netted him two quarts of oil a day! Another cheerfully paid fifteen-thousand for the sixteenth of a flowing well which discounted the Irishman’s flea—“you put your finger on the varmint and he wasn’t there”—by balking that night and declining ever to start again! At a fire in 1866 water from a spring, dashed on the blaze, added fuel to the flames. An examination showed that oil was filling the spring and water-wells in the neighborhood. From the well in Mrs. Reichart’s yard the wooden pump brought fifty barrels of pure oil. L. L. Hill’s well and holes dug eight or ten feet had the same complaint. Excitement blew off at the top gauge. The Record devoted columns to the new departure. Was the oil so impatient to enrich Pitholians that, refusing to wait for the drill to provide an outlet, it burst through the rocks in its eagerness to boom the district? Patches of ground the size of a quilt sold for two, three or four-hundred dollars and rows of pits resembling open graves decorated the slope. In a week a digger discovered that a break in the pipe-line supplied the oil. The leak was repaired, the pits dried up, the water-wells resumed their normal condition and the fiasco ended ignominiously. It was a modern version of the mountain that set the country by the ears to bring forth a mouse.

Joseph Wood, proprietor of the St. James Hotel at Paterson, N.J., died on May thirteenth, 1896. He was a wit and story-teller of the best kind, a gallant fighter for the Union and for a year lived at Pithole. A fortune made by operating and speculation he lost by fire in a year. He conducted hotels at Hot Springs, Washington, Chicago and Milwaukee and was one of the famous Bonifaces of the United States. On his business-cards he printed these “religious beliefs:”

“Do not keep the alabaster-boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone say before they go. The flowers you mean to send to their coffins send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my friends have alabaster-boxes laid away, full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection, which they intend to break over my dead body, I would rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered by them while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin without a flower, a funeral without a eulogy, than a life without the sweetness of love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand for their burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit. Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.”

Let down the bars and enter the field that was once the seething, boiling caldron called Pithole. A poplar-tree thirty feet high grows in the cellar of the National Hotel. Stones and underbrush cover the site of the Metropolitan Theater and Murphy’s Varieties. This bit of sunken ground, clogged with weeds and brambles, marks the Chase House.House. Here was Main street, where millions of dollars changed hands daily. For years the Presbyterian church stood forsaken, the bell in the tower silent, the pews untouched and the pulpit-Bible lying on the preacher’s desk. John McPherson’s store and Dr. Christie’s house were about the last buildings in the place. Not a human-being now lives on the spot. All the old-timers moved away. All? No, a score or two quietly sleep among the bushes and briars that run riot over the little graveyard in which they were laid when the dead city was in the throes of a tremendous excitement.

Pithole was the Mecca of a legion of operators whose history is part and parcel of the oil-development. Phillips Brothers, giants on Oil Creek, bought farms and drilled extensively. Frederic Prentice and W. W. Clark, who figured in two-thirds of the largest transactions from Petroleum Centre to Franklin, held a full hand. Frank W. Andrews, John Satterfield, J. R. Johnson, J. B. Fink, A. J. Keenan—the first burgess—D. H. Burtis, Heman Janes, “Pap” Sheakley, L. H. Smith and hundreds of similar caliber were on deck. John Galloway, known in every oil-district of Pennsylvania and West Virginia as a tireless hustler, did not let Pithole slip past unnoticed. He has been an operator in all the fields since his first appearance on Oil Creek in the fall of 1861. Sharing in the prosperity and adversity of the oil-regions, he has never been hoodooed or bankrupted. His word is his bond and his promise to pay has always meant one-hundred cents on the dollar. More largely interested in producing than ever, he attends to business at Pittsburg and lives at Jamestown, happy in his deserved success, in the love of his family and the esteem of countless friends. Mr. Galloway’s pedestrian feats would have crowned him with olive-wreaths at the Olympic games. Deerfoot could hardly have kept up with him on a twenty-mile tramp to see an important well or hit a farmer for a lease before breakfast. He’s a good one!

The Swordsman’s Club attained the highest reputation as a social organization. One night in 1866, when Pithole was at the zenith of its fame, John Satterfield, Seth Crittenden, Alfred W. Smiley, John McDonald, George Burchill, George Gilmore, Pard B. Smith, L. H. Smith, W. H. Longwell and other congenial gentlemen met for an evening’s enjoyment. The conversation turned upon clubs. Smiley jumped to his feet and moved that “we organize a club.” All assented heartily and the Swordman’s Club was organized there and then, with Pard B. Smith as president and George Burchill as secretary. Elegant rooms were fitted up, the famous motto of “R. C. T.” was adopted and the club gave a series of most elaborate “promenade-concerts and balls” in 1866-7. Invitations to these brilliant affairs were courted by the best people of Oildom. The club dissolved in 1868. Its membership included four congressmen, two ex-governors wore its badge and scores of men conspicuous in the state and nation had the honor of belonging to the Swordman’s. At regular meetings “the feast of reason and the flow of soul” blended merrily with the flowing bowl. Sallies of bright wit, spontaneous and never hanging fire, were promptly on schedule time. Good fellowship prevailed and C. C. Leonard immortalized the club in his side-splitting “History of Pithole.” Verily the years slip by. Long ago the ephemeral town went back to its original pasture, long ago the facetious historian went back to dust, long ago many a good clubman’s sword turned into rust. Pard B. Smith runs a livery in Cleveland, Longwell is in Oil City, Smiley—he represented Clarion county twice in the Legislature—manages the pipe-line at Foxburg, L. H. Smith is in New York and others are scattered or dead. On November twenty-first, 1890, the “Pioneers of Pithole”—among them a number of Swordsmen—had a reunion and banquet at the Hotel Brunswick, Titusville. These stanzas, composed and sung by President Smith and “Alf” Smiley, were vociferously cheered:

“Spirits” inspired four good wells at Pithole. One dry hole, a mile south-east of town, seriously depressed stock in their skill as “oil-smellers.” An enthusiastic disciple of the Fox sisters, assured of “a big well,” drilled two-hundred feet below the sixth sand in search of oil-bearing rock. He drilled himself into debt and Sheriff C. S. Mark—six feet high and correspondingly broad—whom nobody could mistake for an ethereal being, sold the outfit at junk-prices.

In the swish and swirl of Pithole teamsters—a man with two stout horses could earn twenty dollars a day clear—drillers and pumpers played no mean part. They received high wages and spent money freely. Variety-shows, music-halls—with “pretty waiter-girls”—dance-houses, saloons, gambling-hells and dens of vice afforded unlimited opportunities to squander cash and decency and self-respect. Many a clever youth, flushed with the idea of “sowing his wild oats,” sacrificed health and character on the altars of Bacchus and Venus. Many a comely maiden, yielding to the wiles of the betrayer, rounded up in the brothel and the potter’s field. Many a pious mother, weeping for the wayward prodigal who was draining her life-blood, had reason to inquire: “Oh, where is my boy to-night?” Many a husband, forgetting the trusting wife and children at home, wandered from the straight path and tasted the forbidden fruit. Many a promising life was blighted, many a hopeful career blasted, many a reputation smirched and many a fond heart broken by the pitfalls and temptations of Pithole. Dollars were not the only stakes in the exciting game of life—good names, family ties, bright prospects, domestic happiness and human souls were often risked and often lost. “The half has never been told.”

Scarcely less noted was the organization heralded far and wide as “Pithole’s Forty Thieves.” Well-superintendents, controlling the interests of outside companies, were important personages. Distant stockholders, unable to understand the difficulties and uncertainties attending developments, blamed the superintendents for the lack of dividends. No class of men in the country discharged their duties more faithfully, yet cranky investors in wildcat stocks termed them “slick rascals,” “plunderers” and “robbers.” Some joker suggested that once a band of Arabian Knights—fellows who stole everything—associated as “The Forty Thieves” and that the libeled superintendents ought to organize a club. The idea captured the town and “Pithole’s Forty Thieves” became at once a tangible reality. Merchants, producers, capitalists and business-men hastened to enroll themselves as members. Hon. James Sheakley, of Mercer, was elected president. Social meetings were held regularly and guying greenhorns, who supposed stealing to be the object of the organization, was a favorite pastime. The practical pranks of the “Forty” were laughed at and relished in the whole region. Nine-tenths of the members were young men, honorable in every relation of life, to whom the organization was a genuine joke. They enjoyed its notoriety and delighted to gull innocents who imagined they would purloin engines, derricks, drilling-tools, saw-mills and oil-tanks. Ten years after the band disbanded its president served in Congress and was a leading debater on the Hayes-Tilden muddle. “Pap” Sheakley—as the boys affectionately called him—was the embodiment of integrity, kindliness and hospitality. He operated in the Butler field and lived at Greenville. Bereft of his devoted wife and lovely daughters by “the fell sergeant, Death,” he sold his, desolated home and accepted from President Cleveland the governorship of Uncle Sam’s remotest Territory. His administration was so satisfactory that President Harrison reappointed him. There was no squarer, truer, nobler man in the public service than James Sheakley, Ex-Governor of Alaska.

Rev. S. D. Steadman, the first pastor at Pithole, a zealous Methodist—was universally respected for earnestness and piety. The “forty thieves” sent him one-hundred-and-fifty dollars at Christmas of 1866, with a letter commending his moral teachings, his courtesy and charity. Another minister inquired of a Swordsman what the letters of the club’s motto—“R. C. T.”—signified, “Religious Councils Treasured” was the ready response. This raised the club immensely in the divine’s estimation and led to a sermon in which he extolled the jolly organization! He “took a tumble” when a deacon smilingly informed him that the letters—a fake proposed in sport—symbolized “Rum, Cards, Tobacco.”

Mud was responsible for the funniest—to the spectators—mishap that ever convulsed a Pithole audience. A group of us stood in front of the Danforth House at the height of the miry season. Thin mud overflowed the plank-crossing and a grocer laid short pieces of scantling two or three feet apart for pedestrians to step on. A flashy sport, attired in a swell suit and a shiny beaver, was the first to take advantage of the improvised passage. Half-way across the scantling to which he was stepping moved ahead of his foot. In trying to recover his balance the sport careened to one side, his hat flew off and he landed plump on his back, in mud and water three feet deep! He disappeared beneath the surface as completely as though dropped into the sea, his head emerging a moment later. Blinded, sputtering and gasping for breath, he was a sight for the gods and little fishes! Mouth, eyes, nose and ears were choked with the dreadful ooze. Two men went to his assistance, led him to the rear of the hotel and turned the hose on him. His clothes were ruined, his gold watch was never recovered and for weeks small boys would howl: “His name is Mud!”

John Galloway, on one of his rambles for territory, ate dinner at the humble cabin of a poor settler. A fowl, tough, aged and peculiar, was the principal dish. In two weeks the tourist was that way again. A boy of four summers played at the door, close to which the visitor sat down. A brood of small chickens approached the entrance. “Poo’, ittey sings,” lisped the child, “oo mus’ yun away; here’s ’e yasty man ’at eated up oos mammy.” The good woman of the shanty had stewed the clucking-hen to feed the unexpected guest.

A maiden of uncertain age owned a farm which various operators vainly tried to lease. Hoping to steal a march on the others, one smooth talker called the second time. “I have come, Miss Blank,” he began, “to make you an offer.” He didn’t get a chance to add “for your land.” The old girl, not a gosling who would let a prize slip, jumped from her chair, clasped him about the neck and exclaimed: “Oh! Mr. Blank, this is so sudden, but I’m yours!” The astounded oilman shook her off at last and explained that he already had a wife and five children and wanted the Farm only. The clinging vine wept and stormed, threatened a breach-of-promise suit and loaded her dead father’s blunderbuss to be prepared for the next intruder.

W. J. Bostford, who died at Jamestown in November of 1895, operated at Pithole in its palmy days. Business was done on a cash basis and oil-property was paid for in money up to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. Bostford made a big sale and started from Pithole to deposit his money. A cross-country trip was necessary to reach Titusville. Shortly after leaving Pithole he was attacked by robbers, who took all the money and left him for dead upon the highway. He was picked up alive, with a broken head and many other injuries, which he survived thirty years.

The first “hotel” at Pithole—a balloon-frame rushed up in a day—bore the pretentious title of Astor House. Before its erection pilgrims to the coming city took their chance of meals at the Holmden farm-house. As a guest wittily remarked: “It was table d’hote for men and also table d’oat for horses.” The viands were all heaped upon large dishes and everybody helped himself. The Morey-Farm Hotel, just above Pithole, charged twenty-one dollars a week for board, had gas-light, steam-heat, telegraph-office, barber-shop, colored waiters and “spring-mattresses.” Its cooking rivalled the best in the large cities. At Wiggins’s Hotel, a three-story boarding-house in the Tidioute field, two-hundred men would often wait their turn to get dinner. This was a common experience in the frontier towns, to which big throngs hurried before houses could be erected for their accommodation. E. H. Crittenden’s hotel at Titusville was the finest Oildom boasted in the sixties. Book & Frisbee’s was notable at the height of the Parker development. A dollar for a meal or a bed, four dollars a day or twenty-eight dollars a week, be the stay long or short, was the invariable rate. Peter Christie’s Central Hotel, at Petrolia, was immensely popular and a regular gold-mine for the owner. Oil City’s Petroleum House was a model hostelry, under “Charley” Staats and “Jim” White. The Jones House cleared Jones forty-thousand dollars in nine months. Its first guest was a Mr. Seymour, who spent one year collecting data for a statistical work on petroleum. His manuscripts perished in the flood of 1865. The last glimpse my eyes beheld of Jones was at Tarport, where he was driving a dray. Bradford’s Riddell House and St. James Hotel both sized up to the most exacting requirements. Good hotels and good restaurants were seldom far behind the triumphant march of the pioneers whose successes established oil-towns.

Col. Gardner, “a big man any way you take him,” was Chief-of-Police at Pithole. He has operated at Bradford and Warren, toyed with politics and military affairs and won the regard of troops of friends. Charles H. Duncan, of Oil City—his youthful appearance suggests Ponce de Leon’s spring—served in the borough-council, of which James M. Guffey, the astute Democratic leader and successful producer, was clerk. Col. Morton arrived in August of 1865 with a carpet-bag of job-type. His first work—tickets for passage over Little Pithole Creek—the first printing ever done at Pithole, was never paid for. The town had shoals of trusty, generous fellows—“God’s own white boys,“ Fred Wheeler dubbed them—whose manliness and enterprise and liberality were always above par.

When men went crazy at Pithole and outsiders thought the oil-country was “flowing with milk and honey” and greenbacks, a party of wags thought to put up a little joke at the expense of a new-comer from Boston. They arranged with the landlord for some coupon-bonds to use in the dining-room of the hotel and to seat the youth at their table. The New-Englander was seated in due course. The guests talked of oil-lands, fabulous strikes and big fortunes as ordinary affairs. Each chucked under his chin a five-twenty government-bond as a napkin. One lay in front of the Bostonian’s plate, folded and creased like a genuine linen-wiper. Calmly taking the “paper” from its receptacle, the chap from The Hub wiped his brow and adjusted the valuable napkin over his shirt-bosom. A moment later he beckoned to a servant and said: “See here, waiter, this napkin is too small; bring me a dish of soup and a ‘ten-forty.’” The jokers could not stand this. A laugh went around the festive board that could have been heard at the Twin Wells and the matter was explained to the bean-eater. He was put on the trail of “a soft snap” and went home in a month with ten-thousand dollars. “Bring me a ten-forty” circulated for a twelve-month in cigar-shops and bar-rooms.

Ben Hogan was one of the motley crew that swarmed to Pithole “broke.” He taught sparring and gave exhibitions of strength at Diefenbach’s variety-hall. He fought Jack Holliday for a purse of six-hundred dollars and defeated him in seven rounds. Four-hundred tough men and tougher women were present, many of them armed. Hogan was assured before the fight he would be killed if he whipped his opponent. He was shot at by Marsh Elliott during the mill, but escaped unhurt. Ben met Elliott soon thereafter and knocked him out in four brief rounds, breaking his nose and using him up generally. Next he opened a palatial sporting-house, the receipts of which often reached a thousand dollars a day. An adventure of importance was with “Stonehouse Jack.” This desperado and his gang had a grudge against Hogan and concocted a scheme to kill him. Jack was to arrange a fight with Ben, during which Hogan was to be killed by the crowd. Ben saw his enemy coming out of a dance-house and blazed away at him, but without effect. The fusillade scared “Stonehouse” away from Pithole and on January twenty-second, 1866, a vigilance committee at Titusville drove the villain out of the oil-region, threatening to hang him or any of his gang who dared return. This committee was organized to clear out a nest of incendiaries and thugs. The vigilants erected a gallows near the smoking embers of E. B. Chase & Co.’s general store, fired the preceding night, and decreed the banishment of hordes of toughs. “Stonehouse Jack” and one-hundred other men, with a number of vile women came under this sentence. The whole party was formed in line in front of the gallows, the “Rogue’s March” was played and the procession, followed by a great crowd of people, proceeded to the Oil-Creek Railroad station. The prisoners were ordered on board a special train, with a warning that if they ever again set foot upon the soil of Titusville they would be summarily executed. This salutary action ended organized crime in the oil-region.

North of Pithole the tide crossed into Allegheny township. Balltown, a meadow on C. M. Ball’s farm in July, 1865, at the end of the year paraded stores, hotels, a hundred dwellings and a thousand people. Fires in 1866 scorched it and waning production did the rest. Dawson Centre, on the Sawyer tract, budded, frosted and perished. The Morey House, on the Copeland farm, was the oasis in the desert, serving meals that tickled the midriff and might cope with Delmonico’s. Farms on Little Pithole Creek were riddled without swelling the yield of crude immoderately. Where are those oil-wells now? Echo murmurs “where?” In all that section of Cornplanter and Allegheny townships a derrick, an engine-house or a tank would be a novelty of the rarest breed.

Eight miles north-east of Titusville, where Godfrey Hill drilled a dry-hole in 1860 and two companies drilled six later, the Colorado district finally rewarded gritty operators. Enterprise was benefited by small wells in the vicinity. Down Pithole Creek to its junction with the Allegheny the country was punctured. Oleopolis straggled over the slope on the river’s bank, a pipe-line, a railroad to Pithole and minor wells contributing to its support. The first well tackled a vein of natural gas, which caught fire and consumed the rig. The driller was alone, the owner of the well having gone into the shanty. In a twinkling flames enveloped the astonished knight of the temper-screw, who leaped from the derrick, clothes blazing and hair singed off, and headed for the water. “Boss,” he roared in his flight, “jump into the river and say your prayers quick! I’ve bu’sted the bung and hell’s running out.”

“Breathe through the nostrils” is good advice. People should breathe through the nose and not use it so much for talking and singing through. Yet every rule has exceptions. A pair of mules hauled oil from Dawson Centre in the flush times of the excitement. The mud was practically bottomless. A visitor was overheard telling a friend that the bodies of the mules sank out of sight and that they were breathing through their ears, which alone projected above the ooze. Dawson and many more departed oil-towns suggest the jingle:

About St. Valentine’s Day in 1866, when the burning of the Tremont House led to the discovery of oil in springs and wells, was a hilarious time at Pithole. Every cellar was fairly flooded with grease. People pumped it from common pumps, dipped it from streams, tasted it in tea, inhaled it from coffee-pots and were afraid to carry lights at night lest the very air should cause explosion and other unhappiness. It became a serious question what to drink. The whiskey could not be watered—there was no water. Dirty shirts could not be washed—the very rain was crude oil. Dirt fastened upon the damask cheeks of Pithole damsels and found an abiding-place in the whiskers of every bronzed fortune-hunter. Water commanded an enormous price and intoxicating beverages were cheap, since they could scarcely be taken in the raw. The editor of the Record, a strict temperance man, was obliged to travel fourteen miles every morning by stone-boat to get his glass of water. Stocks of oil-companies were the only thing in the community thoroughly watered. Tramps, hobos, wandering vagrants and unwashed disbelievers that “cleanliness is next to Godliness” pronounced Pithole a terrestrial paradise. They were willing to reverse Muhlenburg’s sentiment and “live alway” in that kind of dry territory.

“You’re not fit to sit with decent people; come up here and sit along with me!” thundered a Dawson teacher who sat at his desk hearing a recitation, as he discovered at a glance the worst boy in school annoying his seatmate.

Charles Highberger, who had lost a leg, was elected a justice of the peace at Pithole in 1866. Attorney Ruth, who came from Westmoreland county, was urging the conviction of a miserable whelp when he noticed Highberger had fallen asleep, as was his custom during long arguments. Mr. Ruth aroused him and remarked: “I wish your honor would pay attention to the points which I am about to make, as they have an important bearing on the case.” Highberger opened his eyes, glared around the room and rose on his crutches in great wrath, exclaiming: “There has been too much blamed chin-whacking in this case; you have been talking two hours and I haven’t seen a cent of costs. The prisoner may consider himself discharged. The court will adjourn to Andy Christy’s drug-store.” This was the way justice was dispensed with in those good old days when “go as you please” was the rule at Pithole.

John G. Saxe once lectured at Pithole and was so pleased with the people and place that he donated twenty-five dollars to the charity-fund and wrote columns of descriptive matter to a Boston newspaper. “If I were not Alexander I would be Diogenes,” said the Macedonian conqueror. Similarly Henry Ward Beecher remarked, when he visited Oil City to lecture, “If I were not pastor of Plymouth church I would be pastor of an Oil-City church.” The train conveying Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, through the oil-region stopped at Foxburg to afford the imperial guest an opportunity to see an oil-well torpedoed. He watched the filling of the shell with manifest interest, dropped the weight after the torpedo had been lowered and clapped his hands when a column of oil rose in the air. An irreverent spectator whispered: “This beats playing pedro.”

J. P. ALBEE.