Serious as all these problems were, there was no discourage ment or shrinking from them. The oil men had rid themselves of bunco men and burst the "oil bubbles." They had harnessed the brokers in exchanges and made strict rules to govern them. They had learned not to fear the foreigners, and to take with equal sang froid the "dry-hole" which made them poor, or the "gusher" which made them rich. For every evil they had a remedy. They were not afraid even of the railroads, and loudly declared that if the discriminations were not stopped they would build a railroad of their own. Indeed, the evils in the oil business in 1871, far from being a discouragement, rather added to the interest. They had never known anything but struggle—with conquest—and twelve years of it was far from cooling their ardour for a fair fight.
More had been done in the Oil Regions in the first dozen years than the development of a new industry. From the first there had gone with the oil ambition to make oil to light the whole earth a desire to bring civilisation to the wilderness from which they were drawing wealth, to create an orderly society from the mass of humanity which poured pell-mell into the region. A hatred of indecency first drew together the better element of each of the rough communities which sprang up. Whiskey-sellers and women flocked to the region at the breaking out of the excitement. Their first shelters were shanties built on flatboats which were towed from place to place. They came to Rouseville—a collection of pine shanties and oil derricks, built on a muddy flat—as for Torn and disreputable a town in appearance as the earth ever saw. They tied up for trade, and the next morning woke up from their brawl to find themselves twenty miles away, float ing down the Allegheny River. Rouseville meant to be decent. She had cut them loose, and by such summary vigilance she kept herself decent. Other towns adopted the same policy. By common consent vice was corralled largely in one town. Here a whole street was given up to dance-houses and saloons, and those who must have a "spree" were expected to go to [ etroleum Centre to take it.
Decency and schools! Vice cut adrift, they looked for a chool teacher. Children were sadly out of place, but there hey were, and these men, fighting for a chance, saw to it that shanty, with a school teacher in it, was in every settlement. t was not long, too, before there was a church, a union church. To worship God was their primal instinct; to defend a creed a later development. In the beginning every social contrivance was wanting. There were no policemen, and each individual looked after evil-doers. There were no firemen, and every man turned out with a bucket at a fire. There were no bankers, and each man had to put his wealth away as best he could until a peripatetic banker from Pittsburg relieved him. At one time Dr. Egbert, a rich operator, is said to have had $r,800,000 in currency in his house. There were no hospitals, and in 1861, when the horrible possibilities of the oil fire were first demonstrated by the burning of the Rouse well, a fire at which nineteen persons lost their lives, the many injured found welcome and care for long weeks in the little shanties of women already by the difficulties of caring for families in the rough community.
Out of this poverty and disorder they had developed in ten years a social organisation as good as their commercial.
Titusville, the hamlet on whose outskirts Drake had drilled his well, was now a city of io,000 inhabitants. It had an opera house, where in 1871 Clara Louise Kellogg and Christine Nilsson sang, Joe Jefferson and Janauschek played, and Wen dell Phillips and Bishop Simpson spoke. It had two prosper ous and fearless newspapers. Its schools prepared for college. Oil City was not behind, and between them was a string of lively towns. Many of the oil farms had a decent community life. The Columbia farm kept up a library and reading-room for its employees; there was a good schoolhouse used on Sun day for services, and there was a Columbia farm band of no mean reputation in the Oil Regions.
Indeed, by the opening of 1872, life in the Oil Regions had ceased to be a mere make-shift. Comforts and orderliness and decency, even opportunities for education and for social life, were within reach. It was a conquest to be proud of, quite as proud of as they were of the fact that their business had been developed until it had never before, on the whole, been in so satisfactory a condition.
Nobody realised more fully what had been accomplished in the Oil Regions than the oil men themselves. Nobody rehearsed their achievements so loudly. "In ten years," they were fond of saying, "we have built this business up from nothing to a net product of six millions of barrels per annum. We have invented and devised all the apparatus, the appli ances, the forms needed for a new industry. We use a capital of $2oo,000,000, and support a population of 6o,000 people. To keep up our supply we drill Ioo new wells per month, at an average cost of $6,000 each. We are fourth in the exports of the United States. We have developed a foreign market, including every civilised country on the globe." But what had been done was, in their judgment, only a beginning. Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men. They were still young, most of them under forty, and they looked forward with all the eagerness of the young who have just learned their powers, to years of struggle and develop , ment. They would solve all these perplexing problems of over production, of railroad discrimination, of speculation. Theywould meet their own needs. They would bring the oil refin ing to the region where it belonged. They would make their towns the most beautiful in the world. There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare. But sud denly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future. The suddenness and the blackness ' '.i. of the assault on their business stirred to the bottom their manhood and their sense of fair play, and the whole region 1 J arose in a revolt which is scarcely paralleled in the commer cial history of the United States.
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