Rich returns have ever been the rule for the ones whose efforts were crowned with success. Heavy losses have borne down still farther those on whom a fickle Fortune refused to smile. Sudden wealth and equally sudden ruin have not infrequently been the double portion of the more adventurous. With few exceptions, however, it has been the successful ones who have made oil history, just as oil was the making of 'practically every man whose name appears prominently in the chronicles of the industry. Nowhere during the half century is there a leading figure coming to the industry with important resources already at his command ; on all sides the guiding spirits are those which have " grown up with the business." Nowhere is this fact more strikingly illustrated than in the group of men dominating the Standard Oil Company. John D. Rockefeller rose from an assistant book keeper in a Cleveland commission house at a sal ary of four dollars a week ; H. H. Rogers, from a clerkship in his father's store at Fairhaven, Mass.; John D. Archbold, son of a Methodist minister, from the general store at Salem, Ohio ; Daniel O'Day, the great trunk-line organizer, from the freight yards in Buffalo ; Samuel C. T. Dodd, the keen-witted legal adviser, father of the trust, from a printer's office in Franklin, Pa., where he worked to earn his way through college.
While these men were still laying the founda tions of later success, others belonging to the same class as themselves were rolling in wealth. When the boom in Pennsylvania was still in its in fancy, incomes of $1,000 a day were regarded as fabulous wealth, as indeed they were in those days before the modern age of millionaires. Yet such profits were not entirely unheard of in the years following 1860, when crude oil often sold for sev eral dollars a barrel, and numerous wells averaged hundreds of barrels a day. It is easy to under stand therefore, the irresistible temptation which drew so many young men from the four points of the compass to try their luck in the new venture, with its unlimited opportunities to rise rapidly. Those were the days of the spendthrifts and prodi gals, when money flowed lavishly, as easily gained profits were spread right and left with open-handed generosity: the days of the " Coal Oil Johnnies." The original of this famous figure in oil history was in a way typical of an early class, indeed al most of an early condition in the oil regions, but many of the marvelous tales about him, handed down to later years, are impossible, distorted prod ucts of fertile imaginations. " Coal Oil Johnny," for such a person actually lived, was one John W. Steele, the adopted son and heir of the widow McClintock, on whose farm a number of the early productive wells were located. By her sudden
death in 1863, Steele, then barely of age, found himself the possessor of apparently unlimited wealth, which the wells were pouring out for him in an endless stream. It is scarcely to be wondered at that such unexpected riches turned the boy's head and started him out to spend his money in a way which soon led to the wildest dissipation. For a year he was the sensation of the region, where men were living daily in an atmosphere of constant sensations. For a year self-avowed friends openly robbed or secretly swindled the unsophisticated youth, until, with money and property gone, the friends left him to seek a living as baggage master at a small local station on the Oil Creek Railroad. The unwelcome notoriety which he had gained, how ever, soon drove him into the great unquestioning west, and removed from the oil fields its most spec tacular character. Some chronicles would have it that Steele spent millions of dollars in his brief course as a spendthrift, but it is highly improbable that his whole squanderings much exceeded half a million.
" Coal Oil Johnny " represents one type of man which the oil business produced, his sort being confined largely to the group of early well owners, to whom great profits came quickly : men of whom much has been told and written, but whose service to the petroleum industry was small. The other type is represented by the sober habits and indus trious lives of such men as Standard Oil has en listed in its service. To these men, working hard in the interests of oil refining, wealth came more slowly but all the more surely. To them the pro ducer has always owed much, for their untiring efforts to increase the consumption of petroleum products have benefited both refiner and well owner alike. Many men have been arrayed in the rank and file of oil operators, each contributing in his own small way to the progress of a vast en terprise. Due credit must be given to the few trail blazers, Kier, Eveleth and Bissell, Drake and his faithful helper, " Uncle Billy " Smith. But the real makers of oil history are to be found, in general, among the men most intimately associated with its greatest corporation. The man who dis covered the rich McDonald field, for example, stands in the same position as a scout who locates from afar the camp of the enemy ; the corporation taxing its utmost strength to meet the emergency, stands as the powerful army which gains the vic tory in battle and follows it up to the fullest ad vantage. Behind this army have stood always the same small group of masters of strategy and re sourcefulness, the guiding spirits of oil destinies in this country.