Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/161

Rh tion to stop the drill for six months was brought to these men, who at the time owned the richest territory in the oil field, no amount of explanation could make them understand it. They regarded it simply as a scheme to rob them, and would not sign. Outside of this district, however, the drill stopped over nearly all the field on the first of September.

There was nothing but public opinion to hold the producers to their pledge. But public opinion in those days in the Oil Regions was fearless and active and asserted itself in the daily newspapers and in every meeting of the association. The whole body of oil men became a vigilance committee intent on keeping one another loyal to the pledge. Men who appeared at church on Sunday in silk hats, carrying gold-headed canes—there were such in the Oil Region in 1872—now stole out at night to remote localities to hunt down rumours of drilling wells. If they found them true, their dignity did not prevent their cutting the tools loose or carrying off a band wheel.

Stopping the drill afforded no immediate relief to the producers. It was for the future. And as soon as the Petroleum Producers' Association had the movement well under way, it proposed another drastic measure—a thirty days' shut-down—by which it was meant that all wells should cease pumping for a month. Nothing shows better the compact organisation and the determination of the oil producers at this time than the immediate response they gave to this suggestion. In ten days scarcely a barrel of oil was being pumped from end to end of the Oil Regions. "That a business producing three million dollars a month, employing 10,000 labouring men and fifty million dollars of capital, should be entirely suspended, dried up, stopped still as death by a mutual voluntary agreement, made and perfected by all parties interested, within a space of ten days—this is a statement that staggers belief—a spectacle that takes one's breath away," cried the Derrick, which was using all its wits to persuade the pro