Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/36

Rh awning before a drug store. In the window he saw on a bottle a curious label, "Kier's Petroleum, or Rock-Oil," it read, "Celebrated for its wonderful curative powers. A natural Remedy; Produced from a well in Allegheny Co., Pa., four hundred feet below the earth's surface," etc. On the label was the picture of an artesian well. It was from this well that Mr. Kier got his "Natural Remedy." Hundreds of men had seen the label before, for it went out on every one of Mr. Kier's circulars, but this was the first to look at it with a "seeing eye." As quickly as the bottle of rock-oil in the Dartmouth laboratory had awakened in Mr. Bissell's mind the determination to find out the real value of the strange substance, the label gave him the solution of the problem of getting oil in quantities-it was to bore down into the earth where it was stored, and pump it up.

Professor Silliman made his report to the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company in 1855, but it was not until the spring of 1858 that a representative of the organisation, which by this time had changed hands and was known as the Seneca Oil Company, was on the ground with orders to find oil. The man sent out was a small stockholder in the company, Edwin L. Drake, "Colonel" Drake as he was called. Drake had had no experience to fit him for his task. A man forty years of age, he had spent his life as a clerk, an express agent, and a railway conductor. His only qualifications were a dash of pioneer blood and a great persistency in undertakings which interested him. Whether Drake came to Titusville ordered to put down an artesian well or not is a mooted point. His latter-day admirers claim that the idea was entirely his own. It seems hardly credible that men as intelligent as Professor Silliman, Mr. Bissell, and others interested in the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company, should not have taken means of finding out how the familiar "Kier's Rock-Oil" was obtained. Professor Silliman at least must have known