Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/43

Rh selling at eighteen dollars a barrel. In five months the English tanner had sold over $16,000 worth of oil. A lumberman and merchant of the village, who long had had faith in petroleum if it could be had in quantity, Jonathan Watson, one of the firm of Brewer, Watson and Company, whose land the Pennsylvania Rock-Oil Company had leased, mounted his horse as soon as he heard of the Drake well, and, riding down the valley of Oil Creek, spent the day in leasing farms. He soon had the third well of the region going down, this too by a spring pole. This well started off in March at sixty gallons a minute, and oil was selling at sixty cents a gallon. In two years the farm where this third well was struck had produced 165,000 barrels of oil.

Working an unfriendly piece of land a few miles below the Drake well lived a man of thirty-five. Setting out for himself at twenty-two, he had won his farm by the most dogged efforts, working in saw-mills, saving his earnings, buying a team, working it for others until he could take up piece of land, hoarding his savings here. For what? How could he know? He knew well enough when Drake struck oil, and hastened out to buy a share in a two-acre farm. He sold it at a profit, and with the money put down a well, from which he realised $70,000. A few years later the farm he had slaved to win came into the field. In 1871 he refused a million dollars for it, and at one time he had stored there 200,000 barrels of oil.

A young doctor who had buried himself in the wilderness saw his chance. For a song he bought thirty-eight acres on the creek, six miles below the Drake well, and sold half of it for the price he had paid to a country storekeeper and lumberman of the vicinity, one Charles Hyde. Out of this thirty-eight acres millions of dollars came; one well alone—the Mapleshade—cleared one and one-half millions.

On every rocky farm, in every poor settlement of the