The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-18 00:00:00

LONDON GAZETTE_Last Evening,

FOREIGN-OFFICE, OCT. 14.
Earl Russoll has received the following despatch from
her Majesty's Ambassador at St. Petersburg :
Peters, 3, 15.
My Lord —A farmer in t et. interior interior of the Oct. EmpireB6 has
addressed to me a letter, requesting that the greatest pos-
sible publicity may be given in England to the treatment
for the cure of the prevailing cattle disease adopted by
him with marked success on two several occasions.
As, under the present unfortunate circumstance; the
result of the writer's long experience may possibly b
found of use, I beg leave to forward herewith to your
lordship the letter in question, together with a translation.
—I have, &c.,
--•

(Signed) ANDREW BLTIIANAN.

Earl Russoll, &c.

The Oil Regions of Pennsylvania•

rom the Times Correspondent.)
OIL CITY, Oct. 1.
It is little more than four years ago since I was
last in this then almost unknown, but now world-
famous, oil region. In the comparatively brief in-
terval that has elapsed everything but the geogra-
phical conformation of the country, everything but
its mountains and rivers, has been changed, and
even these are now scarcely recognisable. The
mountain tops have been shorn of their forest
growth of ages, and in its stead rise cities. Wild,
solitary creeks and river inlets, known only to en-
thusiastic sportsmen for their game and fish, are
now roughly bridged, their shores lined with shanty
wharves, their waters covered with every kind of
nondescript craft that can be got to float, all laden
with oil ; and the whole neighbourhood abounds
with such evidences of wild, rough, eager, hurrying
activity as literally can be seen in no other part of
the world but in the new diggings and oil cities of
Petrolia.
Petrolia and its wealth have become a power in
the State during the last three years, and every day
increases its ride-spread influence—every day adds
fresh instances to the long list of colossal fortunes
realised in a week, either by the possessors of a few
acres of poor farm land on which oil has been found
or by the fortunate speculator who has " struck ile"
and parted with his 50th interest in a flowing well,
for which he paid $lOO, at a premium of $25,000.
Every day, too, adds to the influence of Petrolia as
new and more valuable uses for the oil are hourly
discovered, and the demand for it becomes more
certain and more universal both in the States and
Europe.
it is, in fact, almost impossible to de-
scribe, and it would certainly be very difficult to
exaggerate, the extraordinary rise in the material
prosperity of all around this region. I think -I am
speaking within the mark when I say that within a
circuit of 30 miles round this Oil City there are
more so-called cities and towns now existing
than there were villages, or even farms, four
years ago. Take one instance, Corry, four years
ago, was a poor farm, where the thinly scratched
soil of cold clay land yielded so little that the whole
place, buildings and all, might easily have been
purchased at $8 or $lO an acre. It was a mere halt-
ing place for sportsmen en route to shoot deer in the
now manufacturing regions of Petrolia. I was at
Corry the other night. It is a fine rough city of
about 10,000 inhabitants. The Atlantic and Great
Western Railway, which has opened it ',up, has its
great depot there, and has made it the central ex-
change of petroleum. It has nearly 20 banks, two
newspapers, and the city is now building a large
opera-house. The quotations made on the oil-ex-
change at Corry, whether of oil, gold, or breadstuffs,
influence Wall-street, and have infinitely greater
weight on the trade of the country than anything
done at Philadelphia, or indeed throughout all
Pennsylvania. Yet all this has been done within
four years, and the site of a city which now trans-
acts business to the amount of £3,000,000 sterling
annually, and where the land sells almost as dear
as in Cheapside, could all have been bought four
years ago for less than £5,000. But Corry is only
one sample out of many. Its position as the arbiter
and ruler of prices between the oil regions and New
York and Europe gives it, of course, great import-
ance, though in reality the city is not larger than
many others of Petrolia which are much younger.
Rouseville, Plummer, Titusville, Franklin, are all
the juniors of Corry by a couple of years, yet some
of these are almost as important as Corry itself and
nearly as large. The city from which I write can
scarcely be counted as more than three years old,
yet even after what I have seen of the sudden rise
and sudden wealth of oildom, its extent, its squalid
wealth and dirty evidences of incessant activity, its
population, and its resources, all make it a pheno-
menon even in this land of hurried wonders. Oil
City claims to dispute pre-eminence even with
Corry, though I am told by Englishmen that its
rise, its wealth, and business energy are, as it were,
things of every-day occurrence compared with the
new light which has risen further up the hills,
the now universal beacon of attraction in the rush
for speculation—Pithole City. It is only four
months old. It is only four months since the first
trees of the forest amid which it stands were'
felled ; yet a city, both in size and population,
it is admitted to be—a city which is now in influ-
ence and excitement second to none in all
Petrolia. It matters not to state experiences of
Cherry Run, Titusville, Cherry-tree Run, Oil
Creek, Sugar Creek, Rouseville, or all the now for
a time disregarded regions. Most of the wells in
these last-named localities are pumping. At Pithoie
they are all flowing, and flowing at a rate which,
even for Petrolia, is marvellous, and is making the
people round about for miles wild in their desire and
efforts to reach this new land of promise and
performance. " New diggings" at California—a
" new rush" in Australia, give no idea of the furor
produced here by striking flowing wells in any ter-
ritory, no matter how unfavourably situate with re-
gard to means of transit, means of getting there,
means of living, or means of shelter when there.
Where oil is there is wealth, and with wealth comes
rapidly the opportunity of indulging in all the rough
backwoodsman's notions of luxury, such as dry clean
beds andiood and drink when he wants it, while he
is making a fortune. Gold digging is a slow and not
too sure a way to fortune. Here at the oil regions
nothing is slow, and something is sure. It is a mere
gamble—ss,ooo for a chance of a million. There are
many blanks, but there are also many prizes ; and
when the prizes come they are so out of all propor-
tion to theventure that it ceases to be a wonder that
people's heads are turned, and they risk their " bot-
tom dollar" in what may make them millionaires or
paupers in a week. All that is written of the wildest
manias of South Sea schemes, all that novelists have
depicted of John Law's rule in France, falls utterly
short of the fever of speculation in Petrolia. Reason-
ing is useless here.
What can be said when you meet, as you do con-
stantly, one of a party of five or six hard working
men who, knowing the country, banded together to
sink for oil at a cost of less than £2,000, and struck
a flowing well, which they sold in a week or so
to a company for £250,000, receiving as a royalty
half the oil it yielded, and which brings them in
their thousands a day seven days in the week,
for a year, 18 months, or two years together?
What can be said when you meet men who lost
heart, or capital, or both, and parted with their
interest in a sinking well for a horse and $lO to
take them out of the unlucky region, and who, be-
fore they reached their homes, have heard that their
venture had been a prize, and their $lOO interest
had been sold for $50,000 ? Reasoning, in fact, is
as much out of place here as would be provident
societies or insurance companies. Every man knows
that in these territories he has to carry his life and
fortune in his hand. Till the latter is played out
he seldom leaves, and as long as the former lasts he
is almost sure to return and venture again.
Yet it is said that the worst part of the specula-
tive mania has died out ; that a better acquaintance
with
the
ethonds ofature of the oil regions, and the
best in
has making them yield their trea-
sures,taken the ventures out of the hands of
mere speculators
into those of public companies,
who conduct their
who so manage that i• fla
on better systems, and
their profits are very much
smaller they are, at least,
It is claimed, in fact, that
oil much more certain.
ventures are being
reduced to the level of good
mines. This, however, is true only as regards those
paying
coal and iron
who let the land in which oil is sought and expected
to be found. It is not the poor I,ara
..-workine.
farmers who sell. They have been bought out loll;
since (more than two or three months) at what to
m
the was the munificent price of $2O or $3O an
awl the purchasers of these lots and farms neve;
sell them. They are only leased in short terms of
from three to seven years in lots of acres or half-
acres. The lessee is bound to put down one well
in each lot, and one-half of its yield in oil goes to
the ground landlord. This is what is called the
system which has done away with speculation—
this is the regular matter-of fact business rule
which is to put an end to ventures and keep
out all but capitalists, for capitalists are very
z'4 much venerated here. But what is the fact ? This
, time last year the whole of the land of Pithole City

could have been purchased easily at $l5 an acre,
farm buildings and all. A few speculators who
trusted in its " surface indications" of stinking oil
upon its muddy water-courses, and who humbly
staked their little "pile" upon their acre or two of
forest land, became a byword in Oil Creek, Cherry
Run, and Titusville. This is not a year ago. Pit-
hole is now the oil capital of Petrolia, and $BO,OOO
is the price of a half-acre freehold on poor lands
which less than 12 months ago could have been got
for $l5 an acre, with their fences and clearings. In
the face of such facts as these—in the face of the
wild fever and excitement around—in the face of
the perpetual efforts made to induce me, a stranger,
to advance only $lOO in a well belonging to the
" Wild Cat Company," or the " Universal Fortune
Company," when " they can't get enough barrels,"
" made $150,000 in a week," " big thing for the
New Yorkers," &c.,—l am inclined to think that
the oil fever has not yet died out, and never will as
long as men can make great fortunes by buying
good oil wells cheap, or other men can make greater
fortunes by selling bad oil wells dear.
I have already made one effort to reach Pithole
from this city, but was obliged to give up the at-
tempt, as the floods were out, roads had been
washed away, bridges destroyed, and the fords, of
course, rendered utterly impassable. Next time I
hope to be more successful, and to be able to say as
well what floods mean in Petrolia, where the only
two great dangers to be dreaded are fire and flood,
which both occasionally assert their rights of de-
struction in the most tremendous and appalling
manner. Ad interim, however, there is plenty to
be seen here. Oil City is about 600 miles from New
York, in the most westerly portion of Pennsyl-
vania. It is reached by the New York and
Erie as far as Salamanca. Thence the rest of
the route is entirely by the Atlantic and Great
Western—a railway almost every shilling of the
stocks in which are held in England, and which
from its oil business alone is rapidly becoming one
of the most lucrative investments in this country.
A branch line from Meadville strikes out from
the main trunk of the Great Atlantic road and
leads direct to this city, the very heart of oildom.
The traffic on this branch line is so enormous
and so incessant that oil freights by train are
often as much as two months in arrear of the
time fixed for their departure. Leaving Meadville
the line keeps close alongside a branch of the Alle-
ghany, known as French Creek, so named from
the many fights on it when General, Du-
quesne, acting under advice from Montcalm, was
trying to wrest this part of Pennsylvania from the
English. The greater part of the still wild country
was then held by the Sennaca Indians, and Sennaca
oil, as petroleum was then called, was gathered and
sold by them as an absolute specific for many
diseases, especially rheumatism and consumption—
charms which the oil possesses to this day, though
its greater charm, against a more general evil—want
of money—have just now cast its medicinal virtues
rather into the shade. It is impossible to imagine
a more picturesque country than the valley along
which French Creek winds to Oil Creek. Your
readers will easily appreciate its beautiful cha-
racter when I say that it closely resembles the
valley of " Betws-y-Coed," through which tourists
in North Wales make their way from Conway to
Snowdon. All, however, is utterly wild and uncul-
tivated, and only rarely and at long intervals are
signs of life to be seen among the beautifully wooded
hill and bluffs which shut in every turn of the valley.
Here and there a patch of gaunt-looking trees,
girded and left to die with their dry leafess-looking
arms eark and white like skeletons of trees, show
where a clearing has begun ; but this is all. Occa-
sionally comes a little patch of farm land with its
trees overborne with heavy crops of fruit ; but gene-
rally trees, fruit, farmhouse, and everything have
been removed from cleared land, and their place occu-
pied by the eternal derrick and steam-engine boring
for oil. Even where little farms have not been taken,
they are not the less deserted, for all who have
health, strength, and money sufficient—which means
all the rural population of these districts—make their
way to this great centre, and thence radiate to all
parts of Petrolia, from Titusville and Cherry Run to
Pithole. In the peculiar language of Oil City all the
lands along French Creek are considered " dry
territory," though one is at a loss to see why it should
be so accounted, except comparatively and in the
presence of the gigantic flowing wells at Pithole and
Cherry Run. For the air round French Creek is
unpleasantly redolent of the strong garlic-like pun-
gent smell of petroleum, the river itself is blotched
all over with large, rough, irridiscent spots of float-
ing
oil. The pools and ditches along its bank are
covered thickly with its green, sparkling slime : the
very mud is thick with it, like brown paint, and
even the trees and brooks are greasy. Yet the fiat
from the oil smellers and diviners has gone forth,
and French Creek is " dry territory," which means
that for the present adventurers had better try loca-
lities where flowing wells may be struck, which, as
at Pithole, are actually now giving their fortunate
owners $20,000 a day, and are likely to continue
doing so for some time—possibly for two or three
years. The Oil Creek Railway branch stops some
half a mile or so short of this city proper. The dis-
tance may seem trifling, but half a mile seems a good
deal in this wild region, where the trains are not
allowed to come further on in case of their fires or
sparks exploding the petroleum gas which forms the
atmosphere, or where, in fact, if all parties were
ever so much inclined that the truck should advance,
there is not yet room for it. All along the last few
miles to Oil City the derricks have been becoming
thicker and thicker ; the incessant walking beam
which pumps the oil more and more active, the
roads worse, and the painful scenes of overladen
teams struggling through mud up to their shoulders
more and more frequent. The smell of the
gas, though at first not very unpleasant, soon
gets painfully strong, and at last most decidedly
nauseating. It is said here far and wide that the
smell is good for weak lungs, which it certainly may
be, though its effect on strong lungs for the first
day or two is absolutely suffocating, and few can
bear to remain long amid the white steam-like
miasma of a flowing well. The train, as I have said,
stops at little more than half a mile from Oil City
proper. The station is a mere rough shanty, yet,
rough as it is, it may be called almost a gilded
saloon in comparison with its crowd of roughest and
most muddy occupants. Mud in Petrolia is suffi-
ciently fluid to find its own level like water, and to
that level to bring all in Oil City, man or beast.
Mud and oil, one or the other, or both combined,
reign supreme here. As you enter towards this city
the mouth of the valley opens out a little as French
Creek or Venango River turns wider into the delta
which forms Oil Creek. In the cuttings of the rail-
way through the rock can be seen the petrified re-
mains of what were once dense forests of trees, with
their stone stems projecting through the soft layers
of shale. These trees of a bygone age lie as thick as
they could well have fallen. The roughness of their
bark, their annular and radiating lines are still to be
seen and traced through the soilfor 10 feet and more
below what is now the surface of the earth. No one
however minds these things, or the most extraordi-
nary mineralogical or geological facts which are
every day brought to light by the shafts of oil. No-
thing is wanted here but oil, and with the presence
of that all questions are answered. This city, as a
place of four years' growth or less, is one of the most
extraordinary works of Petrolia. In no other place
in the world have I seen such evidence of apathy
and energy, of sloth and industry, of wealth and
squalor. Only the squalor, however, or what in
England would be called such, is a superficial
aspect which all wear. The whole population is
ragged, muddy, and dirty ; but the whole popula-
tion is without an exception more or less thriving,
and, as a general rule, more or less rich. No one
lives in this sea of oily mud but those who are mak-
ing money fast, and all who live here know that the
oldest tatters are good enough for the filth amid
which they dwell. Thus the two things come to be
inseparable in the public mind—that all who live in
oildoui are ragged and dirty and all who live there
rich. About the inunntable truth of the first part of
the proposition none who have ever been here can
entertain the smallest doubt, andthe latter is not al
together devoid of a general accuracy. You land from
the cars in a perfect sea of mud .
—mud
d u of. such depth,
tenacity, and slipperiness as I be
found in any part of the world. `Thatlastnßoatlat:lavbae

was really nothing to it. It is always one or two,
and often three, feet deep on what are called the
roads. Occasionally the greasy monotony of slime
is relieved by a string of rough boulders tossed into
the mud as stepping-stones for those who want to
cross, and by and by these come mingled with egg-
boxes, broken bottles and jars, refuse meat, and
vegetables, sardine-tins, ashes, old bones, and gar-
bage, thrown from the saloons ; broken barrels,
stumps of trees, waggons that have " gin out,"
pieces of machinery that have foundered on the way.
—the first tokens of Oil City proper. These indica-
tions of the town are as varied as they are intermit-
tent, for the real Oil City is only one long winding
street on a mud flat between the river and the high,
steep bluffs, and along this narrow strip depots,
wharves, stores, hotels, eating saloons, whisky
shops, and wells, each in their turn, struggle for
pre-eminence, without the smallest regard to the
position or wants of others. Here is a whisky
saloon, with men smoking and drinking, and next
to it a pumping well, which fills the air with its in-
flammable gas, and on all the greasy boards round
which "No smoking" is roughly chalked. Then
comes a short interval of side walk where the lum-
ber-path, if not above the mud, is, at least, some-
what above the water and oil ; then, again, pump-
ing wells, with their tanks filled with petroleum,
and beyond these men hewing and blasting away
the cliffs to make room for houses over the dirty
waste, or others running them up on piles above
the creek, fastening walls and roofs and ceilings
together with iron tie-rods, to enable the frail tene-
ments to withstand the dreadful and unequal strain
of dangerous floods that arise so frequently. Then
comes, between a group of oil wells and little creeks
and pools of stagnant oil, a photographic shanty ;
then barges moored in the mud alongside the high-
way, and called " eating saloons," where clirtyebed-
cots are slung over dirtier tables, where the charge
is $3 a day, and where not even the all-potent oil
is taken in exchange for money, or rather green-
backs—for money, in the English acceptation of the
term, seems to have vanished from the country
since the war. Higher up than this, the different
kinds of stores may be known at once by the samples
of ragged clothing thrown into the side walk or the
mud of the road outside them. No one here buys
clothes while any he has got can hold together,
and when he buys he simply attires himself in the
stores—a coat at one place, boots at another, and so
on, throwing out into the road the garments which
he supersedes by better. The way of life has fallen
into its roughest forms here, yet only as regards its
outward seeming, for in all that relates to good
order and the security of life and property one is as
safe here as in Cheapside. The upper end of the
long straggling street which constitutes the " city,"
and which ends at Oil Creek, is in its way almost
indescribable. If, however, your readers can
imagine how the dirtiest parts of Limehouse would
look if mixed up with log shanties and the tall
wooden buildings of improvised American cities, all
before and behind the houses being interspersed with
machinery and pumping oil-wells, the whole partly
burnt, and all more or less damaged by floods, they
will have some idea of the " surroundings" of Oil
City. Add to this a teeming population on the side
walks, wearing the best and stoutest of jack boots,
but with nothing else of clothing that would be
thought sufficiently decent for a scarecrow in Eng-
land ; fill up the roads with overladen horses striving
to pull their waggons of - oil through the sea of
mud; cover the adjacent river with crowds of flat
barges, all laden with oil ; and, above all, make oil
predominant in what you eat or drink, feel or
smell, and the everyday life of Oil City is before
you. Once in the place, oil becomes as insepa-
rable from everything you touch, from clothes,
meals, conversation, as the very atmosphere itself,
which is, in fact, entirely made up of gas from the
oil. Men think of nothing, certainly talk of nothing,
and probably dream of nothing but oil ; and if there
is nothing more nauseating than the gas from a
flowing well it is the eternal clamour of " ile, ile,
ile," as it is called here, of "surface indications,"
" good shows," " dry territories," "hundred-barrel
wells," " thousand-barrel wells," " No. 970, a big
thing," "No. 800, quite a strike," " 830 gi'n out,"
and so on, from early dawn, till the last of those in
these rough hotels are asleep. I would not trust the
impressions which I received on my first arrival here.
They appear incredible, and most probably would
have been entirely so to your readers. During the
interval that has elapsed, then, since my first visit
to this city I have made a long round through
Petrolia, have visited its most famous wells, and
seen its most curious cities—woo len cities of large
extent, shanty cities having hotels and newspaper-
offices, banks, and rough theatres, yet the oldest
built within four years—the youngest, and by no
means the smallest, within the last four months.
In a mere hurried letter of this kind I can, of
course, make no attempt to describe the marvels
that are to be seen on every side through this most
extraordinary land. By next mail, however, I
hope to continue my task, and lay before your
readers some description of what few Englishmen
have read of, and fewer still have seen—the old
region of Petrolia.