The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-21 00:00:00

The Oil Regions of Pennsylvania.

(From the Times' Correspondent.)
OIL CITY, Oct. 5.
The more one sees of Oil City and its surround-
ings the less one likes them, though the more one
sees of them the more one has reason to be astonished
at its sudden growth and the extraordinary business
activity which prevails from dawn till night, filling
the mud of its main street with traffic, covering the
broad waters of the river with rafts and scows and
barges and steamers of every kind—all, streets, boats,
and rafts, engaged alike in the universal labour of
transporting oil. The city proper—that is to say,
its business part—consists solely of one main tho-
roughfare, so called because it is almost impassable.
There is so much water in it that it literally more
resembles an old canal than a new street, and but
for the immense boulder stones which occasionally
interrupt its flow of mud, I am certain that more
traffic might be got along it by rafts than by carts.
Nothing but a shanty becomes such a street, and with
praiseworthy consistency the people have built no-
thing but shanties. These are hung against the side
of the cliff, set loosely on piles, or stuck on mounds of
earth, without the slightest regard to the comfort of
either neighbours or occupiers, and without the most
remote approach to any kind of method or regularity.
If there is room on some point of rock for a shanty
between the derricks of two oil -wells or between two
oil tanks themselves, well and good. The frame is
put together in the course of a few days, and the
building finished in less than a fortnight. It makes
not the smallest difference if on examination of any
of these enviable sites it is found that there is not
room for the intended structure. Then the coat is
cut according to the cloth and the house built in all
sorts of odd ways to suit its odd position. It is
plain that when the plan of Oil City was conceived
people lacked faith. They did not believe that
the oil yield could last, and so made their abiding
place temporary. They are not only frame houses
which exist here, but of the lightest description of
structure, of that kind known as balloon frame. It
is of such houses strewn pell-mell on either side of
the muddy channel I have spoken of that Oil City
consists, and banks,rderricks, hotels, vats of oil,
land officers, refineries, mountains of empty barrels,
mountains of full barrels, with grog-shops, clothing
stores, rough piles of old machinery, broken-down
waggons, barges moored alongside the street as
lodging-houses, &c., are all mixed up together in the
widest confusion and dirtiest disarray. No two places
are alike. No two places have any common point of
resemblance, save in their mud, their greasiness, and
their stench of the omnipresent oil. In these three
unpleasant particulars no building is better than the
rest, and it is difficult to imagine how in each parti-
cular any could be worse. Such a thoroughfare is
at once the Cheapside, Cornhill, and Thames-street
of Oil City, and if your readers can imagine it
crowded with teams, reeking with oil, and thronged
with a muddy population from all parts of America
—from California to Nova Scotia, from Canada to
Texas, they will have someidea of everydaylife in Oil
City. Yet all this has grown up in little more than
three years. In little more than three years it has
changed from a poor "half-scratched" unproductive
farm land, with a population of less than 50 souls,
to such a place as I have tried to indicate—
to a wooden city with nearly 9,000 inhabitants,
having two newspapers, two large banks, half a
dozen hotels, ten oil refineries, five churches, and
one public school. Not included in the estimate of
Oil City, but forming, nevertheless, its only clean
and pretty suburb, is a village town on the opposite
bank of Oil Creek called Cottage-hill. It is a very
picturesque semi-mountainous ridge, on the slopes
of which are scattered the residences of the oil kinds
and princes, as they are termed, of this neighbour-
hood. There are houses belonging to men who
have made their two or three million dollars out of
" ile"—men who do not reside in the' region," as
it is called, but who occasionally come down to look
after their interests, and who, following the rule of
extravagance which prevails throughout Petrolia,
have built themselves there handsome little villas in
which to stay during their brief visits. They are all
exceedingly neat and pretty houses, much after the
style of the Swiss chalets. Considering that every-
thing has to be brought with great difficulty from
long distances it is surprising to find how elegantly
some of these houses are furnished, and sometimes,
also, how roughly they are occupied. From this hill
a fine view can be had over the picturesque country
around, and especially down into the most unpic-
turesque mudflat on which Oil City stands or rather
is strewed. Everywhere up and down the river and
up and down Oil Creek flat barges are being towed
laboriously through the water by horses harnessed to
their bows as to a cart. These river flats, with empty
barrels, are crowding up in scores, and their teams
require very careful driving to avoid collision with
the barges laden with oil, either in barrels or in bulk,
which come spinning down with the force of the cur-
rent at a great velocity. Everywhere, on the hills, in
the valleys, from the back-yards of houses, and even
at the corners of streets and passages, rises the irre-
pressible brown, greasy derrick ; everywhere are
fussy little steam-engines and busy walking beams
pumping the brown, stinking fluid into vats, tubs,
barrels, or tanks ; anything, in fact, that will hold
it, and into a good many things which, as it
turns out, will not hold it at all. Everywhere the
oil is flowing, either of its own force or by the force
of the pumps ; everywhere its gas is escaping
and so laden is the whole atmosphere with
this nauseous miasma that the pipes and tanks are
sometimes covered with white stalactites of paraffin
. wax which the gas has deposited.
The visitor who stops in the hotels of Oil City
will be inclined to think leniently of the extrava-
gance of the oil princes who have built tlieir little
villa , up on Cottage-hill. Unlike either Pithole
City, Titusville, Franklin, and. other oil centres,
this city owns hotels only in name. One might as
well expect the hotel to himself as a bed or a room,
and if it be true that every one has to eat a peck of
dirt in his lifetime, then there is no part of the
world where the task can be got through with such
uninterrupted rapidity as here. Everything in the
hotels is in the rough, and roughest of all is the
company, for people only come here to make money,
and get out of the place as fast as they can. The
discomforts of life are very grievous they admit, but
they are not going to live here, and they don't at all
see why they should make the place more comfort-
able for those who will come after them. It is the
same with the shopkeepers, the hotelkeepers, and
with all. They know their customers will never be
regular customers, and they know that they them-
selves intend to leave as soon as they have made
enough and can sell their business at a profit, and
thus everything is in a purely transitory state. No
roads are made, though for the want of them oil
-costs 3i dollars a barrel to bring from the wells to
this city, when a tax of 10c. a barrel would pay for
a good road in a month, and reduce the cost of its
conveyance from s3f to $2 or even less. No
bridges are made, though hundreds of barrels of
oil are wrecked in the streams for the want of
them. Getting oil is a comparatively easy task ;
but getting it away from the wells is a very dif-
ferent matter. Oil City is literally choked with
oil that can find no means of transport. The
Atlantic and Great Western Railway, which has
opened up this region, is taking it away by trains
day and night ; yet, though it receives the enormous
rate of 4d. per ton per mile, and takes almost thou-
sands of tons daily, it can effect but little towards
getting rid of Oil City's accumulation,meeting
the immense demand which is existing orthroughrough the
States for the supply of petroleum for a hundred
purposes. In the same way the track for that city
to Pithole Creek is all but impassable even for
horsemen. A horse tram could be madel,oohoe,orewinina
month for $50,000, which would pay s
a year. The extraordinary mixture of energy and
apathy in the American character is nowhere more
apparent than in these oil regions. They run up a
city, as at Pithole, in four months, yet the rough
mountain track along which the oil must go to the
market is utterly disregarded. The well-owner
aaYs, " If they want my oil, why they must come
_for it and take it away ;" and the consumer who
buys it at the well says. " If I have to pay so much
more for getting it down, the well-owner must sell
it so much cheaper ; and thus both seller and buyer
inadvertently combine to keep up a tax on the pro-
fits of both, which, if imposed - by the State,
_would

very Justly be resented by all as most oppressive
and exorbitant. The State tax on petroleum is a
dollar a barrel, the tax which the dealer ; nd con-
sumer voluntarily put on themselves b their curi-
ous neglect of the roads by which their produce
must come down is pi. But peopl _! went set about
permanent improvements to a region about which
their only desire is to quit when ,they have made
their "pile," and thus everything—roads, cities,
works, tanks, machinery, and all that belongs to the
transactions of business life are of the roughest and
most temporary kind, and a people so shrewd as
the Americans do not seem to see that those who
give them means of transit for their oil must in the
end earn the largest and most certain profits of any.

As with • the roads and the cities so with the
people who inhabit them. Everything is in the
rough. The company in the small, ill-cleansed
apartments of the hotels here resemble nothing to
be seen in other parts of America—resemble no-
thing, in fact, but themselves. To be greasy,
muddy, ragged, and ill-dressed is common to all.
The representatives of millions of dollars jostle and
live side by side with teamsters, penniless adven-
turers, carpenters, bricklayers, workers at wells,
millionaires like themselves, stage drivers, boatmen,
and, in fact, all whom business, want of employ-
ment, love of adventure, or love of money bring to
this most curious place. Neither dress nor manners
give the least clue to the aristocracy of " Oil
Dorado." Your neighbour, no matter how
wretchedly clothed, or how detestably vulgar his
ways and speech, may be so far your superior in
money's worth that in the community where wealth
is the only recognised distinction he is held to be in-
finitely your superior. Oil and money are the only
things required here, and as a general rule the more
ill-dressed and dirty a man is the more rich he is
likely to be. To be tolerably dean—that is to say,
with whole clothes not absolutely covered with mud
and grease, is to be a stranger to Petrolia, and, as a
general rule, to be a stranger in Petrolia means to
be poor. You may be as ragged and dirty as you
like, and yet treated with as much consideration as
if you were worth a million, for rags and dirt
sho if a sojourner in the land, and no one has
any right or reason to suppose that a person
who has dwelt in Petrolia is not worth a
million. The democratic principle adhered to
in the oil business is, that all men, rich
or poor, teamsters or well-owners, are equal. The
well-owner's source of riches may go dry in a week,
and his teamster's 16th in a flowing well may in
.a
single day rise from a value of $250 to $200,000.
These instances of the instability of fortune are so
constantly and so strongly impressed on the minds
of all Petrolians, that they know perfectly well
that no matter what a man's wealth, as long as he
remains speculating in the oil regions, he may lose
it in a week, and they know also that no matter
what a man's poverty, as long as he, too, remains
speculating, he may be a millionaire in a day. Thus
both classes come pretty well to the level of the
lowest, all alike must conform to the rough man-
ners of the place and descend to the plain off-handed
slang absolutely necessary to the establishment of
any pleasant and therefore profitable intercourse.
" Airs" are absolutely of no account whatever. A
gentlemanly bearing does not impress in the least.
The common courtesies of a business transaction
may or may not be required, but in no Case are they
either valued or depended on. Gentlemen, in fact,
are at a discount here ; not that they are not here,
but at least they are in a minority, and while they
stay here have to assume the manners of Oil City
to get on at all, just as they have to wear their
oldest clothes and most muddy boots. When, how-
ever, I have said this of Petrolia I have said the
worst, for a more industrious and peaceful popula-
tion never existed. Every man goes armed with
knife and revolver. Why ? No one can say. There
is no more reason, as they themselves admit, for
carrying such weapons than their would be for their
taking them to church. The first people who come
here did it, then others did it, then all the rest, be-
cause others did it. Every man says it is wrong,
and that he hopes that when Oil City gets its muni-
cipal rights this November that the carrying of
arms of any kind will be forbidden. It is, however,
almost a work of supererogation to forbid their
being carried, for, long as they have been worn
hitherto, I have never been able to trace or dis-
cover a single instance in which they have been
used. As a proof of this I may mention that I
examined several, and did not find one that had
not been loaded for months. The caps were cor-
roded on the nipples, and all I saw, and I saw
many, would as weapons of defence be about as
efficient as umbrellas. About two years ago a resi-
dent of Oil City was found murdered in the woods,
when a vigilance committee was at once formed,
and all bad characters hunted from the scene. Since
then two or three teamsters, while returning at
night through the woods, have, as they say in
Australia, been " stuck up" and eased of a few dol-
lars, but this ends the catalogue of crimes in Pe-
trolia.

There is probably no part of the world—certainly
not of America—where the proportion of drones to
working bees is so small as here. The people not
only come to work, which is one thing, but they do
work, which is quite another thing. From dawn
till night all are busy, and if Satan found mischief
only for idle hands to do, his vocation would be gone
in Petrolia. There is, however, one great stimu-
lant to this excessive industry, which is, that unless
a man works hard he cannot exist. The prices of
everything by which a man must live—food, cloth-
ing, shelter—have all more than trebled throughout
America since I was here four years ago. In Petro-
lia they have increased tenfold at least, on the prices
charged throughout the state. The cost of labour
here is enormous, and the cost of labour is only
another term for the cost of living. What is the
use of a teamster earning $4O dollars a day when
the price of keeping himself and two horses amounts
to $.30. He saves $lO a day, but he saves it at an
amount of exposure, discomfort, and rough living,
which, hardy as he may be, he would shrink from
encountering elsewhere on the same terms. Thus
it is that only the strongest and most hardy can
stand the wild life of this region at all, and it is,
therefore, claimed to be healthy because the rate
of sickness is not high among its iron population of
miners, labourers, or seasoned adventurers from
California. lam inclined, however, to disbelieve
in the healthiness of a district where the two
diseases are typhus and typhoid dysentery, and
where both are pretty rife. These complaints are
not caused by any want of good living, as far as
eating is concerned, nor by any excess in drinking,
for during all the time I have been in Petrolia I
have never seen a tipsy man, nor even one whom,
according to the euphemism of police reports, I could
say was under the influence of liquor. The favou-
rite vices here appearto be gambling and blasphemy.
The former is almost naturally induced by the whole
style of oil-well speculations, the latter has come to
be a mere "facon de parler," a dialect of the district

which almost every one uses, tin the stranger's very
ears creep at the way in which
the most sacred
names names and things are spoken of, not so much as im-
precations, but as the ordinary garniture
most common conversation. In one very important
virtue, however, the Petrolians have few equals, and
that is in their hospitality to strangers. It is offered
freely to all ; but, above and beyond all, it is given
with a welcome to Englishmen. If you come as a
speculator, you are fair game, and woe betide you
and your unlucky dollars then if you are ignorant
of the country and its ways. These dull, quiet, phleg-
matic looking Pennsylvanians have over-reachedthe
shrewdest New England men and " down Easters"
have sold them a few acres of " dry territory" for
hundreds of thousands of dollars, which, as oil land,
was not worth a red cent. Yet, if you disclaim the
character of an investor or speculator, you are safe;
and, if an Englishman, you are taken care of by all,
and each man strives for the merit of entertaining
you. When I first visited Petrolia I came here alone,
without a person knowing either my name or vocation
I came, in fact, as that idlest of human beings, an
English holiday traveller. Yet as soon as it was
known that such a curiosity-hunter was inthe town,
one after another of the well-owners came in a kind,
they
if
rough way to seecould be of use to me, to
place horses at my disposal
putme
offer me guide” from
first to last ; and all this was
~ as they say here, to
wasmbe t ouglh,
oecause was an
Englishman wishing to see the we . Offers