The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-31 00:00:00

thing but itself, even in Potrolia, where all is
strange. Splashing down the hill to the first street,
one gets perfectly confounded by the din of saws
and hammers, for everything is being built, or,
having been built in a hurry some month or six
weeks ago, is already in process of much needed re-
pair. One one aide is a little row of important
agencies and offices of companies, where the rate of
prices makes Wall-street vibrate, though they are
hardly to be distinguished from the hovels where
accommodation is announced for man and beast,
and nothing offered which is fit for either. Then
come long rows of really good three-storied frame
houses, some with their white piazzas runninground
each floor, some painted, others in the rough plain
deal ; then a new street, the lower floors of the houses
in which are being occupied, furnished, and provi-
sioned while the upper ones are being nailedtogether.
Here on one side is a large rough timber building
belonging to an equestrian circus, with a gaudy
banner announcing that its first benefit was given
towards the funds in aid of the Pithole Church;
then a long straggling hotel, which is let and crowd-
edly occupied at one end while the other is being
put together, and where each room as soon as it is
half finished pays its cost in a week. Then, as the
houses get more important, come the stores, the
contents of which, as in Oil City, may be known
by what is littered outside. Here the majority,
whether teamers or oil princes, buy no new
clothes while those they have can hold to-
gether. When either does " rag out," as it is
called, he undresses and redresses in the store, and
throws the discarded habiliments, which he does not
longer want, in the mud of the side-walk before it.
If any comparison could be made between this
place and what Europeans have seen, it might pos-
sibly be found in the interior of one of our interna-
tional exhibitions two nights or so before the time
of opening, when everything is, of course, unfinished
when masons, engineers, and carpenters are atwork,
doing badly in a hurry what should have been done
well long before, and when amid the clang of iron
and the never-ending din of hammers, saws, and
planes, a perfect flood of lost packages keeps arriv-
ing, and the cases are broken up in the mud outside
the building, while inside the other cases are being
nailed together to exhibit them. Such, in a general
way, is Pithole now. Its sidewalks of rough timber,
raised above the mud, are crowded with cases—
provisions, groceries, wines, furniture, crockery, all
laid about waiting for the hotels, boarding-houses,
eating-houses, &c., to be finished before they can be
taken in, and in front of each and all lies a danger-
ous debris among the mud ; old packing frames,
broken ware, timber, bottles, ends of beams studded
with broken nails, huge stones, submerged plank-
ways, now and then felled trees, and crowds of tired
worn-out horses tied to posts and planks or moored
to stones—anywhere, in fact, where the hurried,
jaded traveller can leave his steed with a hope of
finding it again. Such a scene as this—such a wide
spread, well laid out, mixed town of contradictions,
where a fine store is jostled by a dirty stable or
still dirtier lodging-house, where the telegraph
posts, quite as abundant here and rather more
necessary than derricks, are represented by pine-
trees cut short in the middle of the mud—that is
to say, the road—any one can imagine. He has
only to people it with the muddiest of populations
crowding the channels, with overladen teams crowd-
ing the side-walks, with muddy men who congregate
about with note-books in their hands copying down
returns of wells, prices of stocks, and amounts for
which interests aro to be sold, &c., and then he will
have Pithole City before him—a city which is still
in the hands of the carpenter and joiner—a city
which has nearly 10,000 people trying to make it
habitable, but as yet in vain. There are, neverthe-
less, two good hotels here—that is to say, houses
which are awfully overcrowded, but where at least
the fare is abundant and wholesome, the sleeping
accommodation both dry and clean, which is saying
quite as much as a traveller need desire anywhere,
and much more than any could fairly expect to find
in these backwood cities. For the benefit of any
future travellers, I may say that these hotels are the
Morey Farm and Chase-house. It is true that the
beds and pillows of each are popularly and very
naturally supposed to be stuffed with "basswood
feathers "—that is to say, with the chips of the
hardest timber to be found about here. Yet it is
astonishing how soft even " bass-wood feathers "
become to those who have had hard riding, or rather
climbing, through these wild tracks, and who reach
the Morey Farm at night after, it may be, ten, or
12 hours in the saddle, without food or rest.
Such a rough peculiar scene as I have attempted
to describe is common to both sides of this very
steep and picturesque valley, the " regions " or the
territory, as here the oil land is indifferently called,
lying between the two. A very steep decline leads
down to these huge wells, about 150 in num-
ber, from most of which the oil is flowing, from
some only gas, which comes with a roar like steam
from a waste-pipe, and which fills the air with a
sickening miasma that half poisons those who inhale
it for the first few times. All along the way down
the hills men are felling trees and surveying the
half-cleaned ground, mapping it off by marks
upon the pines or white sticks in the ground, show-
ing the boundaries of acre or half-acre lots which
have been let upon the Rooker, Holinden, or
Morey Farms, the great prizes in this district now.
Lower down the valley the road gets muddier and
more greasy, till everything becomes of the con-
sistency of thick green paint, amid which are crowds
of teams, some laden, some empty, but all struggling
down to cross the run, some with loads, some to
reach wells where the flow exceeds the means of
transit ; and where, amid oaths, directions, com-
mands, and entreaties, the word is passed from team
to team that the road to such and such a well is
blocked with waggons, when they turn aside and
begin toiling through the oily woods in search of
roads to other ventures less frequented but equally in
want of teams. On the morning when I first visited
the Creek two full waggons had broken down in the
centre of thelnarrow ford, overturning an empty one
and thus effectually stopping the chief route which
gave access to the wells on either side. The confu-
sion then was something almost maddening, as each
in turn issued contradictory directions, which few
attended to, or only so far followed as to make things
worse, if possible. Such a hopeless entanglement as
then took place amid the mud and oily brushwood
was rare to witness even in the rushes for new wells.
Men in the brook, up to their waists in water, were
trying to extricate the teams ; men in the tracks, up
to their waists in mud, were trying to back their
empty waggons out overstumps and brushwood ; on
all sides men were rolling barrels full of oil from the
overcharged wells ; there were hideous shouts and
alarms raised now and then as trees were felled and
came with a thundering crash to the ground, and
when the confusion was at its height and a heavy
blast was exploded an appalling rumour of fire was
spread about—a rumour almost as dreadful to hear at
Pithole Creek as in a powder magazine. And all this
was going on amid incessant cries and oaths, sultry
weather and heavy rain, an escape of gas from the
wells and the earth that filled the air and made
trees, derricks, hills, men, and horses all alike
flicker and ripple in the atmosphere like some wild,'
unsteady phantasmagoria. It is rather a signifi-
cant fact that nothing tended so much to relieve
this confusion as the false alarm adroitly spread
that the great well to which all the teams were
pressing had "gi'n out" and no more oil was to be
had"from there. Such a statement did not seem to
excite the slightest surprise, and every one took it
as a matter of course that that which had yielded
fullest was most likely to dry up soonest, and the
great mass of waggons turned off to other ventures.
T'Ais ruse relieved the rush upon theford,thae way,nd,by
breaking up the waggons which stopped
the circulation of the traffic was at last restored.
When this had been effected our party were enabled
to advance, and we soon found ourselves amid a
huge series of oily wooden vats, each capable of
holding 2,000 barrels, and which stood in great
black rows running out from the derricks two and
two together, and all joined up at the base by three
inch iron pipes communicating from one pair of
vats to the other. This was the Grant well, one of
the largest on the Creek. A long ladder between
the last couple of wooden tanks gave access to a
staging, where a view could be had of the iron pipe
which led from the well to the vats. From this the
petroleum was flowing in intermittent gushes with