Heat (23 page)

The teamsters were not known for their love of horses. If I had stayed through the winter, I could have watched the men whipping their horses forward, pushing them upstream against the slush and ice that rubbed the hair from the horse’s legs and abraded their skin, leaving it raw and exposed to the mud and oil of Oil Creek. At times the creek was a highway clogged with caravans of dying horses.

In 1865, William Wright, a journalist, visited Oil Creek. He was distressed by the treatment of horses: “One’s first impulse is to curse the day petroleum was first discovered, and to knock down the barbarians by whom the task of applying the lash has been voluntarily accepted.” And this: “The only drawback to the whole is the cruel treatment of the horse, whose lot has been made worse by the great discovery, though its benefits have been felt by whales disporting themselves in the Arctic seas.”

Wright’s goal, though, was not to protect horses. His goal was to make sense of the oil boom, to understand the region known as Petrolia, as the region that surrounded Oil Creek was by then called. Like others, he was impressed by the quantity of mud that he encountered. He was also impressed by the works of man. “Arrived at the journey’s end,” he wrote, “I found a discordant, contradictory mass of facts and figures on my memorandum book; and came to the conclusion that, whatever I knew the first day, I knew much less the second, and nothing at all the third.” This was a mere six years after Drake’s well struck oil.

Wright encountered more than one driller self-educated in geology. Most of them believed the oil came from coal. Oil was coal drippings that found their way to underground reservoirs. But there were other theories. One man, “fussy and seedy-looking,” Wright wrote, “avers that the country is of volcanic origin, and is ready to point out certain rents in the hill-tops, through which Vulcan and his helpers found passages for the smoke and cinders of their forges.”

No one suggested that the oil might have come from the decay of ancient algae and zooplankton. Which, in fact, it did.

Wright wrote of the processing of crude: “Oil refineries, belching forth clouds of black smoke, or (as is quite common) lying idle, form one of the features in the landscape.” And this: “They are for the most part small establishments, each with a capacity not exceeding three hundred barrels per week.”

Refining methods were primitive. They involved heating the oil. They involved what Professor Silliman, in his report to Drake’s investors, called “fractional distillation.” At 300 degrees, about 8 percent of the crude boiled off, turned to vapor. At 360 degrees, 30 percent of the crude was gone, vaporized. At 600 degrees, half the crude was gone. All these vapors could be recaptured. The vapors could be sent into a tube and cooled, yielding purified products like kerosene and gasoline.

At this time, kerosene was the valued product. Kerosene replaced whale oil in lamps. Gasoline, too explosive, too flammable, too deadly, was of no value. It was allowed to evaporate, or it was cast off on the ground, or it was sent into the creek.

I find my way back to Drake’s Well and into the museum gift shop. I talk to a woman there about the journalist William Wright and his visit to Titusville, and I buy Wright’s book. She asks if I know that Mark Twain passed through Titusville. I had seen, I tell her, a commemorative plaque in town describing the visit, which occurred in 1869, ten years after Drake’s success and four years after Wright’s visit. The plaque does not say so, but while speaking Twain was heckled by a Titusville drunkard.

I suggest to her that another writer, Charles Dickens, could have crossed paths with Drake himself. Drake lived for a time at a hotel used by Dickens in New Haven, Connecticut, but that was almost ten years after Dickens had passed through. When Dickens passed through, though, he traveled by steam train, and at that time Drake was a conductor. Whether they met is not known.

I buy a souvenir, a vial of crude oil commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Drake well. The Drake well itself no longer produces. The oil in this vial came from downstream, from a well on the McClintock Farm, reputed to be the longest producing oil well in the world, with a lifespan of fifteen decades and counting. It is the same oil that is now recirculated at the Drake well as a demonstration for visitors.

For the McClintocks, oil brought sudden wealth. Among other things, it financed an adopted son, John Washington Steele, known also as Coal Oil Johnny. Coal Oil Johnny later described a boomtown that grew up at the confluence of Oil Creek and a tiny tributary known as Cherry Tree Run. The town was called Petroleum Centre. “For pure, unadulterated wickedness,” Coal Oil Johnny wrote, “it eclipsed any town. For open, flaunted vice and sin, it laid over any other on the map.” In Petroleum Centre, it was possible to stay drunk indefinitely. It was possible to play cards all night. It was possible to buy the favors of numerous women. Until later in life, when his money ran out and he gave up alcohol, Coal Oil Johnny did not necessarily find Petroleum Centre objectionable.

For those who ran short on funds in places like Petroleum Centre, sandbagging was a viable means to an end. Sandbagging involved filling a small burlap bag with sand, swinging it into the head of a passing man, and taking the wallet from the stunned man’s vest.

The oil that kept the town afloat was harvested quickly. By 1873, Petroleum Centre was abandoned. It disappeared. Its disappearance coincided with the disappearance, through profligate waste, of Coal Oil Johnny’s wealth.

“If someone were to ask me,” Coal Oil Johnny later wrote, “to pen a sentiment for the benefit of young men who have to face the temptations of the world, I do not know of anything better to say to them than ‘Tell the boys to drink water.’”

On my table: a teaspoon, my souvenir glass vial of crude oil, matches, and a copy of the text from a flier that accompanied pint bottles of Kier’s Petroleum sometime around 1850.  This is the same Kier’s Petroleum that inspired Drake to drill.

“Kier’s Petroleum,” the flier says, “celebrated for its wonderful curative powers. A natural remedy! Procured from a well in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, four hundred feet below the earth’s surface.”

But Kier did not want to stretch the truth about the medicinal value of rock oil. “That it will cure every disease to which we are liable,” his flier says, “we do not pretend; but that it will cure a great many diseases hitherto incurable is a fact which is proven by the evidence in its favor.”

Four decades later, when rock oil was an important fuel for lamps and well-known in households throughout the United States, from an 1892 newspaper article: “The ‘rock oil’ which sold in bottles for medicine was simply the crude oil of today, though there is no question that that found in the Kier well was of the very best. I have taken many a dose of it inwardly.” And this: “The petroleum is popularly taken in doses of a teaspoon before each meal, and, after the first day, any nausea, which it may excite in some persons, disappears.”

Medicines based on crude oil remain available today. There is Vaseline as a salve. There is T-gel for dandruff and cradle cap. But raw crude oil is no longer prescribed. The raw product, in Kier’s time taken orally, is no longer recommended. The medical community unanimously frowns on ingestion.

I open my vial of crude oil and pour its contents into my spoon. It flows freely, like a light grade of motor oil. It forms a quarter-sized pool almost the color of dark chocolate but for its subtle greenish tint. It is opaque, full of energy, the liquid embodiment of sunlight captured in the distant past. The smell fills my room, tarlike, a mixed aroma of fresh asphalt and diesel fuel, primitive, troubling, unwelcome. Its smell is as black as that of burning coal.

I touch a match to the surface of the spoon. Vapors ignite, dancing blue for a moment before burning out.

I move the spoon under my nose and into my mouth. I ingest crude.

The taste is not as ugly as the smell. It is not ugly enough to trigger gagging. It does not excite nausea. But it is not the taste of a healthful balm. It is not quite like anything else I have tasted. I lick the spoon.

My lips and teeth and the roof of my mouth are slick with crude. The aroma finds its way from my mouth to my nostrils. It persists. For an hour afterward, my tongue feels the slickness on the roof of my mouth. Through the night the odor of crude oil reappears, its vapors finding their way from my stomach to my nose.

Mark Twain, in 1905, had a few words of his own for a man like Kier, an advertiser and peddler of medicinal oil. From Twain: “The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link.”

Overall it has been a dry spring, and Oil Creek itself will not float a canoe. But nearby French Creek, another tributary of the Allegheny, will. I rent a canoe and cast off into the light current of French Creek.

Long before Drake, the Cornplanter band of the Seneca tribe paddled canoes along these rivers. They occasionally went as far as Pittsburgh to trade furs and other specialties. Among those specialties were hollow logs fashioned into jars and gourds and calabashes containing oil.

By the time of William Wright’s visit, French Creek was home to the Henrietta Well, yielding three barrels a day. It was home to the One Well, producing three barrels a day. It was home to the Niedler Well, which flowed on its own accord, without pumping, to yield twelve barrels a day for eight weeks before subsiding. It was home to the imaginatively named Number One Well, Number Two Well, Number Three Well, and Number Four Well. Numbers One and Three were ruined in a flood. Number Two produced only a trickle. Number Four was being deepened.

In addition to wells, French Creek had a refinery. The refinery had two stills. In those two stills, fifty barrels a day were heated, boiling away the unwanted lighter ends—the natural gas liquids, the explosive gasoline, the diesel. The process left behind kerosene and various residues, including thick tar. Regarding gasoline, from the Titusville
Morning Herald
on September 1, 1871: “It is chiefly to rid the petroleum of this dangerous constituent element that refining becomes essential.”

Now French Creek carries me over beds of bright green aquatic grass and black freshwater mussels. The banks are blanketed in deciduous forest, here and there interrupted by river homes, mostly small weekenders in need of repair, mostly with canoes of their own sitting in backyards and leaning against sheds. A kingfisher flies over my canoe, and then another. I maneuver around rocks, and a bald eagle steps off its perch high in a tree to glide downstream. Later, when I drag the canoe across shallow gravel, I see another eagle, a two-year-old, its head not yet white.

I see no derricks. If any pumps remain, they are not visible from my canoe. But occasionally I peer through the creek’s brown water to see pipes lying on the streambed, pipes of the sort that the oilmen called tubing.

Tubing ran down into active oil wells. It was through the tubing that the oil came to the surface. Over time, tubing corroded or clogged with thick paraffin waxes and had to be replaced. And so some of the old tubing, no longer useful, found its way into the creek.