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he found it full of the precious fluid. They had struck oil. ‘This 
well pumped about twenty barrels a day, and twenty barrels was 
more oil than had ever been gathered or dipped in any one year 
before. Colonel Drake’s well was the beginning of an industry 
that has furnished more romances in real life, than the most fer- 
tile imagination ever conceived. 
In 1864, the government tax of $1.00 a barrel on crude oil, 
amounted to ten thousand dollars a day. At the present time, the 
oil and natural gas industries together, are producing half a mil- 
lion dollars worth of raw materials every day, in the United 
States alone. 
Not long ago, Mr. H. H. Rogers, of the Standard Oil Com- 
pany, to whom Colonel Drake was a friend in the pioneer days, 
erected a seventy-five thousand dollar monument over his grave 
at Titusville; but this is not the only monument erected to his 
memory. There are about one hundred and seventy-five thou- 
sand others, in the shape of derricks, which are scattered all over 
this vast country, from the head waters of the Alleghany River 
westward to the Pacific Coast, northward to the Great Lakes, and 
southward to the Gulf. In some places they cluster thick together, 
like the masts of ships in a great harbor. Then again, an isolated 
one is seen crowning some distant hill top like a lonely sentinel, 
and the very wind as it blows through the hollow ribs of this 
vast army of headless skeletons says: “ Don’t forget poor Drake.” 
The news of Colonel Drake’s well spread over the country 
like wild fire, causing what is now known as “ The oil excitement 
on the creek,” and never in the history of the world, has there 
been anything to equal it. Men went oil mad, and such was the 
rapidity of their plunges in this wild speculation, that it was no 
uncommon thing for a man to make and loose several fortunes in 
a single day. Thousands sold their all for what they could get, 
and rushed to Oil Creek to promptly loose the money they took 
there. <A little oil for medicinal purposes was a good thing, but 
soon the early operators discovered that they had too much oil; 
that it was ‘‘ An elephant” on their hands, and that there was 
practically no demand for it, consequently it was almost worth- 
less. ‘They tried to burn it in lamps that gave a little light, lots 
