A CENTURY OF GEOLOGY IN INDIANA. 167 



In 1889 there appeared from the pen of Edward Orton, then State Geo- 

 ogist of Ohio, a notable paper of 188 quarto pages* and seven maps and 

 sections, entitled "The Trenton Limestone as a Source of Petroleum and 

 Natural Gas in Ohio and Indiana," in which he discussed in detail all theories 

 respecting the origin of gas and petroleum, and gave the early history of the 

 Ohio and Indiana fields, accompanied by a colored double page map of the 

 then producing areas. He described fully the geology of the formations in 

 which gas and oil were found, giving especial attention to the Trenton lime- 

 stone and to the geological structure of the Cincinnati uplift or "Cincinnati 

 Axis" of Newberry, a great broad anticline which, beginning in Tennesee 

 and Kentucky, extended north and north-westward through southwestern 

 Ohio and eastern Indiana and is supposed to have had much to do with the 

 general distribution of petroleum in the Trenton rock area of the latter 

 State. 



In his remarks on the Indiana gas field as then known, Orton wrote: 

 "The heart of the Indiana gas field, as has been shown, is in six counties, 

 viz.: Delaware, Blackford, Madison, Grant, Howard and Hamilton. These 

 counties embrace an area as fertile and beautiful as any of equal extent in 

 the noble state to which they belong. Wealth has been rapidly accumulated 

 in them from agricultural sources since the country was first occupied. 

 Thriving towns have sprung up; manufactories have been established on a 

 large scale. It is not often that great mineral wealth is directly associated 

 with great agricultural resources, but in this case the wonderful stocks of 

 power that have so recently been discovered are added to regions that were 

 already preeminent for the wealth of their soils and forests. These favored 

 districts ought to reap an enormous advantage from the addition that has 

 thus been made to their resources. To this end it is necessary that they 

 speedily learn the real nature of their newly discovered sources of power and 

 speedily introduce a wise economy in the use of the same. A vandal-like waste 

 has characterized the early exploitation of most of the subdivisions of the 

 field." 



Thus as early as 1889 did Edward Orton, one of the greatest of the Geol- 

 ogists of the Central-west, warn the citizens of the Indiana gas field of the 

 danger of the waste. Did they heed that warning? Never! During the 

 next six years they came to believe that they had the world by the tail. 

 They were the discoverers — the owners, the users, the wasters of a fuel supply 

 which, in their opinion, would never fail. The boom of the gas belt days! 

 Who that lived there then will ever forget it? Flambeaux lighted the high- 

 ways and byways by night so that they gleamed more brilliantly than the 

 "broadways and brightways" of the Hoosier capital to-day. Crossroad 

 hamlets of a score of inhabitants came to count their citizens by the thousand. 

 Villages and towns of a few hundreds grew into cities of thu-ty thousand. 

 Factories by the hundreds were induced to locate, the promise of free gas 

 which should be perpetual being the lode-star which attracted them from far 



♦Eighth Ann. Eep. U. S. Geol. Survey, 1889. Pt. II, pp. 475-668. 



