172 GILBERT HOLLAND MONTAGUE 



The secret of this strange success with the railways is not, 

 however, completely insoluble. If the episodes in the progress 

 of the Standard Oil company from 1865 till 1877 be carefully 

 studied, the motives of every act, both of the company and 

 of the railways, will certainly be revealed. The materials 

 for this study are not lacking. A vast amount of evidence 

 showing the ability of the Standard Oil company to turn 

 these possibilities to advantage has been gathered by vari- 

 ous commissions and investigating committees. With such 

 sources of information as these available, an intelligible nar- 

 rative may readily be put together. Not only may each act 

 of the company and of the railways be authenticated, but also, 

 at each step in the progress, the increasing efficiency and im- 

 portance of the company may be estimated, and the mo- 

 mentary opportunities of railway and industrial conditions 

 may be gauged. And so in what seems at first sight an un- 

 accountable and suspiciously rapid growth may be discerned 

 signs of inevitable development — the operation of motives 

 which are, at any rate, explicable. 



In 1865, when Mr. John D. Rockefeller began in a small 

 way to refine petroleum at Cleveland, Ohio, the oil industry 

 was in a singularly inchoate state With the success of Drake's 

 oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, refiners had been 

 released from the necessity of distilling coal into petroleum 

 before refining petroleum into kerosene; and at the same 

 time the sources of petroleum were shown to be enormously 

 greater than they had ever before been guessed. This dis- 

 covery stimulated consumers to increased use of lubricants 

 and burning oils and in this way rapidly increased the de- 

 mand in the arts for the refined product. In even greater 

 measure it encouraged the production of crude petroleum. 

 Within a year after Drake's success, wells had been sunk all 

 around Oil City and along the Allegheny river. In 1864 had 

 occurred the Cherry "run," followed by the Benninghoff and 

 the Pioneer "runs," and the sensational exploitation of Pit- 

 hole creek. While Mr. Rockefeller was erecting his little 

 refinery, Pithole City — now a field sown with wheat — had 

 a postoffice nearly as large as that of Philadelphia. From 

 Manitoulin island to Alabama and from Missouri to Central 



