12 University Geological Survey of Kansas. 
followed to a greater depth, none of them proving sufficiently 
large to give the field an orchestra chair in the petroleum 
arena. 
“The history of petroleum in America commences with the 
use the pioneer settlers found the redmen made of it for medi-. 
cine and for painting their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted 
its medicinal use and retained for various affluents of the Alle- 
gheny the Indian name of Oil creek. Both natives and whites. 
collected the oil by spreading blankets on the marshy pools. 
along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep hill- 
sides or of mountain walls that hem in the valleys supporting 
coal-measures above. The remains of ancient pits on Oil 
creek—the Oil creek ordained to become a household word— 
lined with timbers and provided with notched logs for ladders, 
show how for generations the aborigines had valued and stored 
the product. Some of these queer reservoirs, choked with 
leaves and dirt accumulated during hundreds of years, bore: 
trees two centuries old. Many of them, circular, square, ob- 
long and oval, sunk in the earth fifteen to twenty feet and 
strongly cribbed, have been excavated. Their number and 
systematic arrangement attest that petroleum was saved in 
liberal quantities by a race possessing in some degree the ele- 
ments of civilization. The oil has preserved the timbers from 
the ravages of decay, ‘to point a moral or adorn a tale,’ and. 
they are as sound to-day as when cut down by hands that. 
erumbled into dust ages ago. 
“The renowned ‘spring’ which may have supplied these re- 
markable vats was located in the middle of Oil creek, on the 
McClintock farm, three miles above Oil City and a short dis- 
tance below Rouseville. Oil would escape from the rocks and 
gravel beneath the creek, appearing like air-bubbles until it 
reached the surface and spread a thin film reflecting all the 
colors of the rainbow. From shallow holes, dug and wailed 
sometimes in the bed of the stream, the oil was skimmed and 
husbanded jealously. The demand was limited and the enter- 
prise to meet it was correspondingly modest. Nathaniel Cary, 
the first tailor in Franklin and owner of the tract adjoining’ 
the McClintock, peddled it about the townships early in the 
century, when the population was sparse and every good house- 
wife laid by a bottle of ‘Seneca Oil’ in case of accident or sick- 
ness. Cary would sling two jars or kegs across a faithful 
horse, and, mounting this willing steed, went his rounds at- 
irregular intervals. Occasionally he took a ten-gallon cargo to 
Pittsburg, riding with it eight miles on horseback and trading 
the oil for cloth and groceries. His memory should be cher- 
ished as the first ‘shipper’ of petroleum to ‘the Smoky City,’ 
then a mere cluster of log and frame buildings in a patch of | 
cleared ground surrounding Fort Pitt. 
“Signs of petroleum in the Keystone state were not confined 
to Oil creek. Ten miles westward, in water-wells and in the: 
