HAWORTH. | Discoveries of Oil and Gas. 19 
were guarding three barrels of the precious liquid. The pump- 
ing apparatus was adjusted and by noon the well commenced 
producing at the rate of twenty barrels a day! The problem 
of the ages was solved, the agony ended and petroleum fairly 
launched upon its astonishing career. 
“The news flew like a Dakota cyclone. Villagers and coun- 
try folk flocked to the wonderful well. Smith wrote to Peter- 
son, his former employer: ‘Come quick; there’s oceans of 
oil!’ Jonathan Watson jumped on a horse and galloped down 
the creek to lease the McClintock farm, where Nathanael 
Cary dipped oil and a timbered crib had been constructed. 
Henry Potter tied up the lands for miles along the stream, 
hoping to interest New York capital. William Barnsdall se- 
cured the farm north of the Willard. George H. Bissell, who 
had arranged to be posted by telegraph, bought all the Penn- 
sylvania Rock-oil stock he could find and in four days was at 
the well. He leased farm after farm on Oil creek and the 
Alleghany river, regardless of surface indications or the ad- 
monition of meddling wiseacres. 
‘“Unluckily for himself, Colonel Drake took a narrow view of 
affairs. Complacently assuming that he had ‘tapped the mine’ 
—to quote his own phrase—and that paying territory would 
not be found outside the company’s lease, he pumped the well 
serenely, told funny stories, and secured not one foot of 
ground! Had he possessed a particle of the prophetic instinct; 
had he grasped the magnitude of the issues at stake; had he 
appreciated the importance of petroleum as a commercial prod- 
uct; had -he been able to ‘see an inch beyond his nose,’ he 
would have gone forth that August morning and become ‘mas- 
ter of the oil country.’ ‘The world was all before him where 
to choose’; he was literally ‘monarch of all he surveyed’; but 
he did n’t move a pez! Money was not needed, the promise 
of one-eighth or one-quarter royalty satisfying the easy-going 
farmers, consequently he might have gathered in any quantity 
of land. Friends urged him to ‘get into the game’; he rejected 
their counsel and never realized his mistake until other wells 
sent prices skyward and it was everlastingly too late for his 
short pole to knock the persimmons. Yet this is the man whom 
numerous writers have proclaimed ‘the discoverer of petro- 
leum’! Times without number it has been said and written 
and printed that he was ‘the first man to advise boring for oil’; 
that ‘his was the first mind to conceive the idea of penetrating 
the rock in search of a larger deposit of oil than was dreamed 
of by any one’; that ‘he alone unlocked one of nature’s vast 
storehouses,’ and ‘had visions of a revolution in light and lubri- 
cation.’ Considering what Kier, Peterson, Bissell and Watson 
had done years before Drake ever saw—perhaps ever heard 
of—a drop of petroleum, the absurdity of these claims is ‘so 
plain that he who runs may read.’ Couple with this his in- 
credible failure to secure lands after the well was drilled— 
