Ze, University Geological Survey of Kansas. 
Lawrence in the spring of 1855, had detailed to me his dis- 
covery of an oil-spring on the Wea, in what is now Miami 
county, Kansas. So I hastened home and examined a file of the 
Herald of Freedom wherein the spring was described. Then 
getting Erastus Heath, then a member of the territorial legis- 
lature, which was in session in Lawrence, January, 1860, to 
join me, we visited the locality and found the spring described. 
The oil dripped from fissures in the rock and formed an oily 
surface on the rivulet which flowed at the base of the outcrop- 
ping rock. 
“We returned to Lawrence and organized a company of 
eight for purposes of exploration. This company, as organ- 
ized, consisted of G. W. Brown, Erastus Heath, Maltravis 
Solomon, Doctor Barker, Seth Clover, W. R. Wagstaff and G. 
W. Miller. To this number was afterwards added Doctor Ly- 
kins. I was made president and business manager of the com- 
pany. I visited the region and obtained leases on 30,000 acres 
of land for mining purposes to run thirty years. About June 
1, 1860, two young men with boring apparatus commenced 
drilling a four-inch hole, and descended 100 feet. I kept a 
record of the rock through which we passed but it is mislaid or 
lost. I remember we passed through a stratum of coal of over 
two feet in thickness—I think at sixty-nine feet. I remember 
I made some estimate from the dip of the rock and estimated 
if continued the same at Leavenworth the stratum of coal 
would be there reached at 120 feet. I have never seen any ac- 
count of coal being found in that region, so have no informa- 
tion as to the correctness of my figures. 
“IT found another spring of oil some eight miles south of that 
on the Wea, in the bed of a small stream. We started a second 
well there and continued it until near 100 feet, when we aban- 
doned it temporarily, as the workmen had gone down the full 
length of their boring apparatus. 
“Another well was started in an old well at the Baptist Mis- 
sion in charge of David Lykins, about one mile east of Paola. 
I think we got down over a hundred feet below the bottom of 
the old well, which was blasted in the rock. This well we 
piped, cutting off with a seed-bag the water and oil entering the 
tube from all points above two or three feet from the extreme 
lower point. The pumping yielded salt-water, with a thin coat- 
ing of oil, which formed on the vessels receiving it, showing 
that we were still in oil, as we had been most of the distance 
we had bored. We closed labor in all the wells in the winter 
of 1860-’61, with the intention of resuming borings in all of 
them in the spring. But the war coming on, we abandoned 
them temporarily. Before the war closed two members of the 
company died; two were in sympathy with the South and left 
the country, while others were almost financially ruined by 
the Quantrill raid on Lawrence in August of 1863; so work 
was never resumed. 
