Settlers in western Pennsylvania had already discovered this from the Indians. This gave them great relief, and freed them immediately from the rheumatic complaints with which many of them were affected. The troops, in marching that way, halted at the spring, collected the oil, and bathed their joints with it. In the northern part of Pennsylvania, there is a creek called Oil Creek, which empties itself into the Allegheny River, issuing from a spring, on the top of which floats an oil, similar to what is called Barbadoes tar, and from which may be collected, by one man, several gallons in a day. General Benjamin Lincoln reported in 1785: Later it became Oil City.Īfter making a survey of other Revolutionary land grants. The hillside settlement of shanties above Oil Creek was called Cornplanter long after the chief sold the land, in 1818, to two white settlers for $2,121. For his help in the Revolution, the great chief Cornplanter was given 300 acres in Venango County, Pennsylvania. Lewis Evans, drawing a map of the middle British colonies in America in 1755, carefully lettered Petroleum near the spot where Seneca and Cornplanter Indians spread blankets on the rainbowed oily surface of the creek, then wrung out the slippery liquid into earthenware vessels for liniment and medicine and to mix with their war paint for glistening, waterproof make-up. In the seventeenth century British and French explorers in what is now western Pennsylvania and New York sent back eager accounts of the oil pools that looked like water and burned like brandy, but nobody seemed to care. Job, in the Bible, sounds like the best prophet of the lot, with his talk of the rock that poured out “rivers of oil.” The truth is large enough-that Drake was probably the first man to carry through a practical method for drilling and pumping out of the earth mass quantities of the liquid wealth that had been collecting for a few million years, in the slow distillation of matter, animal, vegetable, or mineral. Since 1859, there have been so many fierce arguments that it seems only sensible to point out that nobody “discovered” oil. In fact, there are still factions who say that the other three men were the heroes. It took an improbable trio of New Englanders-a hearty country doctor, a lawyer-promoter who looked like a Greenwich Village poet, and a banker with an undercoating of ballyhoo-to propel the ex-railroad conductor into his one larger-than-life act. He was the hero, all right, but one of those heroes who seem to have been chosen in a game of blindfold, like Pin The Tail On The Donkey. After his well came in, poor Edwin Drake got shoved aside in all the excitement and nearly lost in the rush.
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