with most other things in New York State. All three of the roads began as early as 1868 to use secret rebates on the published freight rates in oil as a means of securing traffic. This practice had gone on until in 1871 any big producer, refiner, or buyer could bully a freight agent into a special rate. Those "on the inside," those who had "pulls," also secured special rates. The result was that the open rate was enforced only on the innocent and the weak.
Serious as all these problems were, there was no discouragement or shrinking from them. The oil men had rid themselves of bunco men and burst the "oil bubbles." They had harnessed the brokers in exchanges and made strict rules to govern them. They had learned not to fear the foreigners, and to take with equal sang froid the "dry-hole" which made them poor, or the "gusher" which made them rich. For every evil they had a remedy. They were not afraid even of the railroads, and loudly declared that if the discriminations were not stopped they would build a railroad of their own. Indeed, the evils in the oil business in 1871, far from being a discouragement, rather added to the interest. They had never known anything but struggle — with conquest — and twelve years of it was far from cooling their ardour for a fair fight.
More had been done in the Oil Regions in the first dozen years than the development of a new industry. From the first there had gone with the oil men's ambition to make oil to light the whole earth a desire to bring civilisation to the wilderness from which they were drawing wealth, to create an orderly society from the mass of humanity which poured pell-mell into the region. A hatred of indecency first drew together the better element of each of the rough communities which sprang up. Whiskey-sellers and women flocked to the region at the breaking out of the excitement. Their first shelters were shanties built on flatboats which were towed from place to place. They came to Rouseville — a collection of pine shanties and oil derricks, built on a muddy flat — as forlorn and disreputable a town in appearance as the earth ever saw. They tied up for trade, and the next morning woke up from their brawl to find themselves twenty miles away, floating down the Allegheny River. Rouseville meant to be decent. She had cut them loose, and by such summary vigilance she kept herself decent. Other towns adopted the same policy. By common consent vice was corralled largely in one town. Here a whole street was given up to dance-houses and saloons, and those who must have a "spree" were expected to go to Petroleum Centre to take it.
FAC-SIMILE OF A LABEL USED BY S. M. KIER IN ADVERTISING ROCK-OIL OBTAINED IN DRILLING SALT WELLS NEAR TARENTUM, PENNSYLVANIA
FAGUNDUS — A TYPICAL OIL TOWN
Decency and schools! Vice cut adrift, they looked for a school teacher. Children were sadly out of place, but there they were, and these men, fighting for a chance, saw to it that a shanty, with a school teacher in it, was in every settlement. It was not long, too, before there was a church, a union church. To worship God was their primal instinct; to defend a creed a later development. In the beginning every social contrivance was wanting. There were no policemen, and each individual looked after evil-doers. There were no firemen, and every man turned out with a bucket at a fire. There were no bankers, and each man had to put his wealth away as best he could until a peripatetic banker from Pittsburg relieved him. At one time Dr. Egbert, a rich operator, is said to have had $1,800,000 in currency in his house. There were no hospitals, and in 1861, when the horrible possibilities of the oil fire were first demonstrated by the burning of the Rouse well, a fire at which nineteen persons lost their lives, the many injured found welcome and care for long weeks in the little shanties of women already overburdened by the difficulties of caring for families in the rough community.
Out of this poverty and disorder they had developed in ten years a social organisation as good as their commercial. Titusville, the hamlet on whose outskirts Drake had drilled his well, was now a city of 10,000 inhabitants. It had an opera house, where in 1871 Clara Louise Kellogg and Christine Nilsson sang, Joe Jefferson and Janauschek played, and Wendell Phillips and Bishop Simpson spoke. It had two prosperous and fearless newspapers. Its schools prepared for college. Oil City was not behind, and between them was a string of lively towns. Many of the oil farms had a decent community life. The Columbia farm kept up a library and reading-room for its employees; there was a good schoolhouse used on Sunday for services, and there was a Columbia farm band of no mean reputation in the Oil Regions.
Indeed, by the opening of 1872, life in the Oil Regions had ceased to be a mere make-shift. Comforts and orderliness and decency, even opportunities for education and for social life, were within reach. It was a conquest to be proud of, quite as proud of as they were of the fact that their business had been developed until it had never before, on the whole, been in so satisfactory a condition.
Nobody realised more fully what had been accomplished in the Oil Regions than the oil men themselves. Nobody rehearsed their achievements so loudly. "In ten years," they were fond of saying, "we have built this business up from nothing to a net product of six millions of barrels per annum. We have invented and devised all the apparatus, the appliances, the forms needed for a new industry. We use a capital of $200,000,000, and support a population of 60,000 people. To keep up our supply we drill 100 new wells per month, at an average cost of $6,000 each. We are fourth in the exports of the United States. We have developed a foreign market, including every civilised country on the globe."
But what had been done was, in their judgment, only a beginning. Life ran swift and ruddy and joyous in these men. They were still young, most of them under forty, and they looked forward with all the eagerness of the young who have just learned their powers, to years of struggle and development. They would solve all these perplexing problems of over-production, of railroad discrimination, of speculation. They would meet their own needs. They would bring the oil refining to the region where it belonged. They would make their towns the most beautiful in the world. There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare. But suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future. The suddenness and the blackness of the assault on their business stirred to the bottom their manhood and their sense of fair play, and the whole region arose in a revolt which is scarcely paralleled in the commercial history of the United States.
CHAPTER TWO
THE RISE OF THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER'S FIRST CONNECTION WITH THE OIL BUSINESS — STORIES OF HIS EARLY LIFE IN CLEVELAND — HIS FIRST PARTNERS — ORGANISATION OF THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY IN JUNE, 1870 — ROCKEFELLER'S ABLE ASSOCIATES — FIRST EVIDENCE OF RAILWAY DISCRIMINATIONS IN THE OIL BUSINESS — REBATES FOUND TO BE GENERALLY GIVEN TO LARGE SHIPPERS — FIRST PLAN FOR A SECRET COMBINATION — THE SOUTH IMPROVEMENT COMPANY — SECRET CONTRACTS MADE WITH THE RAILROADS PROVIDING REBATES AND DRAWBACKS — ROCKEFELLER AND ASSOCIATES FORCE CLEVELAND REFINERS TO JOIN THE NEW COMBINATION OR SELL — RUMOUR OF THE PLAN REACHES THE OIL REGIONS.
The chief refining competitor of Oil Creek in 1872 was Cleveland, Ohio. Since 1869 that city had done annually more refining than any other place in the country. Strung along the banks of Walworth and Kingsbury Runs, the creeks to which the city frequently banishes her heavy and evil-smelling burdens, there had been since the early sixties from twenty to thirty oil refineries. Why they were there, more than 200 miles from the spot where the oil was taken from the earth, a glance at a map of the railroads of the time will show: By rail and water Cleveland commanded the entire Western market. It had two trunk lines running to New York, both eager for oil traffic, and by Lake Erie and the canal it had for a large part of the year a splendid cheap waterway. Thus, at the opening of the oil business, Cleveland was destined by geographical position to be a refining center.
