Heat (22 page)

The drilling stopped the oil seeps that leaked into the creek. The seeps no longer flow. Now the creek runs clear, its surface untainted by Barbados tar.

Across Oil Creek from my hotel, the site of Drake’s well has been converted into a museum. Drake’s derrick has been reconstructed on the grounds of the museum. The derrick, shrouded in rough wooden planks, stands three stories tall. It is attached to an engine house, also of rough wooden planks. In that engine house, a five-hundred-gallon boiler heated by burning wood supplies steam to a six-and-one-half-horsepower steam engine. The steam engine’s single piston moves a walking beam up and down, like a seesaw, and the end of that beam lifts and drops a rod that extends down into the well. Each time Drake’s walking beam moved up, it lifted seventy feet of steel rods. At the bottom of those steel rods sat a pool of oil, and each stroke of the steam engine sent a spurt of oil to the surface, where it was directed into a wooden cistern.

Today, on the museum grounds, the Drake well house recirculates oil to show how things would have looked after the well was drilled—after the discovery, when the well was in production. The oil does not come from a depth of seventy feet, but it is real oil. It is oil that the museum recirculates for the viewing public. It is crude oil, smelling sulfurous and bituminous, flowing darkly, looking black at first but then, in the right light, casting a greenish tint. It flows like a thin syrup, watery, only hinting of viscosity.

From Professor Silliman’s 1854 report on a sample of oil from Oil Creek: “The Crude oil, as it is gathered on your lands, has a dark brown color, which, by reflected light, is greenish or bluish. It is thick even in warm weather—about as thick as thin molasses. In very cold weather it is somewhat more stiff, but can always be poured from a bottle even at 15 degrees below zero. Its odor is strong and peculiar, and recalls to those who are familiar with it, the smell of Bitumen and Naphtha.”

The well itself—the hole in the ground on top of which the derrick sits—is as real as the oil being pumped. It is the Drake well, the hole that Drake made, still intact. With a diameter of about five inches, it is a hole that changed history.

I stand here in Drake’s reconstructed engine house with its attached derrick, rigged now as it would have been then, during the pumping phase of the endeavor. The walking beam goes up and down. I listen to the steam engine’s pistons, its valves popping and hissing with the regular slow heartbeat of steam-powered motion. Recirculated oil pulses out of the well and into a wooden storage tank, showing visitors what Drake might have seen after the well was drilled.

Almost everything here is a reconstruction: the engine house, the derrick, the sucker rods, the drilling tools hanging on the wall, the pump, the barrels. But the well itself is the original. The actual Drake well exists intact. I crouch and touch the metal casing going into the soil. I feel the ground. I smell the oil. This is where it started—the petroleum revolution, the displacement of coal and the replacement of whale oil, the acceleration of climate change.

But only the hole itself is the original. The rest of it burned on October 7, little more than a month after Smith’s drill bit found an oil-filled void in the rocky ground of western Pennsylvania. 

In an 1880 edition of
The Titusville Weekly Herald
, Uncle Billy Smith remembered the fire. It was late, about ten o’clock. Drake himself was away, off buying pipe. “I thought the tank was not filling up fast enough,” Smith told the reporter, “and went to see if the oil had stopped. I had a little lamp in my left hand. A little streak of light, like a flash of lightning, went to the oil, set everything in a blaze and in two seconds everything was burned up, including the little house I lived in.”

When Drake was told of the fire, he asked about casualties. Was anyone killed? Was anyone hurt? Remarkably, no on both counts. “I’m glad of that,” Drake responded. Only then did he ask about the well. The works were gone—the derrick, the engine house, the ropes, the steam engine, all in ruins.

“Did the hole burn?” Drake asked. No, the hole was intact.

Without missing a beat, Drake was ready to rebuild.

The fire was the first of many well fires in western Pennsylvania and among the least tragic.

Drake was far from the first to discover oil. Pliny the Elder wrote of it in the first volume of his
Natural History
. “In Samosata, a city of Commagene,” he reported, “there is a pool which discharges an inflammable mud, called Maltha. It adheres to every solid body which it touches, and moreover, when touched, it follows you, if you attempt to escape from it. By means of it the people defended their walls against Lucullus, and the soldiers were burned in their armor. It is even set on fire in water.” In the next paragraph he writes of Naphtha. “Naphtha is a substance of a similar nature (it is so called about Babylon, and in the territory of the Astaceni, in Parthia), flowing like liquid bitumen. It has a great affinity to fire, which instantly darts on it wherever it is seen.”

In the next paragraph, he writes of “places which are always burning,” referring now not to petroleum but to volcanoes.

Drake was not the first to discover oil, and he may not have been the first to drill for oil, even ignoring the dozens of salt wells that unintentionally struck oil. A retired medical doctor named Dr. Robert Hazlett bought land along Oil Spring Run in West Virginia in January 1859. With his investors, he drilled. He did not drill for salt. From
The Derrick’s Hand-Book of Petroleum
, 1898: “It is claimed that this company—known as the Virginia Petroleum Company, drilled their first producing well as early as—possibly before—Drake drilled his historic well in Pennsylvania.”

The field Hazlett discovered was named the Volcano Field.

But first or not, Drake catalyzed a boom. Merchants and preachers and lawyers abandoned stores and pulpits and offices to become oilmen. Whalers, tired of long voyages and uncertain profits, set a course for Titusville. Farmers beat their plows into drill bits.

The market, for now, was lighting—the heat from burning oil, like the heat from burning whale oil or wood or coal, created light. It was the heat that made the flame incandesce. But it would be some time before the heat of burning rock oil would be converted to a mode of motion.

Downstream from Drake’s well, almost to its confluence with the Allegheny River, a distance of more than ten miles, Oil Creek and the surrounding land are now a state park. I had planned to canoe the creek, to follow the route of the oil that once traveled here. But just now this creek will not float a canoe. It is too shallow. The cobbles and pebbles that line its bed reach within inches of the surface.

Even in Drake’s time, the creek’s water levels were known for their responsiveness to rain. Not wanting to ship oil on a schedule dictated by weather, enterprising transporters devised a series of small dams along the creek’s tributaries. They opened the dams in a synchronized fashion, sending water downstream, a flash flood made to order to carry shallow-draft scows to the Allegheny River, at the time a river of commerce. Those scows, roughly built, carried barrels of oil. They called the flash floods “freshets.”

The barrels are gone. The scows are gone. The dams are gone. There will be no freshets today. So I walk along the creek’s banks in on-and-off rain. The hills around Oil Creek, originally covered by conifers and then laid bare by loggers and oilmen, stand covered with mixed deciduous trees, the sort of regrowth that passes for nature in the eastern United States. Mosquitoes abound. A red-winged blackbird displays. The creek that once carried oil now carries trout. I watch a doe wading. She watches me, her brown eyes large and her ears twitching, and then she disappears into thick brush.

Along Oil Creek I find, without trying, abandoned well stems, vertical pipes standing a few inches above the soil surface, overgrown with weeds. Some of the wells stand in the company of rusting steel rocking donkeys, the remains of oil pumps. I find an old wooden storage tank that at one time may have held a hundred gallons of crude, now empty and grown over by a white-flowered briar. A four-inch pipeline runs next to my path, for the most part hidden by leaf litter and undergrowth, occasionally half buried, its outermost skin reddish brown with rust.

I stroll through Funkville. That is, I stroll past a sign in the forest proclaiming the site to be the abandoned community of Funkville, where Captain A. B. Funk drilled into the third sand. Drake’s well struck oil in the void that became known as the first sand, but there was more oil to be found deeper, in the second sand, and still deeper in the third sand.

Captain Funk’s well flowed without pumping, an artesian well of oil sending three hundred barrels a day to the surface. He called his well “the Fountain.” Funkvillians once strolled here next to the Fountain.

After Drake’s discovery, wells were routinely named. There was the Noble, the Empire, the Craft, the Coquette, the Wild-cat, the Jersey. There was the Lincoln and the Old Abe and the Sherman and the Yankee. Wells were named after girlfriends and daughters, after geographic features, or simply after their owners. There was, for example, the Ewing well.

Different wells had different personalities. They produced oil and water in different ratios. The oil was of differing quality. Some wells flowed intermittently. One well, it was claimed, only flowed on Sundays. Another well—the Yankee—would stand idle for twenty minutes, then gently cough up spurts of oil and gas for three minutes, then violently belch up oil and gas for some time, and then pause again for another twenty-minute nap. The violent coughing spells could be heard at a distance of six hundred feet.

One out of ten wells struck oil. Nine out of ten wells struck dust.

Of the wells that struck oil, the better producers were easily identified by the rows of blackened tanks, invariably made of wood, sometimes but not always roofed over. In general, the tanks sat close to the creek. In general, they leaked. The crude, black when seen in the shaded dimness of a tank’s innards but greenish in the sunshine, flowed in tributary rivulets to Oil Creek. The color of the surface of Oil Creek, where the crude spread into a sheen, was described as “exceedingly delicate and beautiful.”

The smell was overpowering.

It was not uncommon for wells to be separated by less than seventy-five feet. I stroll through what was once the McClintock Farm. The first well here was drilled without a steam engine, in 1860. Instead of a steam engine and a rocking beam, the men used a spring pole, a downed tree laid across a fulcrum and rigged in a manner such that two men, by stepping on and off a rope loop, could cause the pole to bob up and down and in so doing cause their drill bit to chisel into the earth. Toward the end of the year, they struck oil. They did not have sufficient barrels on hand to capture the flow and for a time their wealth ran freely downhill and then downstream.

They acquired barrels. They acquired steam engines. They drilled more wells. They rigged an eccentric drive—a single steam engine running pumps at several wells, using steel connecting rods that ran like cables through pulleys in a rusty network, the whole thing moving back and forth, squeaking steel rubbing against steel.

Now some of the steel remains, unmoving and silent. In places, connecting rods still run through pulleys hung on frames in the forest. Elsewhere I find them on the ground, buried under decaying leaves. An engine house still stands, padlocked and silent. I cannot see into the darkness through its windows.

Had I been here in time—150 years ago—I would have heard the steady movement of steam pistons, the squeaking of steel rods, the hissing of oil, the voices of men, the pounding of percussion drilling. I would have smelled oil. My boots would be covered in mud. If I could find lodging, it would have been a shared bed in a hastily built hotel, its parlor floor an inch deep in oily mud and tobacco juice. I would have seen men building barrels. I would have seen and heard teamsters swearing as they drove horses upstream, the horses harnessed to empty scows returning for more oil.