PETROLIA.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 59, 7 June 1873, Page 3

PETROLIA.

This district, chiefly situated in Western Pennsylvania, was but a few years ago scantily populated by a remnant of the Seneca tribe of American Indians. The red men, true to the instincts and habits of their race, migrated farther westward when the white man, influenced by the discovery of the oil-wells, began to settle among them. It is scarcely five years since this migration took place, yet within that comparatively brief space of time the face of nature has undergone a thorough transformation. The forest-growth of ages has disappeared, and populous cities and villages occupy its site. The solitary creeks and inlets, then known only to the enthusiastic sportsman have been roughly bridged over, their shores, have been lined with wliarves, and their waters are covered with every description of strangelooking craft that can be made to float and carry a cargo of oil; and where, five years ago, solitude reigned almost supreme, a wild, eager activity abounds, that may be sought for in vain beyond the limits of the new oil-diggings of Petrolia.

Very strange the scene appears to the traveller who has just irrived at toe oil-diggings from New York, or the eastern coast of Pennsylvania. He has passed through some of the most beautiful scenery to be found in the United States in course of his journey. The slackening speed of the train warns him that he is drawing near a station. The bell rings, the whistle screams, and the train is stopped. He alights from the cars upon a platform built of rough, dirty, discolored boards, an inch deep in tenacious, slimy, foul-smelling mud, and crowded with rough, ragged, mud-bespattered men, some just arrived from other “oil cities,” others about to take their departure. He passes from

the station and finds himself on a muddy road strewn with rubbish of every description. Occasionally the greasy monotony of glime is relieved by a string of rough boulders thrown into the mud to serve as stepping-stones to those who want to cross the road. By-and-by, as he draws near the city, the scene is varied by the presence of egg-boxes, sardine tins, broken bottles, refuse meat and vegetables, ashes, bones, and dilapidated carts and waggons ; and amidst these and every possible kind of garbage he enters into a long, winding street, which constitutes the city proper. The street is built on a mud-flat, between the river and the high steep bluffs; and along this narrow strip are depdts, wharves, stores, hotels, eating-saloons, whisky-shops, banks, etc., all built of rough boards, and all struggling for pre-eminence, without any regard to regularity or convenience. Here is a whisky-shop in which men are smoking and drinking, and next to it a pumping-well which fills the air with inflammatory gas. Yet, though the words “ No Smoking ” are roughly chalked on the greasy boards surrounding the well, and though smoking in the vicinity of the wells is extremely dangerous, men will smoke, regardless of the too probable consequences. Next comes a short interval of side-walk, where the lumber-path, if not above the mud, is at least somewhat above the water and oil; then, again, pumpingwells, with their tanks filled with petroleum ; and, beyond these, men hewing and blasting away the cliffs to make room for houses over the dirty waste, or others running houses up on piles above the creek ; or fastening walls and roofs and ceilings together with iron rods, to enable the frail tenements to withstand the dreadful and unequal strain of the dangerous floods that so frequently arise. Then appears, be! ween a. group of oil-wells and a stagnant pool, a photograph shanty ; then barges moored in the mud, and eating-saloons, where the charges are three dollars (twelve shillings) a day, and where not even the all-potent oil is taken in exchange for money. Higher up the street the different kinds of stores may be known at once by the samples of ragged clothing thrown into the mud outside; for no one here buys new clothes while he has any that will hold together, but buys a coat at one place, boots at another, and so forth, throwing the ragged garment he has been wearing into the road. The upper end of the city is' almost indescribable; but if the reader can imagine how the lowest districts of London would look if wooden shanties were substituted for houses, the shanties interspersed with machinery and pumping oil-wells, the whole partly burnt, and more or less damaged by floods, and the atmosphere reeking with petroleum gas, he will form some idea of “ Oil City.” And a description of one of the cities will serve equally well for almost any other in the oil-regions. The way of life has fallen into its roughest forms in Petrolia, yet only as regards outward seeming ; for in all that relates to good order, and the security of life and property, the resident is as safe as he would be iu London. A squalor surrounds everything, Only the squalor is a mere superficial aspect. The teeming population, all ragged, muddy, and greasy —wearing nothing, except their stout jack-boots, that would be thought sufficiently decent for a scarecrow in England — appear poverty-stricken, but are not-so in reality. No one lives amid this sea of oil but those who are making money, and all know that the oldest tatters are good enough for the filth amid which they dwell. Men think of oil, talk of oil, dream of oil; the smell and taste of oil predominate in all they eat and drink ; they breathe an atmosphere of oil-gas, and the clamour of “ He—ile —ile ” rings in one’s ears from daylight until midnight. Though the above description will, as we have said, apply to most of the cities of the oil-regions, Pithole City —one of the most recently built — possesses attributes peculiar to itself. The approach to the city is over a corduroy-road —a kind of road very common in the Western and Southern States, and which is simply a passage made over a marsh, or through a forest, where no regular road can be constructed. It consists of a mere disjointed litter of branches and trees, amid which—though ] artially concealed —rises a stubble of sharp brushwood points, over which the horses frequently stumble, cutting their feet to pieces, and sometimes seriously, and even fatally injuring both themselves and their riders. The special correspondent of the Times, writing from Pithole City, says, “Everything here is so utterly unlike what we of the Old World have been accustomed to see, that it is impossible to give a description that can resemble the place, and quite impossible to institute a comparison that will parallel it. Pithole is, in fact, like nothing but itself, even in Petrolia, where all is strange. “ There are no derricks here, but, splashing down the hill to the first street, one gets perfectly confounded by the din of saws and hammers; for everything is being built, or, having been built in a hurry some month or six weeks ago, is already in process of muchneeded repair. On one side is a little row of important agencies, or offices of companies, where the rate of prices makes Wall Street vibrate, though the buildings are mere hovels. Then come long rows of really good houses, with piazzas running round each floor. Here, on one side, is a large timber building belonging to an equestrian circus, with a gaudy banner announcing that its first benefit was given towards the funds in aid of the Pithole church! Then a large hotel, in which each room, as soon as it is half-finished, pays its cost in a week. Then come the stores, the contents of which, as in other cities, may be known by what is lettered outside. “ Such a scene as this —such a wide-spread, well-laidout, mixed town of contradictions, where a fine store is jostled by a dirty stable or still dirtier lodging-house, where the telegraph-posts, more necessary than derricks, are represented by pine-trees cut short in the middle of the mud, that is to say, the road —

any one can imagine. He has only to people it with the muddiest of populations, with overladen teams crowding the side-walks, and with muddy men who congregate about with note-books in their hands, copying down returns of wells, prices of stocks, and amounts for which interests are to be sold, and then he will have Pithole City before him. “ For the benefit of future travellers, however, I may state that there are two good hotels here —the Morey Farm and the Chase House—where the sleeping accommodations are both good and clean. It is true that the beds and pillows of each are popularly and very naturally supposed to be stuffed with * bass-wood feathers,’ that is to say, with chips of the hardest timber to be found here; yet it is astonishing how soft even ‘ bass-wood feathers ’ become to those who have had hard riding, or rather climbing, through these wild tracks, and who reach the hotels at midnight, it may be after ten or twelve hours in the saddle without food or rest.” (To be continued.)