could be made from petroleum, they secured
some land in Pennsylvania that seemed promising and set to work to
dig a well. But the more they dug, the more the loose dirt fell in
upon them. Fortunately for the company, the superintendent had brains,
and he thought out a way to get the better of the crumbling soil. He
simply drove down an iron pipe to the sandstone which contained the
oil, and set his borer at work within the pipe. One morning he found
that the oil had gushed in nearly to the top of the well. He had
"struck oil."

This was about ten years after the rush to California for gold, and
now that this cheaper and quicker method of making a well had been
invented, there was almost as much of a rush to Pennsylvania for oil.
With every penny that they could beg or borrow, people from the East
hurried to the westward to buy or lease a piece of land in the hope of
making their fortunes. A song of the day had for its refrain,--

"Stocks par, stocks up,
Then on the wane;
Everybody's troubled with
Oil on the brain."

In the course of a year or two, the first "gusher" was discovered. The
workmen had drilled down some four or five hundred feet and were
working away peacefully, when a furious stream of oil burst forth
which hurled the tools high up into the air. Hundreds of barrels
gushed out every day, and soon other gushers were discovered. The most
famous one in the world is at Lakeview, California. For months it
produced fifty thousand barrels of oil a day, and threw it up three
hundred and fifty feet into the air in a black column, spraying the
country with oil for a mile around. The oil flowed away in a river,
and for a time no one could plan any way to stop it or store it. At
last, however, a mammoth tank was built around the well and made firm
with stones and bags of earth. This was soon full of oil; and with all
this vast weight of oil pressing down upon it, the stream could not
rise more than a few feet above the surface. Just why oil should come
out with such force, the geologists are not quite certain; but it is
thought to result from a pressure of gas upon the sandstone containing
it. The flow almost always becomes less and less, and after a time the
most generous well has to be pumped.

[Illustration: A CALIFORNIA OIL FIELD

For scenery, one should not go to an oil field. Looks, smell, and oil
alike are unpleasant, but every oil derrick covers a fortune and helps
to make our machine