iumph by a great monopoly would not be less
fascinating than that of any war of conquest.

The greatest monopoly of ancient or modern times, the Standard Oil
Company, had its rise in Ohio, and there is no more impressive chapter
in the annals of our country than its history forms. In fact, everything
concerning the discovery of the great underground lakes of petroleum,
and subterranean spaces of natural gas, which suddenly enriched certain
sections of the state, and then with their exhaustion left them to lapse
into ruin, is picturesque and dramatic. Many tales are told of poor
farmers who struck oil on their lands, and sold them for sums greater
than they had ever dreamed of, and then went out into the world to waste
their wealth in a few years of wild riot, or sank down and led idle
and useless lives in sight of the fields they had once tilled. Similar
stories are told of the regions where natural gas has been found, and
some day, when the chronicles of Findlay, in Hancock County are fully
written we shall know all these romantic episodes in their grotesqueness
and their pathos. It had been known from the earliest settlement of the
country that the natural gas underlay the town, and fifty years ago two
small wells were sunk. But it was not until after the discovery of the
natural gas at Pittsburg that the people of Findlay began to think of
turning their treasure to account. Then, in the year 1884, the first
great well was bored, and sent into the startled air a shaft of flame
sixty feet high. Other wells were sunk, and the greatest of all, the
famous Karg well, shook its flag of fire against the sky with a roar
like that of Niagara, and made its voice heard fifteen miles away. It
was winter when it was first lighted, but it made summer for two hundred
yards around. The snow melted, the grass and wild flowers sprang up,
and the crickets came and trilled in the grateful warmth. By a sad irony
this source of future wealth became the refuge of homeless men, and
within its genial circuit many tramps slept sweetly, secure from the
winter beyond.

Findlay grew from five thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants in a
year. The municipality wisely possessed itself of the most important
wells, and supplied the gas so cheaply and abundantly to the people that
no company could rival it. In June, 1887, it celebrated the anniversary
of the first use of the natural gas in the industrial arts, and for
three days the town was given o