The trip went well, and at the end of August, 1859, he turned back, money in his pocket to take us to Iowa. But as he journeyed eastward he was met everywhere by excitement. A man had drilled a well near a lumber settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania—Titusville it was called—drilled for oil and found it, quantities of it. My father, like most men who traveled up and down the Allegheny and Ohio in those days, was familiar with crude petroleum. He had used it to grease creaking machinery and, too, as a medicine, a general cure-all, Seneca oil; used it for the colds, the fever and ague, the weak lungs which had afflicted him from boyhood. He knew, too, that there were those who believed that if rock oil, as it was called, could be found in sufficient quantities it would make a better light than the coal and whale oils then in common use. The well near Titusville producing twenty-five to one hundred barrels a day—nobody knew how much—proved that if other reservoirs or veins could be opened by such drilling there would be oil to light the world.
Rumors were exciting and grew in the telling. The nearer he came to Erie County, the bigger the well. He met men on foot and horseback making their way in. Something to look into before he started back to Iowa. He looked into it, not merely at Titusville with its first well, but down the stream on which the first well stood and where other wells were already drilling. Oil Creek, it was called. What if they continued to get oil? my father asked himself. Where would they put it? They would need tanks, tanks in numbers. He believed he could build one that would hold five hundred or more barrels. He said as much to the owner of a well drilling down the creek near the mouth of a tributary called Cherry Run. “Show me a model that won’t leak, and I’ll give you an order.” He lost no time in making his model and got his order.
Here was a chance for a business if oil continued to be found, a business with more money in it than he had ever dreamed of making. Moreover, he knew all the elements of that business, had had experience in handling them. Tank building called for his trade, that of the joiner. Iowa could wait.
By the summer of 1860 he had his shop going at the mouth of Cherry Run near the well for which he had received his first order. The shop running, he built what was to be my mother’s first home of her own, the one for which with infinite confidence and infinite pain she had been waiting since her marriage four years and a half before.
It was in October of 1860 that my father drove his little family over the Allegheny foothills some forty miles. There were two of us children now, for in July of 1860 my brother William Walter Tarbell, named from his two grandfathers, had been born. Close beside his shop father had built a shanty. It had a living room with an alcove, a family bedroom with trundle beds for us children, and a kitchen. A covered passage led into the shop, which was soon to be the joy of my life for here were great piles of long odorous curly pine shavings into which to roll, to take naps, to trim my gown, and in which to search day in and day out for the longest, the curliest.
But these shavings and my delight in them were a later discovery. My first reaction to my new surroundings was one of acute dislike. It aroused me to a revolt which is the first thing I am sure I remember about my life—the birth in me of conscious experience. This revolt did not come from natural depravity; on the contrary it was a natural and righteous protest against having the life and home I had known, and which I loved, taken away without explanation and a new scene, a new set of rules which I did not like, suddenly imposed.
My life in the log house had been full of joyous interests. There were turkeys and ducks and chickens, lambs and colts and calves, kittens and puppies—never could I be without playmates. There were trees and woods and flowers in summer—a great fireplace with popcorn and maple candy in winter, and I an only grandchild the center of it all. But what had I come to? As mother realized, a place of perils, a creek rushing wildly at the side of the house, great oil pits sunken in the earth not far away, a derrick inviting to adventurous climbing at the door. No wonder that warnings and scoldings and occasional switchings dogged my steps. Moreover, I was no longer the center of the circle: a baby filled her arms—“my” arms! A man still strange gave me orders and claimed her—“my” mother.
It was not to be endured, and so one November day just after my third birthday I announced I was going to leave. “Going back to Grandma.” “Very well,” my mother said. I knew the way the men went when they walked away from the shop, and I followed it, but not far. Across the valley in which we lived ran an embankment. To my young eyes it was as high as a mountain, and the nearer I came the higher it looked, the higher and blacker. And then suddenly as I came to its foot I realized that I had never been on the other side, that I did not know the way to Grandma’s. I knew I was beaten, and sat down to think it over. Never in all these years since have I faced defeat, known that I must retreat, that I have not been again that little figure with the black mountain in front of it, a little figure looking longingly at a shanty dim in the growing night but showing a light in the window.
Finally I turned slowly back to the house and sat down on the steps. It seemed a long time before the door opened and my mother in a surprised voice said:
“Why, Ida! I thought you had gone to Grandma’s.”
“I don’t know the way,” I said humbly.
“Very well. Come in and get your supper.”
Respect for my mother, her wisdom in dealing with hard situations, was born then. I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was to be accepted. Years later she told me of the unhappy hour she spent watching me go off so sturdily, to come back so droopingly, watching with tears running down her cheeks, but determined I must learn my lesson. It was a bit of wisdom she never ceased to practice. My mother always let me carry out my revolts, return when I would and no questions asked.
In the three years we spent in the shanty on the flats there was but one other episode that had for me the same self-revealing quality as this revolt. It was my first attempt to test by experiment. The brook which ran beside the house was rapid, noisy, in times of high water dangerous for children. Watching it, fascinated, I observed that some things floated on the surface, others dropped to the bottom. It set me to wondering what would happen to my little brother, then in dresses, if dropped in. I had to find out. There was a footbridge near the house, and one day when I supposed I was unobserved I led him onto it and dropped him in. His little skirts spread out and held him up. Fortunately at that moment his screams brought a near-by workman, and he was rescued. I suppose I was spanked; of that I remember nothing, only the peace of satisfied curiosity in the certainty that my brother belonged to the category of things which floated.
What I really remember of these early days concerns only my personal discoveries, discoveries of the kind of person I was, of the nature of things around me which stirred my curiosity. Whether a childish experience was deep enough to etch itself on my memory or I only know of it from hearing it told and retold, I always decide by this test: if I really remember it, the happening is set in a scene—a scene with a background, exits, entrances, and properties. I know I remember my revolt and defeat because I always see it as an act on a stage, every detail, every line clear.
Of the pregnant, bizarre, and often tragic development going on about me I remember nothing; yet the uncertainties and dangers of it were part of our daily fare.
Whether there was oil in the ground in sufficient quantities to justify the prodigious effort being made to find it, nobody could know. If not, the shop and shanty were a dead loss—another long delay on the road to Iowa. All that winter of 1860 and 1861 my father was asking himself that question; but in 1861 it was answered when up and down Oil Creek a succession of flowing wells came in, wells producing from three hundred to three thousand barrels a day—“fountain wells,” “gushers,” “spouters,” they called them from the great streams which rose straight into the air one to two hundred feet, to fall in an oily green-black spray over the surrounding landscape.
Deadly, dangerous, too, as the Oil Region learned to its sorrow by a disaster almost at the doorsteps of our Cherry Run home. It was the evening of April 17, 1861. The news of the Fall of Sumter had just reached the settlement, remote as it was from rail and telegraph connections, and all the men of the town had gathered after supper at one place or another to discuss the situation. What did it mean? What would the President do? My father was sitting on a cracker barrel in the one general store. As he and his friends talked a man ran in to tell the company that a fresh vein of oil had been struck in a well on the edge of the town. Its owner, Henry Rouse, had been drilling it deeper; the oil was spouting over the derrick. Great news for the community still uncertain as to the extent of its field. Great news for my father. It meant tanks. Everybody jumped to run to the well when the earth was rocked by a mighty explosion. A careless light had ignited the gas which had spread from the flowing oil until it had enveloped everything in the vicinity. Before my father reached the place nineteen men, among them his friend the well—owner Henry Rouse, had been burned to death. How many had escaped and in what condition, nobody knew.