Our grandest picnic excursions in those days were to Chautauqua Lake, a charming sheet of water only some fifty miles from home. Near the head of the lake lay an old Chautauqua County town, Mayville; at its foot, Jamestown where my father for several years had been a student in the Academy, and from which in vacations he had gone on his annual trips down the Ohio. Loaded with big baskets of lunch, we took an early train to Mayville, changed there to a little white steamer: zigzagged the length of the lake, twenty or so miles, stopping at point after point. We ate our lunch en route, and at Jamestown went uptown to drink a bottle of “pop.” And then came the slow return home, where we arrived after dark exhausted by pleasure.
Three or four miles from Mayville on the west side of the lake jutted a wooded promontory—Fair Point—the site in those days of a Methodist camp meeting; and here we sometimes stopped for the day. We never liked it so well as going to Jamestown; neither did father.
2 I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST
Five years went by in the house on the hill, and then in 1870 when I was thirteen I found myself in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in a new house my father had built. How characteristic of the instability of the oil towns of that day, as well as of the frugality of my father, was this house! From the beginning of the Pithole excitement he had, as I have said, made money—more than he could ever have dreamed, I fancy; and then about 1869 practically without warning the bottom fell out, as the vernacular of the region put it. The end shut up my father’s shops there, but it also gave us the makings of a home. In that rapid development, only four years long, a town of some twenty thousand had grown up with several big hotels—among them, one called the Bonta House. It had features which delighted my father—long French windows, really fine iron brackets supporting its verandahs, handsome woodwork. The Bonta House was said to have cost $60,000, but its owners were glad to take the $600 father offered when the town “blew up.” He paid the money, tore down the building, loaded its iron brackets and fine doors and windows, mouldings and all, and I suppose much of its timber, onto wagons and carted it ten miles away to Titusville where, out of it, he built the house which was our home for many years.
Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from the mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a substantial settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small but sturdy with a few families who had made money chiefly in lumber, owning good homes, carefully guarding the order and decency of the place.
The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of fortune seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback, wagon. The nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and the roads and fields leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by the heavy hauling, its streets at times impassable with mud.
The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the bigger it grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of all this activity, as well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish food and shelter for caravans of strangers, shops for their trades, offices for speculators and brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases, for oil producers, surveyors, and draftsmen—all the factors of the big business organization necessary to develop the industry. In 1862 the overflow was doubled by the arrival of a railroad with a connection sixteen miles away with the East and West. The disbanding of the Army in June of 1865 brought a new rush—men still in uniform, their rifles and knapsacks on their backs. Most of this fresh inflow was bound to the scene of the latest excitement, Pithole.
Stampeded though she was, Titusville refused to give up her idea of what a town should be. She kept a kind of order, waged a steady fight on pickpockets, drunkards, wantons; and in this she was backed by the growing number of men and women who, having found their chance for fortune in oil, wanted a town fit for their families. After churches, the schools were receiving the most attention. It was the Titusville schools which had determined my father and mother to make the town their permanent home.
But school did not play a serious part in my scheme of things at the start. I went because I was sent, and had no interest in what went on. I was thirteen, but I had never been in a crowded room before. In a small private school the teacher had been my friend. Here I was not conscious my teacher recognized my existence. I soon became a truant; but the competent ruler of that schoolroom knew more than I realized. She was able to spot a truant, and one day when I turned up after an unexplainable absence she suddenly turned on me and read me a scathing lecture. I cannot remember that I was ashamed or humiliated, only amazed, but something in me asserted itself. I suppose that here a decent respect for the opinions of mankind was born; at least I became on the instant a model pupil.
A few months later I passed into high school; and when at the end of the year the grades were averaged at a ceremony where everybody was present I stood at the head of the honor roll. Nobody could have been more surprised. I had not been working for the honor roll: I had simply been doing what they expected me to do as I understood it, and here I was at the top. I remember I felt very serious about it. Having made the top once, I knew what would be expected of me. I couldn’t let my father and mother or my teachers down, so I continued to learn my lessons. It was a good deal like being good at a game. I liked to work out the mathematics and translations—good puzzles, but that they had any relation to my life I was unconscious. And then suddenly, among these puzzles I was set to solve, I found in certain textbooks the sesame which was to free my curiosity, stir desires to know, set me working on my own to find out more than these books had to offer. The texts which did all this for me were a series I suspect a modern teacher might laugh at—Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry.
Here I was suddenly on a ground which meant something to me. From childhood, plants, insects, stones were what I saw when I went abroad, what I brought home to press, to put into bottles, to “litter up the house.” The hills about Rouseville were rich in treasures for such a collector, but nobody had ever taught me more than their common names. I had never realized that they were subjects for study, like Latin and geometry and rhetoric and other such unmeaning tasks. They were too fascinating. But here my pleasure became my duty. School suddenly became exciting. Now I could justify my tramps before breakfast on the hills, justify my “collections,” and soon I knew what I was to be—a scientist. Life was beginning to be very good, for what I liked best to do had a reason. No doubt this uplift was helped by the general cheerfulness of the family under our new conditions of life.
Things were going well in father’s business; there was ease such as we had never known, luxuries we had never heard of. Our first Christmas in the new home was celebrated lavishly. Far away was that first Christmas in the shanty on the flats when there was nothing but nuts and candy and my mother and father promising, “Just wait, just wait, the day will come.” The day had come—a gorgeous Christmas tree, a velvet cloak, _and_ a fur coat for my mother. I haven’t the least idea what there was for the rest of us, but those coats were an epoch in my life—my first notion of elegance.
This family blossoming was characteristic of the town. Titusville was gay, confident of its future. It was spending money on schools and churches, was building an Opera House where Janauschek soon was to play, Christine Nilsson to sing. More and more fine homes were going up. Its main street had been graded and worked until fine afternoons, winter and summer, it was cleared by four o’clock for the trotting of the fast horses the rich were importing. When New Year’s Day came every woman received—wine, cakes, salads, cold meats on the table—every man went calling. That is, Titusville was taking on metropolitan airs, led by a few citizens who knew New York and its ways, even spoke familiarly of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, both of whom naturally enough had their eye on us. Did not the Erie road from which they at the moment were filling their pockets regard oil as one of its most profitable freights? We were grain for their mill.
There was reason for confidence. In the dozen years since the first well was drilled the Oil Creek Valley had yielded nearly thirty-three million barrels of crude oil. Producing, transporting, refining, marketing, exporting, and by-products had been developed into an organized industry which was now believed to have a splendid future.