Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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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.