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

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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.