When the first real oil man, Edwin Drake made the first oil strike, and the stuff came gushing out of the ground, Black tells us that Vanity Fair ran a cartoon featuring gussied up whales at a gala celebration of the first oil well. We read: “As they danced and frolicked in celebration of the technological progress that had freed them, the whales knew the time had passed when the world’s need for illumination lay on their flukes. A good time had come at last.”

But Black takes us from the biological beast straight to the geological beast of the earth, which apparently does not give up her goods as easily as you might think. A contemporary observer of the world’s first well writes that “the earth seems to bleed like a mad ox, wrathfully and violently.”

Before 1859, people in crude-producing regions were familiar with oil, knew it quite well, in fact, as a kind of docile brown scum that sat atop streams. Native Americans soaked it up and used it for body decoration. Civil War soldiers bathed their aching bones in it. It was a cordial, an elixir — snake oil, perhaps, but no more fearsome than your average dose of resveratrol or gingko.

The drill transformed that oil, the kind that bubbled up,  into the kind that roared. The editor of the local rag, again:

We have no language at our command by which to convey to the minds of our readers any adequate idea of the agitated state at the time we saw [the well]. The gas from below was forcing up immense quantities of oil in a fearful manner and attended with noise that was terrifying…When the gas subsided for a few seconds, the oil rushed back down the pipe with a hollow, gurgling sound, so much resembling the struggle and suffocating breathings of a dying man, as to make one feel as though the earth were a huge giant seized with the pains of death and in its spasmodic efforts to retain a hold on life was throwing all nature into convulsion.

That’s quite a lot of language for an editor with no words. It’s like a bad Shakespearean death scene with Pennsylvania land as the lead. Early Gaia thinking.

Image: LOC, American Memory Collection, part of Westward by Sea: A Maritime Perspective on American Expansion, 1820-1890