Abstract

The history of the modern oil industry begins along Oil Creek in August 1859 when Edwin Drake and Billy Smith found petroleum at the bottom of their well. Over the next decade and a half, Petrolia, the name given to this region in northwest Pennsylvania, produced more oil than anywhere else on earth. In the process, Petrolia became a massive industrial site and a vivid cultural image. Understanding this profound dual transformation is the object of Brian Black's sensitively drawn portrait of the landscape of America's first oil boom.A landscape, according to Black, is a place where culture and nature meet, and in the 1860s a devastating crash occurred when the natural oil of Oil Creek met the commercial demand for lamp and machine oil. Oil Creek had been a quiet, lightly populated agricultural region whose sense of place was entirely self‐constructed by the local farmers. After Drake's discovery, the area became a place of unprecedented exploitation whose identity was hastily assembled by the thousands of outsiders that flooded the area looking for work, riches, or an exciting newspaper story. Petrolia soon became a mythic boom, a mania, a craze. Distant capitalists and recently arrived entrepreneurs painted fantastic pictures of endless and easy wealth. Oil became a prized commodity, and everything else—animals, plants, people, and even the creek itself—became expendable in a single‐minded market designed to pump as much oil as fast as possible. There seemed no legal, economic, or natural limitation to the exploitation—or to the boom mentality. Petrolia became the very embodiment of greed and speculation, instantaneous wealth and sudden failure. Its mores were as ephemeral as its transient population.All this is grist for Black's ethical mill, and he grinds it well, perhaps too relentlessly. There is no doubt that looking at the exploitation of oil from the obliteration of the wooded valleys, or the filth of boomtown streets, or the emptiness of ghost towns reveals a sacrificial landscape—an environment abused, wasted, ruined, and despoiled in pursuit of profit. Certainly Black is on firm ground when he ties what happened in Petrolia to what happened in Gilded Age America as a whole, but he may overstate the case when he argues that “industrial rationalization would never allow … humanitarianism to penetrate the utilitarian logic of Petrolia” .Was the logic of oil so ruthless and the motives of the Petrolians so shortsighted as to miss what was happening around them and what they were doing to themselves? They took photographs, after all. They criticized and complained endlessly about the mud, the floods, and the fires. Certain towns curbed land speculation, restricted development, and preserved a sense of community. And capitalists, by definition investors who try to reduce risk, worked to bring stability to petroleum production and prices. Black describes these valiant if sometimes vain efforts to restrain the oil rush. But taken together, they seem to suggest more of a struggle—communities versus companies, humanitarianism versus utilitarianism—than Black acknowledges.Many of those involved in the seeming chaos that was Petrolia wanted the oil industry to become a permanent, predictable branch of mining. This was especially true for the engineers, scientists, and other petroleum experts. To this end, Black provides a useful sketch of the technology of oil production along with a brief explanation of petroleum geology. He concludes, however, that none of these experts had much effect on the problems. “Science and technology were clearly tools of industry in Petrolia” .To an extent. In Black's account, the oil “industry” was a collective evil. Equal parts cultural and economic, it acts like a numberless, faceless mob, gripped by “oil on the brain” and motivated by an all‐pervasive ethic of progress and an insatiable drive to make money. It reduces to the sharp end of a rod used to bore through the earth for oil—environmentally insensitive and destructive. As an analytical device, however, “industry” is a blunt tool. Not all wells struck oil, not all companies manipulated knowledge and technique to their own purpose. Experts learned quite a bit and quite quickly about the habits of oil. The divining rod was not the most acceptable method of exploration . Again, there was more of a struggle—sci‐tech versus random wildcatting—than Black allows.The suggestion of situated struggles, however, does not detract from Black's larger theme. Petrolia was environmental hell. Black has rendered this nightmarish landscape into a powerful and at times passionate story about the physical changes to the land and its meaning . If there is a lesson to be found in Petrolia, it is that the modern oil industry is truly an American creation