'The lightnings, barbed, red with wrath,
Sent from the quiver of Omnipotence,
Cross and recross the fiery gloom, and burn
Into the centre!--burn without, within,
And help the native fires which God awoke,
And kindled with the fury of His wrath.'

But this was when thousands of barrels of petroleum had been stored up
in vats, and when the combustible fluid was spouting from the wells at
the rate of many hundred barrels per day. Before the present deep wells
were bored, oil was not produced in sufficient quantities to cause such
a conflagration, and there was never seen upon the creek a stratum of
the fluid of such consistency as to be inflammable.

The remains of the once powerful confederacy of Indians known as the Six
Nations still linger in Western Pennsylvania, in a region not very
remote from Oil Creek, but they can throw no light upon the origin of
these pits. In regard to their history, they can give no more
information than they can concerning the mounds and fortifications,
ruined castles, and dismantled cities, that tell us of a once glorious
past, of a mysterious decadence, and of the utter vanity of all earthly
glory.

There are men still living in the oil valley, who were on terms of
familiar intimacy with Cornplanter, a celebrated chief of the Seneca
tribe of Indians--the last of a noble and heroic line of chieftains that
had borne sway from the Canadas to the Ohio River, and who was living at
the time of the French occupation. But in reciting his own deeds and
memories, and those of his fathers, who had gone to the silent hunting