The End of Country (6 page)

Fredonia did have one characteristic that set it apart, though. Here and there, in the woods or along the creeks around town, there were small fissures in the ground where strange flammable vapors escaped from the earth.

The people around Fredonia had long known of the existence of
the mysterious vapors. As far back as the early seventeenth century, French trappers, busily working to extirpate the beavers and the pine martens and the other fur-bearing creatures in those forested hills and valleys, had stumbled across a number of places where gas spewed from the rocks or from the creek beds. But neither the trappers nor the nineteenth-century English-speaking settlers who followed them had any idea that the stuff might turn out to be of practical value. To them, it was a source of amusement, a natural magic trick, but not much else.

In the early 1820s, for instance, according to one local story, a little girl out gathering chestnuts along Canadaway Creek with her father was frightened to tears by a bear; her father, unable to comfort her any other way, waded out into a familiar spot in the creek, built a chimney out of stones, and set fire to it.

To a great degree, the little girl’s experience was typical of the way humans had always dealt with gas. As far back as recorded history can peer, and all over the world, there are tales of people encountering strange wisps rising up from the ground, sometimes burning for no reason at all. In fact, three thousand years before this pioneer father set fire to Canadaway Creek to soothe his child, ancient Greeks had been trekking toward what is now believed to have been a fissure exuding natural gas on Mount Parnassus around which they had constructed a temple for the Oracle of Delphi. In fact, the Greek word
psyche
, signifying the animating essence of the human soul, and their word for gas share a common root. Some scholars now believe it’s possible that the burning bush of the Book of Exodus was in fact an ignited natural gas deposit.

Not everyone was dazzled by the stuff, however. Some saw a more practical use for it. By 500
B.C.E.
, the Chinese had found a way to harvest and harness small amounts of natural gas. To get to it, the ancient Chinese developed what has come to be known as
cable tool drilling
, a crude but effective technique that has remained fundamentally unchanged for millennia. Most of us, if we think of drills at all, equate them with the household power tools we use or the high-speed dentist drills we dread, precise and civilized devices of finely forged steel spinning at high enough speed to focus all that energy into a minuscule point to create a discrete puncture. The cable tool drill was nothing at all like that. It is to that refined and cultivated modern drill
what a cannonball is to laser beam. It was in effect a kind of brutal, giant, whirling pig-iron battle-ax. It was hoisted to the top of a large scaffold by a battery of gears and cams—in those early days, the gears were turned by hand, and later by engines of various sorts—and when it reached the top it would plummet, spinning furiously as it fell, gaining enough force to shatter the rocks and dirt beneath it, with enough energy left over to churn through the earth a few more feet before starting the whole process again. In other words, it wasn’t designed to gently urge the earth to part with its riches. It was designed to punish her for having the audacity to think she could resist. It was far better than digging by hand, but it was still a time-consuming process. Some wells, reported to have reached a depth of three thousand feet, took generations to complete.

It’s staggering to think that for all the time and work it took to get to the gas, the gas wasn’t really what the Chinese were after. To them, gas was simply a means to an end, a way of getting what they really wanted: salt. Once the gas was freed, these early drillers collected it and moved it through rudimentary pipelines made out of bamboo to nearby saltwater deposits where the gas would fuel fires beneath huge cauldrons to boil away the water and leave the salt behind.

Given all that effort for such a small return, it’s easy to see why it took a while, a few thousand years in fact, before the idea of using natural gas for anything other than the amusement of children or the foundation of a religion really caught on.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t the occasional visionary who saw the commercial potential of gas as a fuel. As far back as the late eighteenth century in Britain, a dirty-burning and inefficient gas manufactured from coal was in limited use, and by 1816, that same manufactured gas was being used to fuel lamps in Baltimore.

But it wasn’t until about 1825 in Fredonia that the local gunsmith, William Hart, struck on the idea of tapping into the deposits of cleaner-burning natural gas around Fredonia. He wasn’t trying to get rich. Compared to his neighbors, he was already pretty prosperous, having made quite a reputation for himself as a skilled gunsmith and a bit of an innovator. He was one of the pioneers of a new technology that was revolutionizing the art of arms making at the time: the use of percussion caps, small, reliable charges that would make old flintlock
rifles obsolete and lead in time to the development of modern bullets and even more deadly modern firearms.

Hart’s life was hard, but not overly so. His house and workshop were, like the man himself, solid and well built, strong enough to withstand whatever the harsh local environment could churn up. That might have been enough for a lot of people back then. But not for Hart.

Hart was by all accounts a man of restless curiosity, and while few historians would suggest that he was immune to an interest in making money, it seems clear that he was the type who was always looking to test his wits against a new challenge.

The story goes that Hart stumbled across his greatest challenge one day while walking along Canadaway Creek. Like everybody else around there, the enterprising Hart was weary of the tedious work of collecting firewood. One day, he stopped and watched as a neighbor of his did the same thing the pioneer father had done: the man built a cairn out of creek stones, struck flint to steel, and set off a dancing column of flame. Hart had an epiphany. He figured that if the mysterious gas that so delighted the children could be harnessed and channeled, it could provide a steady, clean, reliable, and, above all, easy source of fuel for the villagers.

Before long, the pursuit of vapors became an obsession for him. Hart had observed the behavior of the gas, the way it sometimes collected in pools and pockets, and calculated that if he dug a few feet down into the earth near the creek, he might find a big enough pocket of gas to meet the town’s needs. It seemed to him that a cistern, a deep pit similar to the ones long used for collecting water, might work, and so he pressed a couple of other local men into joining him in digging a hole, using nothing more than picks and shovels, twenty-seven feet into the rocky ground. There is no official record of the project—back in those days, one didn’t need to secure a permit or file logbooks with the state—but it’s clear that Hart had undertaken a gargantuan task. The work was backbreaking—even today, with modern earth-moving equipment, it is no easy matter to dig through dozens of feet of unforgiving Appalachian rock—and Hart and his men were doing it with hand tools. It’s easy to imagine them down in that pit, grunting and panting, their eyes burning from the dirt and the dust and the
gathering gas, their linen shirts soaked with sweat and maybe the occasional droplet of blood from tiny wounds inflicted by flying flecks of stone, their arm and shoulder muscles twitching every time they lifted the awkward weight of their picks above their heads. That would be followed by an instant of relief, fleeting and taunting, as their picks fell, a relief erased the next instant by the sharp pain pulsing through the steel when the picks hit stone, a pain they could almost see coming as it coursed down the wooden handles of their tools and into every joint of their bodies from their necks to their knees. Even the sound would have been torture, the threatening hiss of the pick slashing through the air, giving them just enough warning to tighten all their muscles, and then the harsh shriek of metal on stone that would signal their immediate punishment for tensing and flinching. And underneath it all was the sense of danger. The deeper they dug, the more difficult it would become to catch a breath as the cistern slowly filled with gas. They would almost certainly have become light-headed and woozy, and that at the very moment when they most needed to keep their wits about them, because almost every swing of their picks would send up a spark, and if they miscalculated, if they dug too deep and the gas gathered too thickly before they were done, one of those errant sparks might just ignite an inferno. Woozy as they might have been, they had nothing to judge that by except their instincts.

But Hart and his friends persisted.

What would later be heralded as the nation’s first natural gas well was really nothing more than a barrel-sized hole in the ground with a makeshift wooden lid on top in the hopes that it would be enough to keep most of the gas from drifting off into the atmosphere, and a pipe to carry the gas away before it built up enough pressure to blow the lid off the barrel. Sure enough, gas gathered in the hole, plenty of it.

Hart’s next challenge was finding a way to transport it a mile or so to town. For that, he drew his inspiration, indirectly of course, from the ancient Chinese. It goes without saying that Hart was no scholar of ancient Eastern history. Even if there had been a library in Fredonia where he could have accessed books on archaic technology—and at the time, there wasn’t—the demands of daily survival would have allowed him no time to peruse them. But fortunately, just as with the guns that Hart made, the rough outlines of their ancient technology
had survived time and distance and were in daily use in and around Fredonia. It took Hart a couple of tries to get it right, but eventually he cobbled together a rustic and rudimentary wooden pipeline to deliver the gas. This was the same primitive technology that had been used for thousands of years to carry water, a hardwood version of the bamboo pipelines the Chinese had built nearly two thousand years before, a system that the locals still used to transport their drinking water to their troughs. Hart gathered about 150 feet of logs, hollowed them out, and, no doubt drawing from his gunsmithing skills, made them as airtight as possible, binding together the pieces of log pipe with rags and tar. He attached a jury-rigged hand pump to propel the gas, and soon he was able to provide enough gas to keep the lights burning at a few houses, two shops, and the mill.

The daily race against the sun had suddenly gotten significantly easier. It would take another four years before Fredonia’s first tentative steps toward energy independence—independence from the vagaries of nature, that is—would gain widespread publicity, and then only because of a chance visit by the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. The reports of his trip make clear just how far Fredonia had come in a few short months.

A year earlier, in 1824, as America was preparing to celebrate its golden anniversary, the U.S. Congress and President James Madison invited the revolutionary hero to the United States to take a long-awaited victory lap, a whirlwind tour that took Lafayette all over the growing nation he had helped establish. By 1825, his trip was winding down and he was scheduled to pass through Fredonia on his way to Buffalo. However, because of the erratic nature of transportation at the time, Lafayette didn’t arrive until after midnight, and the locals, wanting to greet Lafayette in a manner appropriate to his station, burned every lamp in the village to light his carriage’s way. Though the story has certainly been embroidered over the years, there is little doubt that several of those lights were fueled by Hart’s gas. Lafayette never publicly spoke about the miracle of natural gas, but the journalists who accompanied him did. According to published accounts of the visit, Lafayette marveled at how spectacularly bright the little village was on his arrival, and he was reported to have been even more amazed to be feted at a banquet cooked on a modified version of the same rudimentary gas ring that the Chinese had used to boil seawater.
It would be another three decades before gas stoves would gain any kind of widespread acceptance, but the dinner party in Fredonia was a start.

The raw power that Hart had harnessed from the earth had begun to transform Fredonia from a glorified hunting and gathering camp to a prosperous, civilized, and comparatively cosmopolitan place. That first primitive well he had drilled four years before Lafayette’s arrival proved reliable, and it provided enough fuel to keep the village lit for nearly thirty years. In time, another well was drilled, and that generated enough gas to light some two hundred homes. The town became a showplace of modern technology where the streets and homes were bathed in the steady, soft light of gas lamps and where people could cook their meals on the precise, predictable heat of gas-fired stoves. Businesses sprang up, and the locals even established an academy to school the children of the growing middle class of which Hart was now firmly a member.

For a time, Hart tried to play the role of successful burgher. He even went so far as to plant a spectacular garden, and the tinkerer in him built a small amusement park for local children along Canadaway Creek, not far from the site of his first well. One wonders whether he was trying with his amusement park to replace something that he had taken away: those curious vapors that so delighted the children had lost their magic. A mystery had become a common commodity.

But it was hard for a man like Hart, a pioneer to the core, to adjust to so predictable a life, and soon enough the addictive allure—not of the gas but of the hunt for it—grew too strong to resist. In the years that followed, Hart reportedly showed up all over the burgeoning energy fields of New York and Pennsylvania as an itinerant engineer, a prototype of the nomadic gas and oil field laborers called roustabouts, the drill hands known as roughnecks, who would follow his path through these hills almost two centuries later.