The petroleum once ignited, it is very hard to extinguish the flames; and Mr. Williams told of being one of a company of men who labored twenty-four hours in vain to subdue a burning well. They tried water, which only aggravated the trouble; they tried covering the well with earth, but the gas permeated the whole mass and blazed up more defiantly than ever; they covered the mound of earth with a carpet, (paid for at the value of cloth of gold,) and the carpet with wet sand, but a bad smell of burned wool was the only result. Finally, some incipient Bonaparte hit upon the expedient of dividing the Allies, who together defied mankind, and, bringing a huge oil-tank, inverted it over the sand, the carpet, the earth, and the well, by this time one blazing mass. Fire thus cut off from Air succumbed, and the battle was over.
"There was no one hurt that time," pursued Friend Williams, in a tone of airy reminiscence; "but mostly at our fires there'll be two or three people burned up, and more women than men, I've noticed. Either it's their clothes, or they get scared and don't look out for themselves. Now there was the Widow McClintock owned that farm above here. She was worth her hundreds of thousands of dollars, but she _would_ put kerosene on her fire to make it burn. So one day it caught, and she caught, and in half an hour there was no such thing as Widow McClintock on Oil Creek. Still all the women keep right on pouring kerosene into their stoves, and every little while one of them goes after the Widow.
"Then there was a woman who sent to the refinery for a pail of alkali to clean her floor. The man thought he'd get benzine instead; and just as he got into the house, the fire from his pipe dropped into it, and the whole shanty was in a blaze before the poor woman knew what had happened. The stupid fool that was to blame got off, but the woman burned up.
"Then there was a woman whose house was afire, and she would rush back, after she had been dragged out, to look for her pet teacups, and _she_ was burned up. And so they go."
Sometimes also the tanks of crude oil take fire, and these conflagrations are said to present a splendid spectacle,--the resinous parts of the oil burning with a fierce deep-red flame and sending up volumes of smoke, through which are emitted lightning-like flashes exploding the ignited gas.