Civilian & Telegraph

CORY O'LANUS' EPISTLE.
CORY AT THE OIL REGIONS.
Hotel and things there-Elevated Real Estate.

Oil Regions, Pa.

Dear Eagle:-
I have reached the land of oil, having taken a safer route than the Erie. Pennsylvania is a good sized State and it takes some time to get here.

When you do get here you wish you hadn't come.

There is plenty of oil--and that is all, except lots of people.

I made for "Snaky Run," the most likely place for oil.

They call these places Runs, because everybody who is after oil runs here.

Every man you meet is the President Director or Engineer of a petroleum company.

The natives, who are white people, and resemble country folks, live by selling land and green horns.

They have a system in both transactions.

They double the price of land every morning. If you know anybody who has got a few vacant lots that he wants to sell, tell him to bring them out here.

The folks are so busy looking for oil they haven't time to build houses, and everybody is afraid to put up a house for fear that he might cover an oil well.

Consequently the Hotels are a little crowded.

The Muggins Hotel, where I put up, is much so.

Muggins, the proprietor is the most accommodating man you ever saw. A city railroad conductor isn't a circumstance to him. He has only got six beds in the house, but he is always ready to take in everybody.

He took me in.

Also two hundred more petroleum pilgrims.

The sleeping accommodations are various.

We got to bed by platoons.

When the first platoon gets asleep they are carefully taken out of bed and hung over a clothes line. The second platoon go through the same process until everybody is provided for.

Preferring to sleep alone, I slept on the mantel-piece, with the skuttle for a pillow.

As I observed, land is precious here.

I bought a lot, of ten inches by four, for three hundred thousand dollars, and commenced operations.

The next thing is to commence boring. You want a sharp bore. A public lecturor won't do. Neither will a skating gimblet. I took a brace-and-bit. and went in. Got down about seven hundred thousand feet into the bowels of the land, when I came to an impediment.

Found that I had struck the pre-Adamite rock. of the ossified strata of the Silurian formation.

This is geology, and you perhaps won't understand it, but I will explain it all in the paper to the Historical society I am about writing.

Got a candle and went down to see about it.

I found a big Megatherium about six hundred feet long, and nine hundred wide, in a capital state of preservation.

I got him out and shall send him on by express.

Went on boring through forty thousand feet of sandstone. Here encountered a strange smell of sulphur, which alarmed the native who sold me the land, and to ease his conscience he gave me half the money back, and wanted me to stop boring.

Told him I was bound to keep on until I struck oil, or came out on the other side of creation.

Bored on. Went through about sixty thousand feet more, when suddenly the brace and bit went in, and there was a grand report like that made by Butler's powder boat which didn't blow up Fort Fisher.

Things were slightly confused for a time.

A section of Pennsylvania went up, and I went with it. I guess I must have come down again, as the next idea I had, was finding myself comfortably hung over the clothes line at the Muggins Hotel.

An investigation into the matter showed that I had struck through to a gas factory in China, which had exploded at both ends of the bore, killing half a million Chinese.

The casualties on our side were confined to one native and a small dog.

The Megatherium had also disappeared;--probably scared off by the explosion.

I haven't given up yet. The folks here are very encouraging; they will stick to a man as long as he has got a cent left, and I never knew Muggins to turn a man out of his hotel who had the means to pay his bill.

A kind hearted chap offered me another piece of land, the size of a stove-plate, within a mile and a half of a seven hundred barrel well, for the reasonable figure of a half a million and two-thirds of the oil.

I concluded that boring for oil is not so profitable as bleeding the public. I shall start an oil company on more liberal terms than any yet offered.

I shall be prepared to guarantee anything.

The capital will be a million dollars, divided into two million shares at fifty cents each.

Dividends of two hundred per cent, will be paid weekly, in addition to which each subscriber will be entitled to a season ticket for Lapigan's Ball, a new hat, a farm in Minnesota, and a ton of coal at market prices.

The "Scaly Run" Petroleum Company will be the biggest thing on oil in the market.

I am coming on to arrange the business as soon as my friends remit funds enough to pay my way back.

Yours oleaginously,
Corry O'Lanus.