The Golden Flood

MR. ASBURY is an observer and recorder of some of the more violent episodes and localities in the America of yesterday. This volume is subtitled ‘An informal history of America’s first oil field,’ and it concerns the early developments of the famous Pennsylvania petroleum area in the sixties. The history is well, if informally, told, and the reader can acquire much useful information about the nature of oil in and out of the ground. But what attracts Mr. Asbury is not so much the history of petroleum and its by-products as it is the effect of sudden wealth on men and women and on their extempore communities. He describes with his customary gusto the gaudy, bawdy antics of the blue-chip gamblers who were the early oilmen. He carries his story up and down the various newly found fields and the fly-by-night, wideopen towns which mushroomed around them. Men lived like pigs but they floated on a ‘golden flood.’ Thugs, crooks, prostitutes, followed the tide in the customary rhythm of Golcundus everywhere. Gradually the industry became respectable. It attracted the pious interests of John D. Rockefeller and his brethren. It put on the Prince Albert of Baptist big business, and Mr. Asbury lost interest in its history.

R. E. D.