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La Force went as if on ordinary business, but he proved one of the most active, daring, and mischief-making of those anomalous agents employed by the French among the Indian tribes. It is probable that he was at the bottom of many of the perplexities experienced by Washington at Venango, and now travelled with him for the prosecution of his wiles.
Now he would be glad to exchange all his interest in Venango County for one share in the Christian's prospect of heaven. Hopeless, he falls back in his last sickness. His delirium is filled with senseless talk about "percentages" and "commissions" and "buyer, sixty days," and "stocks up," and "stocks down." He thinks that the physician who feels his pulse is trying to steal his "board book."
It is true that oil wells are successfully worked on the banks of the Alleghany for some distance above and below the mouth of Oil Creek: still the county of Venango has monopolized almost the whole number of oil-producing wells in this region.
Though you should be successful in leaving a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the sunken money cannot be pumped up again, prove to them that it was eternally decreed that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the most orthodox and heavenly style.
After leaving Venango on his return, he found the horses so weak that, to arrive the sooner, he left them and their drivers in charge of Vanbraam and pushed forward on foot, accompanied by Gist alone. Each was wrapped to the throat in an Indian "matchcoat," with a gun in his hand and a pack at his back.
Here he delivered the governor's letter, and while M. de St. Pierre wrote a vague and polite answer, he sketched the fort and informed himself in regard to the military condition of the post. Then came another struggle over the Indians, and finally Washington got off with them once more, and worked his way back to Venango.
At the same time, M. de Contrecour, with a thousand men and eighteen pieces of cannon, arrived in three hundred canoes from Venango, a fort they had raised on the banks of the Ohio, and reduced by surprise a British fort which the Virginians had built on the forks of the Monangahela, that runs into the same river.
From the fact that some of these pits have been cribbed with timber bearing marks of the axe in its adjustment, many have supposed that their construction was due to the French, who at one time occupied, to a certain extent, the Venango oil region. But this theory is scarcely plausible.
A small tent or two, and such few things as they would need on the journey, were strapped on the backs of horses. They pushed through the woods in a northwestwardly direction, and at last reached a place called Venango, not very far from where Pittsburg now stands.
The oil wells of Venango County alone produced, during the first year of their operation, more oil than the entire product of the whale fisheries during the most favorable and prosperous year in their history. At the present time, after a lapse of little more than two years, the daily product of the wells on Oil Creek alone is computed to be over six thousand barrels.
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