The problem for my father now was to earn money to take us back to Iowa,
for my mother to continue her patient waiting. For a dozen years before
her marriage she had taught in district schools in Erie County, as well
as in a private school of an aunt in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a
good teacher, but she was married! She must stay with her family then
until her husband had a home ready for her; so ruled my grandmother,
chock-full as she was of the best and severest New England rules for
training girls to be ladies. You might live in a log house. You were
reminded loftily that many of the “best families” had done that while
“settling the country,” but you must “never forget who you are!”
“Remember that your father is a McCullough of an ancient and honored
Scotch clan, his mother a Raleigh of Sir Walter’s family, that I am a
Seabury, my great-uncle the first Episcopal Bishop in the United States,
my mother a Welles, her father on Washington’s staff.” It was a litany
her four daughters all had to learn!

Exciting employment waited my father. For six or seven years before his
marriage, when he was earning his way through the Academy of Jamestown,
New York, he spent his summers running a fleet of three or more
flatboats of merchandise to be delivered at trading points on the
Allegheny and the Ohio River—always as far south as Louisville,
sometimes even up the Mississippi. “Captain Tarbell,” his small and
jolly crew called him. The River was the chief highway of a great
country. To its waters came the pioneer and trader, the teacher, the
preacher, the scientist, the prophet, as well as every species of
gambler, charlatan, speculator, swindler, cutthroat. My father’s stories
of what he saw were among the joys of my childhood: a great fleet of
steamboats burning at Pittsburgh, a hanging, river churches and
preachers and show boats, children who never knew other homes than a
boat, towns, cities, and what he loved best of all—nights floating
quietly down the great Ohio, the moon above. Not strange that after
those cruel months of working his way back to us he should have seized
this opportunity again to take charge of his Jamestown friend’s river
enterprise.

The trip went well, and at the end of August, 1859, he turned back,
money in his pocket to take us to Iowa. But as he journeyed eastward he
was met everywhere by excitement. A man had drilled a well near a lumber
settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania—Titusville it was called—drilled
for oil and found it, quantities of it. My father, like most men who
traveled up and down the Allegheny and Ohio in those days, was familiar
with crude petroleum. He had used it to grease creaking machinery and,
too, as a medicine, a general cure-all, Seneca oil; used it for the
colds, the fever and ague, the weak lungs which had afflicted him from
boyhood. He knew, too, that there were those who believed that if rock
oil, as it was called, could be found in sufficient quantities it would
make a better light than the coal and whale oils then in common use. The
well near Titusville producing twenty-five to one hundred barrels a
day—nobody knew how much—proved that if other reservoirs or veins could
be opened by such drilling there would be oil to light the world.

Rumors were exciting and grew in the telling. The nearer he came to Erie
County, the bigger the well. He met men on foot and horseback making
their way in. Something to look into before he started back to Iowa. He
looked into it, not merely at Titusville with its first well, but down
the stream on which the first well stood and where other wells were
already drilling. Oil Creek, it was called. What if they continued to
get oil? my father asked himself. Where would they put it? They would
need tanks, tanks in numbers. He believed he could build one that would
hold five hundred or more barrels. He said as much to the owner of a
well drilling down the creek near the mouth of a tributary called Cherry
Run. “Show me a model that won’t leak, and I’ll give you an order.” He
lost no time in making his model and got his order.

Here was a chance for a business if oil continued to be found, a
business with more money in it than he had ever dreamed of making.
Moreover, he knew all the elements of that business, had had experience
in handling them. Tank building called for his trade, that of the
joiner. Iowa could wait.

By the summer of 1860 he had his shop going at the mouth of Cherry Run
near the well for which he had received his first order. The shop
running, he built what was to be my mother’s first home of her own, the
one for which with infinite confidence and infinite pain she had been
waiting since her marriage four years and a half before.

It was in October of 1860 that my father drove his little family over
the Allegheny foothills some forty miles. There were two of us children
now, for in July of 1860 my brother William Walter Tarbell, named from
his two grandfathers, had been born. Close beside his shop father had
built a shanty. It had a living room with an alcove, a family bedroom
with trundle beds for us children, and a kitchen. A covered passage led
into the shop, which was soon to be the joy of my life for here were
great piles of long odorous curly pine shavings into which to roll, to
take naps, to trim my gown, and in which to search day in and day out
for the longest, the curliest.

But these shavings and my delight in them were a later discovery. My
first reaction to my new surroundings was one of acute dislike. It
aroused me to a revolt which is the first thing I am sure I remember
about my life—the birth in me of conscious experience. This revolt did
not come from natural depravity; on the contrary it was a natural and
righteous protest against having the life and home I had known, and
which I loved, taken away without explanation and a new scene, a new set
of rules which I did not like, suddenly imposed.