A free railroad pass changed the planet

Around 1854 accounts tell of an unemployed railroad conductor and express agent named Edwin Drake who happened to be staying at the same hotel in Connecticut as an attorney looking to make a buck off so called “Seneca Oil”, a crude oil-based patent medicine being sold by hawkers since as early as 1792. The Seneca's are native americans that have occupied Pennsylvania since long before european settler occupation.

The attorney hired Drake in 1857 to visit Titusville, PA, a town on Oil Creek where people collected free flowing crude oil by damming the local creek. Apparently, Drake’s only qualification for this assignment was a free railroad pass remaining from his previous job.

When he got there his oil company boss gave him the phony title of Colonel despite having never being in the military so as to lend him more prestige in their nascent marketing efforts at selling the distilled oil. Apparently this trick works.

When Drake got frustrated with the inefficiency of being only able to skim about six gallons of oil a day off the dammed creek, he hired a salt well driller to help locate pockets of trapped oil. At a depth of 69½ feet they found their first black gold.

The rest is history. In 1859, Drake struck the first commercially productive oil well in the USA. It wasn’t a gusher, but it began the first great oil boom.

I suspect the residents of Titusville, thought they had found The Ultimate Answer to their dreams. Their answer was a non-renewable natural resource that took many millions of years to form that will be totally depleted in a geological blink of an eye.

The Seneca's had offerred a different answer to The Ultimate Question. The Senecas were perhaps the most sophisticated in all of the North-American Native cultures. With the exception of one tribe, they had adopted a democratic form of government after years of questionable leadership by Chiefs who had come into their positions out of lineage rather than virtue. "The Seneca women were in charge of elections, and decided who was to become tribal leader, Leaders usually held their posts for life, but could be removed if they became corrupt or proved to be incompetent; the Seneca political system also included a constitution, which is believed to have been the model for the American constitution." More.