My apologies to all here as I lied last episode and said that this would be the last in the Rockefeller series.

Turns out I have one more that follows, but it's worth it as the very final show puts the period on the rise of Rockefeller in a big way.

And I'll have it published with Cat-like Quickness, and then we'll be moving into the proper 2017 lineup, which, in my personal opinion, is pretty stacked.

So without further preamble. And the There are many stories about John D Rockefeller's first visit to the oil fields in Western Pennsylvania.

Most of them fabricated and embellished as his status and legend grew.

But there is one that most Rockefeller historians agree on

actually happened the way it was told.

Now Rockefeller's nature mandated that he know as much as possible about any subject

that he was interested or involved in, and this desire for knowledge was even more

intense when the subject included any element of money.

So it was expected early on that if he was going to be in the oil business, then he would

want to see the very place where the oil was coming from.

The early oil boom towns were how you might imagine them to be.

They were dirty and very grimy places with quickly built makeshift hotels and shoddy housing structures all lining the dusty streets.

Author Ron Chernau gives a hell of a description of a place called Oil Creek, and Oil Creek was the name given to the area in Western Pennsylvania that was an early epicenter of all the oil action.

Churnow writes that the place was a quote,

satanic new world bequeathed by the oil boom,

an idyllic valley blackened with derricks and tanks, engine houses and ramshackle

huts thickly crowded together in a crazy quilt-like pattern." And you heard the word Derek in there. A Derek is what most people think of

when they think of an oil field, even if they don't know it. Derek's are the tall towers that

you see littering all oil fields and they stand over the oil well itself and they hold the drilling equipment.

And of course in these boom towns there were questionable characters with grungy beards and

...