Oil Scouts – Oil Patch Detectives
Once called night riders of the hemlocks, petroleum sleuths separated oil well fact from fiction.
In the hard winter of 1888, 37-year-old oil scout Justus C. McMullen succumbed to pneumonia — contracted while investigating oil production from a well in densely wooded hills near Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
McMullen, publisher of the Bradford “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a journalist and oilfield detective.
