Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/193

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
STUDIES PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE
133

can carry a train from New York to the Pacific Coast and back to New York without refueling. Of course the expected railroad development in the oil line cannot take place during the war time, when the American oil reserves are being drawn down two million barrels a month. Nevertheless, oil-burning locomotives are operating in twenty-one States on fifty-three roads, and on thirty-two thousand miles of road, and consuming forty-two million barrels of oil per annum.

STUDIES PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

It is not only oil in the future and the man in the future that interest Doheny, but the oil of the past, the man of the past, and the animal and mineral life of the past.

Five years ago Doheny and Canfield used to note deposits of bones in asphalt about eight miles out from Los Angeles, whence tons of asphalt had been taken for road making. "What a fool rancher to lose so many sheep in tar beds," they said; "why did n't he fence out the sheep?" Then somebody noted that there was not a sheep bone in the lot. In came the scientists to solve the riddle.

Now bones of the elephant, the ground sloth,