The Marriage of the Dead and Capitalism at the Altar of Petroleum

Spiritualism and Capitalism certainly make for odd bedfellows.

In the United States, both commercial oil interests and spiritualism were born at almost the same time and geographically close to one another. Both dealt with the unseen — the spirits of the departed and the rich resource buried deep in the ground.

The first “commercial” oil wells were those drilled by Drake in 1859 in Titusville Pennsylvania. Previously oil and gas were merely by-products of wells being drilled for salt brine, and it was the financial success of the Drake well that led to increased interest in drilling for oil alone. Thus began the quest to seek out productive wells and no longer rely on finding oil through surface “seepage” as had been done up to that point.

And here begins the odd story of Abraham “Abram” James, also known as “The Wizard of Oil”. His story goes back to the Spiritualist Movement that saw its origins in New York State around 1840.

Spiritualism is not precisely a religion, but more of a social-religious movement where its adherents believe that consciousness persists after death and those who have passed may be contacted by the living through mediums. Abraham “Abram” James was one of those mediums.

Abram was born on June 16, 1827, in Chester, Pennsylvania. He was a twin (his sibling likely died in infancy) and one of ten children born to Abraham James, a potter (1795-1862) and Phoebe Hunt (1800-1844). The family were devout Christians — Quakers, in fact. Still, it seems that Abram’s mother was an early influence in the development of his esoteric beliefs. According to several biographers of Abram, he believed his mother Phoebe continued to nurture his spiritual gifts even after her death.

Phoebe died when Abram was only 17 years old. An interesting person in her own right, she was a devout Quaker, yet she was gifted with the “second sight”. Biographers of Abram, writing in the late 1800s, all comment on how he was born a Gemini, under the influence of two planets (Jupiter and Venus), was himself a twin, and his mother had twinned sight — truly indicative of his “dual” existence, straddling both the physical and the spiritual worlds. Abram had a fine pedigree of both worlds: Christian and Spiritualist.

At age 25, Abram married a local Pennsylvania woman named Martha Ann Jones in 1852, and together they had four children (twin girls in1853 and two boys in 1857), all born in Chester, excepting the youngest son who was born somewhere in Illinois. How fitting a continuation to his backstory of innate spiritual powers — a twin who had twins himself!

Abram flits in and out of the historical records. He is rumoured to have worked on the railways, eventually making his way to California and to the Pacific Northwest. By 1863-1864 he was in Chicago, involved with the Spirits’ Well.

The Spirits’ Well was a long-established artesian well. When Abram arrived on the scene, he met with a lawyer, George A. Shufeldt, an investor in the well and with the Rock Oil Company. Shufeldt was also a fervent believer in Spiritualism and was intrigued by Abram's claims to clairvoyant powers and by the complex geological drawings he had made at the direction of spirits.

Shufeldt wrote a history of the well where he tells how Abram used “pencils …placed between the fingers and the hand moves with a rapidity which troubles the eye to follow, each pencil doing a separate part of the work at the same time, and it makes no difference whether it be in the dark or light; indeed his best pictures are made in a dark room. I have frequently bandaged his eyes and held a paper between his face and his picture, and it made no difference…”

As an interesting side note, Abram was inspired by these same spirits to draw a life-sized portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Abram directed Shufeldt to a specific spot in Chicago where he insisted that oil would be found, in addition to a “stream of the best purest and healthiest water known anywhere”. They went to the location at Chicago and Western Avenue where Abram fell into a trance and pointed to the spot where drilling should begin. Sure enough, water began flowing, but, sadly, no oil.

Despite the lack of oil, the Spirits' Well is an intriguing study in the dynamic of Spiritualism and Industry of the time. Commenting on all the different persons involved, Adaline Buffum, editor of News from the Spirit World, wrote that the drilling “was protected by various bands of spirits: mechanical, scientific, geological, financial, and political; also, ancient bands of Hebrews and Chaldeans, and philosophers, prophets, poets, and heralds from the most remote sphere, with Roger Bacon, of the thirteenth century, as sentinel, to drive away all the myriads, and myriads of spiritual and material substances that lurked about, not necessary to the enterprise of boring for oil, and the whole was surrounded by a wisdom sphere.”

Not only did the Spirits pick the location; they were also pivotal in warding off the dangers of the work.

Despite all the otherworldly support, the Rock Oil Company only struck water. At this point the spirits and their associated mediums disagreed on how best to proceed. Of the 24 entities consulted, half wanted to keep drilling for oil and the other half advised just staying with the water.

Another — competing — medium, a Mrs. Genung, had been channeling the spirit of Tecumseh who declared that Abram’s location was incorrect. According to Genung, Tecumseh had more spiritual currency than Abram’s unnamed guides. She, furthermore, and despite Abram's effeminacy (more on this later), stated that drilling for oil was “no boy’s play”. Despite her prominence at the time, Shufeldt was uninterested in documenting female participation in the well and affirmed that oil mediums should be men.

One wonders what the rough and tumble oilmen of the time thought of Abram. His biographers tended to somewhat “feminize” the man. They used words such as “soft”, “mild”, “gentle”, and mention his “weak constitution”. They relate that he had been forced by “material circumstances” to work on the railroad and perform unsuitable physical labour. He is described as “unostentatious”, physically weak, and that health issues made him go to California. It was there he worked as a railroad conductor but found the demands of the job too taxing. His “spare slender figure” was unsuitable for manual labour; his biographers insisted that this physique only emphasized his spiritual gifts.

Other historians of spiritualism have noted that young women were more commonly practitioners of mediumship, but occasionally “effeminate and gentle men” might have a vocation as well.

Despite his lack of formal and scientific education, he was well regarded by the oil investors. They saw the combination of spiritual clarity and some industrial experience as a potentially winning hand. Safety was also important: he had a reputation of being a “safe” railway conductor because of both his conscientiousness and his ability to “sense” danger through the other realm. This would be useful in the oil fields.

His later success in finding oil underground had nothing to do with any geological education. He claimed that it was both Native American spiritual guides and the deceased oilmen who pointed the way. When Abram died, the New York Times enthused:

“Presently the earth opened, and an immense cavern yawned before them. Into this [Abram] James was led by the spirit. They journeyed down into the earth for a long distance, and finally the spirit brought James to the margin of a lake of petroleum of unknown depth and extent. Speechless with amazement, James gazed on that apparently boundless store of wealth for a few minutes, when the spirit led him back to the surface. The mouth of the cavern closed, and the spirit vanished.”

Returning to Abram’s previous partial failure, another biographer (Peebles), explained that the “correspondence” between the spiritual and physical could only result in the discovery of water. He maintained that humans are predominantly made of water, and so a medium would have a natural “sympathy” toward that element. The spirits would, according to Peebles, provide Abram with a “second lesson” in oil, and that this would happen in Pennsylvania.

Even the esteemed publication “Scientific American” had faith that Spiritualism would succeed if conjoined with Capitalism.

Undeterred by Tecumseh and by his partial failure in Chicago, Abram ended up in the Pennsylvania oil region, arriving in Pennsylvania on Hallowe’en, October 31, 1866. Now relatively famous for his involvement in the Spirits’ Well, he could hold primacy over some other unusual oil sourcing practitioners; people such as oil dowsers who used Y-shaped rods to find a prospective drilling point, or “oil smellers” who would literally sniff the ground.

Abram later explained that when he rolled into town with four friends, “I was violently influenced and controlled by a power outside myself. Forced from the buggy over the fence, and becoming entirely unconscious, I was moved some distance across the fields, and made to stop upon a certain location, where my controlling influence said to those present, pointing towards the earth: ‘Here is an immense amount of petroleum.’”

Timing, as they say, is everything. The region had been experiencing a financial crisis with a string of bank failures in 1867. At the time, the cost of sinking a well was about $3300 and only about half of the wells actually produced. Of those productive wells, the average “life span” was roughly six months. Hundreds of wells were drilled, and hundreds produced nothing but debt. The industry was young, not particularly scientific, and was willing to grasp at any notion. They would follow hunches, set up near surface “seepages” or follow the pseudo-science of “creekology” (think how Jed Clampett in the Beverley Hillbillies struck it rich while “shooting at some food”). Dowsers (also known as “doodlebugs”) were employed alongside the occasional geologist, neither being more respected than the other. To a certain degree, those working in oil believed that scientists were “godless quacks”; better to put your faith in those touched by Christianity and the spirit world.

Despite the overall suspicion of geologists and scientists, dowsers began to make their equipment more “technological”. Initially they had been using a forked twig (ideally from a witch-hazel tree) and would walk about waiting for it to point downward. Later they added bells, whistles, and dials to a large black box. The dowser would cover himself and the box with a cloth shroud. Then several men would hoist the man and his device aloft, wandering around the prospective oil field, awaiting the ringing and whistling of success.

Things were moving towards the metaphysical, and Abram was there at precisely the right time.

In August 1867 he continued to have dreams and visions of oil. Those who believed in the precise location Abram had signaled commenced drilling and reached 700 feet (about 213 metres) by December — there was nothing there other than sand. Investors were getting skittish, and in January 1868, after another 100 feet (about 30 metres) was drilled there was still no sign of oil. Investors began to murmur that it was a dreaded “dry hole”.

Oh, ye of little faith… On the morning of February 1st, at a depth of 835 feet (about 255 metres), Abram, in a trance and communicating with his spirits, found oil — and lots of it.

The Harmonial No. 1 is the first well bearing a name associated with his Spiritualist belief system. It produced an average of 100 barrels of oil per day — an impressive amount at the time. More than 350 wells were drilled in the vicinity, all happily producing a tidy profit and driving up the land values to the delight of those leasing or selling their properties.

Did Abram make much money? The records are ambiguous on this point. The oil boom in the area collapsed in 1869. The classic rags to riches to rags legends prevailed. He made money but lost it all in poor investments. Or had made massive amounts of money but ended up spending it all on philanthropic works. He purchased land nearby, drilled a well and lost a fortune. A New York Times obituary said he left an estate worth $500,000. But then that same obituary misreported his birthdate and other verifiable details.

Who were his spirits?

According to some accounts, he channeled a Seneca leader called “Mountain Bear”. Some said that when Abram communed with the Native Americans, he was a man possessed and spoke in a “stream of Indian talk”. He also was said to channel a beautiful female called “Lalah”. Abram spoke of seeing “coruscations”, a type of atmospheric glimmer where oil would be found and which could only be seen by very few.

In Pennsylvania Abram was successful. But when he left the area, his Seneca guides failed him.

Today, when he is remembered at all, Abram is a footnote, an embarrassment, an anomaly, a curiosity, a joke. But he was there, and despite his elusive history, he made his mark on the world.

His mother must have been proud.

Lyrics to the music pictured above:

There's `Ketchum & Cheatum'
And `Lure em & Beatum',
And `Swindle um', all in a row;
Then `Coax em & Lead em,
And `Leech em & Bleed em,'
And `Guzzle em Sink em & Co

(CHORUS:)
Oh! oh!
Oily firms pay, in Pensylvani-i-a
Jest so.

There's `Gull em & Skinner,'
And `Gammon & Sinner;'
`R. Askal & Oily & Son.'
With `Sponge um & Fleece um,'
And `Strip em & Grease em,'
And `Take em in Brothers & Run.'

(CHORUS)

There's `Watch em & Nab em,'
And `Knock em & Grab em,'
And `Lather & Shave em well,' too;
There's `Force em & Tie em,'
And `Pump em & Dry em,'
And `Wheedle & Soap em in view.'

(CHORUS)

There's `Pare em & Core em,'
And `Grind em & Bore em,'
And `Pinchum good, Scrape um & Friend,'
With `Done um & Brown um,'
And `Finish & Drown um,'
And thus I might go to the end.