Boom Town Vocabulary

Under the heading “CRIMINAL ELEMENT and DISREPUTABLE CHARACTERS”, the following “professions” and names are a condensation of a much larger list.

Some of the hoodlums had an entrepreneurial persuasion (ladies too) and opened degraded dives which hosted crooked games and served almost poisoness liquor. Brothel-keepers composed a special category.

The tough ladies and the business ladies had their own descriptive names or situations and a special vocabulay grew around them. There is one that caught the writer’s attention for its sheer graphic punch:
!!! CAST-OFF STRUMPET !!!

Among the WOMEN (these weren’t cooks or waitresses):

The names (or nicknames) of a few of the TOUGHS, card players and brothel-keepers (Asbury, 1942) are:

There are many more. Names of regular gang members are too numerous to mention.

Washington Street, the main drag in Petroleum Centre on Oil Creek in 1868. The notorious Centre was already turning quiet.

The names of BARS, GAMBLING DENS, BROTHELS and the like didn’t lack for color while some were even elegant in name (most were not). Sometimes just the name of the owner or keeper was all that was needed (everybody knew where the back street was and all establishments were usually built in a row there). When the word elegant was used, it probably meant that there was a throw rug on the floor.

CONCERT SALOONS were numerous, but they offered only bad music, if that. They were back street joints and lowest of the low, but you wouldn‘t know it from the fancy names:

Petroleum Centre. The railroad was built into Petroleum Centre in 1866. The Central House was the best hotel in town during the boom. It burned. Its location is indicated today by a cellar. Mather photo.

According to Asbury (1942) the following OIL TOWNS in Northwest Pennsylvania joined the already impressive ranks of the wild ones in the 1860’s-70’s and on (however, many became ghosts in a short time, *).

The above names of participants, their "calling" and the places where they performed give the reader a view of this subculture. Fortunately Oil Creek Valley and the rest of oildom was full of legitimate oilmen who either had venture capital or rolled up their shirt sleeves and drilled for others. They made the boom and the industry. The bums didn’t leave a monument other than some of their episodes became oft-told stories, and by that route they came to be in the oil literature, deserving or not.