Sort of a proto-J.R. Ewing crossed with Johnny Appleseed, Coal Oil Johnny was a folk hero/cautionary tale from America's first big oil boom (and, subsequently, first big oil bust). At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes about how the real-life John W. Steele made a fortune when oil was found under his Pennsylvania land in the 1860s—and how Steele then hemorrhaged so much of that cash, so fast, that his wastefulness and eventual return to poverty became the stuff of legend.
He even had a steed to match Bunyan's blue ox. She was a small horse named Bess, and she had fine tastes, too. Legend has it that one night in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Johnny rode her right into a bar on his way to a good time.
"He didn't know a soul but that didn't matter," the Perrysburg Journal of Ohio wrote more than 20 years later. "'I'm Johnny Steele. Close the doors and every one make a night of it with me. Give Bess a bottle of champagne to start with."
…"It was wealth from nowhere," said Brian Black, a historian at Pennsylvania State, who wrote the book Petrolia, about those early oil years. "Somebody like that was coming in without any opportunity or wealth and suddenly has a transforming moment. That's the magic and it transfers right through to the Beverly Hillbillies and the rest of the mythology."
And then the oil ran out, just a couple of decades after the first black gold came bubbling out of the underworld. The first oil region, like Coal Oil Johnny, ended up just as poor as it had been before the strike, even if the oil fat cats made a pretty penny.
"Coal Oil Johnny personifies what the whole country learned from the Pennsylvania oil boom," Black said.
The Atlantic: The Legend of Coal Oil Johnny, America's Great Forgotten Parable
