Edwin Drake strikes oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania, using a steam-powered drill inside a cased well hole, creating the world's first commercially successful oil well. This breakthrough initiates the modern petroleum industry, quickly rendering whale oil obsolete for illumination and establishing petroleum as a critical global resource. Boomtowns like Oil City spring up overnight across western Pennsylvania, characterized by rapid fortunes, devastating fires, and intense environmental degradation. The rush establishes the corporate extraction models that lead to the rise of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil monopoly.

The black oil boom disrupts traditional American transcendentalist views of nature, prompting a literary shift toward industrial realism. Local 'oil poets' write vernacular ballads detailing the greasy, dangerous life of the drillers and 'wildcatters.' Nationally, the boom inspires poems that look with anxiety upon the earth being punctured for wealth, establishing a new ecological trope in American literature that contrasts the pristine wilderness with the black, industrial slick of modern energy extraction.