"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.' Bess was the beautiful little mare he rode and immediately interest was centered on the horse whom her owner said drank champagne. Bess, moreover, was the only sober one of the outfit some hours later."

John W. Steele, his real name, disputed the truth of some of these stories, but as in The Social Network, it's not really the facts that matter here. Coal Oil Johnny was a legend and like all legends, he became a stand-in for a constellation of people, things, ideas, feelings and morals -- in this case, about oil wealth and how it works.

Oil made common people rich beyond their wildest dreams. They did some crazy things with that wealth as the whole region got whipped into a frenzy. People spilled out of the oil regions crazed.

"Other misguided beings from the oil regions of Pennsylvania were scattered about the country doing foolish things, and many of their performances were afterwards credited to me," Steele himself wrote in his autobiography. "But as I had played the fool in so many directions, it was not strange that this was so, as possibly I was the 'king-bee' of the oil region spendthrifts."

And why wouldn't they buy crazy things? There was something about oil money that was slippery and dangerous and exciting. And besides, it was free! You could pump money out of the petroleum pools underneath land had been nearly worthless before.

"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.

And yet now we've forgotten this important peak oil parable. American crude production has dwindled to about 55% of its early '70s peak -- and the International Energy Agency thinks more than half of global production will come offshore by 2015. The time when striking oil required little more than some gumption is long over. The first oil well in America came from the hard work of a couple of blacksmiths with the backing of some investors. Now, we build offshore platforms, drag them miles out into the ocean, and pin them to the seafloor, so we can grind through thousands of feet of sediment to the oil pools beneath them. It's not the same playing field or the same sport.