This plan, however, met with too much opposition and was abandoned. During the following year a new plan, backed by both the American and the German interests, secured the strong cooperation and endorsement of J. P. Morgan and Company. This was the first instance of Morgan's entry into railroad reorganization in the West. During the previous few years he had been increasing his reputation as a reorganizer of Eastern railroad properties, and by this time he had successfully organized or was rehabilitating the Erie, the Reading, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Southern, and the Hocking Valley systems. But he had kept clear of the far Western field and had definitely refused to reorganize the Union Pacific on the ground that its territory was too sparsely settled and that there was little hope for its future, especially as its partial control by the United States Government made any reorganization extremely difficult. The new plan for the Northern Pacific was carried out with no regard to the Hill interests: the old stockholders were heavily assessed; all bondholders were forced to make sacrifices; the Wisconsin Central lines were entirely eliminated and separately reorganized; and the Oregon lines were dissociated from the Northern Pacific and afterwards returned to the control of the new Union Pacific.
While the new Northern Pacific as reorganized in 1898 came directly under Morgan's control and was immediately classed as a Morgan property, it did not remain exclusively such for very long. In the promotion and development of the Great Northern system, Hill had hitherto maintained an independent position so far as banking alliances were concerned, but he now began to develop closer relations with the Morgans and became heavily interested in the First National Bank of New York, an institution which for many years had been more or less directly identified with the Morgan interests. On more than one occasion thereafter the banking firm of J. P. Morgan and Company acted as financial agent for the Great Northern.
Soon after the reorganization of the Northern Pacific, it became known that Hill had acquired an important interest in the property, and as time went on this interest was substantially increased. Within a year or two the Northern Pacific began to be classed as one of the Hill lines. With a substantial Hill representation on the board of directors and a managerial policy which was clearly inspired by Hill, the company now entered upon a new stage in its career.
The outstanding dramatic event in the story of the modern Northern Pacific was the famous corner which occurred in the spring of 1901 as a result of a contest between the Hill and the Harriman interests for the control of the property. The details of this operation, which sent the price of Northern Pacific stock up to $1000 a share and precipitated a stock-market panic, form part of the story of the Harriman lines. The contest resulted in the formation of the Northern Securities Company, a corporation of $400,000,000 capital, devised as a holding company under the joint control of the Hill and Harriman interests, for the purpose of retaining a majority of the stocks of the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern.
The Hill interests, jointly with the Morgan control of the Northern Pacific, had been quietly accumulating stock in the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and Harriman felt that there was grave danger to the Union Pacific in this move, as the Burlington had already penetrated into the Union Pacific territory and might at any time start to build through to the coast its own line parallel to the Union Pacific. Harriman consequently began to buy up Northern Pacific stock in the open market and thus, together with the efforts of the Hill and Morgan people to retain and strengthen their control, brought about the corner.
The Northern Securities Company was designed to harmonize all interests and to keep the control of the Burlington property jointly in the hands of Harriman and Hill. But as the result of a suit under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, this combination was declared illegal, and in 1904 the company was dissolved. The final outcome of the situation was that the Northern Pacific, sharing with the Great Northern the joint control of the Burlington lines, was left indisputably in the hands of the Hill-Morgan group, where it has ever since remained. These three great railroad systems, the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, constituting nearly twenty thousand miles of railroad, have been known ever since as Hill lines.
Since the dramatic days of the Harriman-Hill contest the history of the Northern Pacific system has been simply a striking reflection of the growth in population and wealth of the great Northwest. The States through which it operates have grown with astounding rapidity during the past two decades; small cities have spread into great centers of manufacture and trade; hundreds of smaller towns have sprung up; natural resources of untold value have been developed. In the meanwhile the Northern Pacific has forged ahead in its earnings and profits, and the stock of the road has come to be known as one of the highest class of investment issues. Although new competition appeared, in both the local and the through business of the company—notably by the extension of the St. Paul system largely through Northern Pacific territory to the Puget Sound region—the superior modern business management of James J. Hill, backed by the strong resources of the Morgan banking interests, made the Northern Pacific one of the standard railroad systems of America.
CHAPTER VIII. BUILDING ALONG THE SANTA FE TRAIL
The Santa Fe Route, or the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, which has in modern times developed into one of the largest and most profitable railroad systems in this country, was projected long before the idea of a transcontinental line to the Pacific coast had taken full possession of men's minds. As early as 1858 a plan was worked out for the construction of a line of about forty miles within the State of Kansas to connect what were then the obscure and unimportant townships of Atchison and Topeka. At that time not a mile of railroad had been built in Kansas or in any Territory west of that State, except on the Pacific coast, to which there had been an enormous immigration occasioned by the wonderful discovery of gold.