Two Years in Oregon

by Wallis Nash

So seriously did Mr. Villard feel the impending danger that it is no secret in Oregon that a confidential agent was dispatched by him to Scotland, to endeavor to put the Scotch investors out of conceit with their property, and, failing that, he attempted to secure some of their stock, so as to gain a footing inside their camp. But there also he failed.

THE "BLIND POOL."Shortly before these pages were written, occurred the episode of what is known in financial circles in America as "the blind pool." Mr. Villard caused it to be known among his circle of followers that he desired the use of eight million dollars. According to statements made on his authority, he not only secured it, but in all fifteen millions were offered him. Quietly and secretly he used the eight millions in buying up stock of the Northern Pacific Railroad in the New York market, nor did he show his hand until he had thus secured twenty-seven millions par value of the stock of that road. When his great gun was thus loaded, he discharged it full at the head of Mr. Billings, the president of the Northern Pacific, and those directors who had loyally coöperated with him in the reorganization of the company and the redemption of its securities from the chaos into which they had fallen following the Jay Cooke failure. And the invader boldly claimed that he had secured the "control" of that company too, and proposed to oust the president, to install a representative of the "blind pool."

But an unexpected check was met. It seems that part of the reconstituted stock of the company, amounting to eighteen million dollars, was as yet in the treasury of the company, but was the property of divers persons who had coöperated in or assented to the reconstruction. This being issued, as Mr. Billings and his friends claim, in fulfillment of engagements long since entered into, displaced the center of gravity, and caused it to incline heavily toward the Billings section. A vociferous outcry was of course heard; the courts were appealed to; and the result of what promises to be a long and costly litigation remains to be seen.

Even without the entrance on the field of the new forces I am about to describe, the position of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company appears to be a very perilous one.

Under the chieftainship of Mr. Villard, who was no novice at the art of playing with railroad companies as counters in the game of "beggar-my-neighbor," a vast amount of Eastern capital was taken up by the aid of the enormous profits earned by the previously existing Oregon Steamship and Oregon Steam Navigation Company. Then followed naturally an era of really delusive prosperity, while the expenditure of this capital in substituting the new lamps of costly railroads for the magical old lamps of stern-wheel steamboats was going on.

But, in order to secure this capital, it was necessary to publish to the world the enormous profits the earlier companies were making. The effects were twofold and immediate. One was to open the eyes of the farmers of Oregon to the fact that they were paying for the transport to market of their crops sums utterly disproportionate to the cost and risk of the services rendered. And thus it was certain that ere long measures would be taken in the Legislature of Oregon, similar in purport to those adopted in other States, to check and curb the power of discrimination, which was the engine used to force the traffic on to the boats and trains of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. The measure to that end introduced in the session of the Legislature of 1880 was, it is true, defeated by the strenuous efforts of the company, aided by their Portland friends. But that success was dearly bought, and the process was so patent as to awaken the farmers, with whom the real power dwells, in a fashion that will soon be felt.

YAQUINA BAY.The other result, equally inevitable, was to call into active life plans, long in preparation, for constructing an east and west line across the State, relying on Yaquina Bay as the outport, and on the trade of the Willamette Valley as the mainstay of the road.

But the enterprise had other features to recommend it. The Willamette Valley and Coast Railroad Company had been originated four or five years back by the farmers of the valley to construct a railroad between Corvallis and Yaquina Bay. It had obtained a charter from the Legislature giving it authority to extend its line across the State to the eastern boundary, at a point directly en route to Boisé City, Idaho.

This had been long ago marked out as the probable limit where connection either with a branch from the Union Pacific Railroad, or with some other road pushing westward to the ocean, might be made.

The Willamette Valley and Coast Railroad received in its charter from the State immunity from taxation for twenty years, and also a grant of all the rich tide and overflowed lands in Benton County, amounting to probably upward of one hundred thousand acres.