USA > Washington > History of Washington the evergreen state : from early dawn to daylight with portraits and biographies Vol. II > Part 27
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Some tyrant's freak to favor or carve his costly grave. But modern engineering hath nobler work to do, No difficulty fearing, it tunnels mountains through. To bridge the foaming torrent or span the deep cañon,
Holding the highest warrant, it makes all means its own ;
To link the chains of commerce with brotherhood of man, Provide communications to aid the settler's plan,
Reducing miles to minutes, annihilating space, And utilizing powers that elevate our race. Compare the North Pacific, as it opens up the way To regions more prolific, with the pyramids to day.
The world should count such wonders the work of wasted toil, For use, gigantic blunders to burden Egypt's soil ; While modern art and science hath victories to show, That make with need alliance and strike uo idle blow."
-BREWERTON.
THE thought which we have woven into verse we will now render into prose as the most appropriate opening to the present chapter, the subject of which is a skeleton sketch of the incep- tion, birth, difficulties, progress, financial straits, natural obsta- cles, and final successful completion of that triumph of modern enterprise, industry, engineering genius and skill, the great Northern Pacific Railroad.
The pyramids are but enormous tombs ; thirty centuries of folly look down upon the gazer who contemplates their gigantic proportions. If they had any better purpose than to provide a
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magnificent sepulchre for the dead tyrants whose unhappy cap- tives constructed them, we have yet to make the discovery. And that which may be said of the pyramids is equally true of the numerous temples of the olden time ; their many-pillared aisles led but to altars of heathen worship, polluted by the sacri- fices of false and too often cruel gods. The ruined theatres whose vast proportions excite the wonder of to-day were but arenas where martyrs died and innocent blood flowed like water " to make a Roman holiday." Man gained nothing either in happiness, progress, or virtue from the structures thus painfully erected. Founded in ambition and destined to perpetuate memories far better forgotten, these massive piles rose to the sound of the lash and the moans of many a laboring slave. No man was the better for their building. In them the æsthetic and the beautiful grew ofttimes like some exquisite flower, root- ed and springing from the slime, out of the enforced labor of the captive hordes of whom we have spoken, torn from their distant homes by the cruelties of war, and doing the will of their cap- tors with hopeless hearts and weary hands. This, and this alone, was the sole result of the Old World's wonder-work, its worthless legacy to the New. Useless monuments, built by the suffering, planned by tyrants, erected to the memory of evil deeds and conquests, whose far-off echoes make humanity shud- der. Compare these elaborate failures with the magnificent work now to be considered-the achievement of a better and nobler age. The Northern Pacific Railroad was the child of Enterprise and Energy. Genius and Skill stood sponsors at its . birth. Capital and Labor nourished its infancy, and brought its feeble youth to a full and lusty manhood, till to-day the result of these combined efforts gives not only to our own land, but to the world at large, a blessing which figures cannot compute or reason justly estimate. What has it done for humanity or, rather, what has the Northern Pacific not done ? It has linked two oceans ; it has given birth to and sustained towns and cities that grew up beside its path ; it has populated the prairies and made waste places " to blossom as the rose ;" it has given and still affords remunerative employment to thousands ; it has opened up avenues of progress, removed obstacles, and found channels, hitherto unsuspected, through which culture, moral improvement, and educational advancement continue to flow ;
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it has pressed, like an invading army, the savage from the wilder- ness and forced him to take refuge in the arms of civilization. We repeat, then, that the pyramids, the Coliseum, the temples and forums of the past sink into insignificance where their adaptation to any need of humanity is concerned when compared with the good gifts of that mighty highway whose iron bands wed the metropolis of the Atlantic coast with the cities of Puget Sound.
And now permit us a word of retrospect. When the author, writing in 1852 the incidents of his eventful " Ride with Kit Carson" across the continent, made in the spring and summer of 1848, declared, in the words we are about to quote from one of his overland articles in Harper's Magazine, that a personal examination of the ground convinced him that the building of a railroad to the Pacific across the Rocky Mountains was practi- cable and would yet be done, he was recognized by the old fogy- ism of that day as a " crank," a victim to a mild form of mania, a harmless lunatic, perhaps, on the subject of a transcontinental route. He then wrote as follows-words that seem almost pro- phetic now, though then quite as uselessly enunciated as similar predictions made before our time by other tongues and abler advocates. The paragraphs selected are from the closing pages of the author's "Incidents of Travel in New Mexico," published in Harper's Magazine for April, 1854. They run thus :
." And now as we bid each other, for the present, good-by, let me choose for my 'finally ' that much-vexed topic, a railroad to the Pacific. Can it be built ? Will it pay ? Both simple and peculiarly American questions, which I shall answer in precisely the same manner that every practical man who has crossed the continent would reply to a similar query. Let us look at the thing fairly, and, to do so, begin with the dark side of the pic- ture. 'Can it be built ?' The obstacles to its accomplishment are immense. Huge mountains rear their rugged bulwarks as if to bar its progress ; precipitous cliffs and deep cañons are in its path. Overcome these difficulties, and you have yet to struggle with the shifting sands and uninhabitable wastes of the Great Basin. Hostile Indians are to be subdued, wells dug, or water brought from long distances to supply the hosts of laborers which so vast a work must necessarily employ. Such are a few of the popular arguments against its feasibility. But, though they may and do exist, does it therefore follow that they are
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insurmountable ? We shall hardly need workmen for the task when every day is bringing to our shores crowds of able-bodied emigrants, whose strong arms are seeking employment within our borders. Have we not engineers of the highest order of tal- ent ? Are we not, in this, the nineteenth century, endowed with the enterprise to begin and the energy to carry on this or any other reasonable undertaking ? In a word, do we lack the spirit whose cry is ' Go ahead ' ? I, for one, should be sorry to believe that any American-born man could be so far behind the age in which we live as to acknowledge that an impossibility can exist which Yankee ingenuity and its servant the steam engine are unable to triumph over. We may not live to witness its com- pletion. It may even be deferred until the springtime of our children's children, but the prophecy which hung upon my lips as our little band of wayworn voyageurs traversed with hasty steps the bases of those mighty sierras will yet be fulfilled, for I am confident that the 'iron horse ' will one day thunder upon his rapid flight through these far solitudes, now so wild and tenantless. It is, most undoubtedly, the great task of our day and generation. Let us, then, snatch the honor of being its first projectors ere ' Young America ' rises up to thrust aside the ‘ old fogyism ' of his fathers and plant the corner-stone of this great national work. ' Will it pay ' ? Need I answer this question ? Look at the countless sails which are whitening the boisterous seas of the stormy cape. Remember the multitudes who brave the pestilential miasmas of the Isthmus to reach the ' Eldorado ' of their hopes. Have the coasts of China and the Indian Seas no cargoes for our Atlantic ports ? Has the great country across which the Pacific Railroad would be a social, political, and Chris- tian bond of union no resources to be developed, no products to export ? Look at it in a military point of view. With such a facility we could, in case of need, concentrate an 'organized militia,' that strongest safeguard of a free republic, upon the shores of either ocean. A few days' notice would place 'the bone and sinew ' of the West beside the hardy fisherman of our Atlantic seaboard. We should then be almost entirely secure from invasion from without or dissension from within our terri- tory. Such a work would do more to weaken sectional preju- dices than the legislation of a century. Once more, I repeat, ' It will be done.' ""
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How commonplace and easy all this seems now, when not one alone, but many lines stretch out their far-reaching tenta- cles to grasp trade and stimulate business wherever their feelers are found, but it required no little independence of public opin- ion to express as decidedly as the author did in 1852 the senti- ments and opinions we have recalled. Still stranger would it seem to doubt it now, or, indeed, in this age of successful inven- tion and unprecedented progress, to discourage any scheme which involved the removal of natural obstacles, however appar- ently unconquerable and stupendous. And where did such bar- riers loom up more aggressively than in the proposed path of the Northern Pacific ? Its engineers must have felt, in thus violat- ing the sanctuaries of the primitive wilderness, so long sacred to solitude, where for centuries the wild beast and the savage had reigned supreme, that they were intruding on nature's own triply guarded reservation. Nor did she yield her ancient domain without a struggle. Her powers made alliance and fought bravely against the assaults of the railroad's most emi- nent engineers ; but all in vain ; the mountains interposed their barriers ; the eternal snows joined hands with fierce torrents and foaming cascades ; cañons and crevasses threw their abysses across its trail ; yet Science, directing Labor, never for a moment faltered or feared for the result. The work went on. Means were intelligently applied to gain their desired end till the difficulty of to-day became the triumph of to-morrow. The mountain passes were utilized or their fortresses of primitive and volcanic rock eluded or besieged ; the rivers were bridged and the gulches tresselled. Month by month the work went on, ever advancing to its successful termination.
And now, before entering upon its more particular history, let us consider the extent of territory it was compelled to traverse. The region which the Northern Pacific Railroad has already developed, or proposes by its branch lines to improve, embraces in whole or in part no less than eight of our largest States -- namely, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, or, at a rough estimate, one sixth of the area of the United States, the distance between the extreme eastern and western termini of the main line on Lake Superior and Puget Sound, Ashland, Wis., and Tacoma, Wash. (inclusive of 210 miles of railroad along the Columbia),
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being 2254 miles. By way of the Cascade branch of the North- ern Pacific it is 1961 miles. If this was the number of miles constructed and open to travel in 1886 (from which report we quote), six years ago, what must be its facilities to-day ? Con- nected with the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis by a lateral line of 136 miles in length, it has also other branches, including one to the National Yellowstone Park, representing 700 miles of track. Then, too, there are its many tributaries. What won- der, then, that this great highway, with its allied railroads, should have opened within the last few years to civilization and settlement some of the finest, though hitherto inaccessible, regions of the country-regions exceeded by no other part of the United States in their wealth of natural resources, possessed of all that amenity of climate and fertility of soil which, com- bined with beauty of situation, admirably fitted them to be occu- pied and enjoyed by the human race-a territory which has already become famous for the prodigality of its cereal produc- tions, the extent and variety of its mineral deposits, and the value of its magnificent timber lands, to say nothing of a diver-' sity of scenery, which rivals the glaciers of Switzerland and the wild forests of the rugged Hartz. It has made many a home easy of access hitherto deemed almost out of the world ; brought distant settlements into near neighborhood, and cities once re- garded as widely separated into the closer companionship of common interest and trade alliances.
More than half a century ago the subject of a trans-conti- nental road began to be agitated. Oregon, with her sister Terri- tories of the Far West, looked with eager eyes for some surer and more rapid mode of communication with the East as their best hope for ultimate wealth and development. The route to Puget Sound was favored, and in this respect anticipated its later rivals. It had its friends and propagandists even before our acquisition of California, though that addition to our terri- tory was undoubtedly a powerful factor in stimulating action and bringing it to a favorable result. Earliest and most san- guine among its believers and advocates was the Rev. Samuel Parker, who, in the course of his missionary work, explored Oregon in 1835, and upon his return to the East expressed the opinion that no real obstacle existed on the route by which he travelled to its completion. He went so far as to predict that it
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would not only be finished in the near future, but that tourists would one day glide over its rails as they were wont to pass to and fro from Niagara. In 1837 Dr. Samuel Barlow, a prominent physician of Massachusetts, advocated its being built by the National Government. In this connection he then wrote as fol- lows : " My feeble pen would fail me to expatiate upon the sub- stantial and enduring glory which would redound to our nation should it engage in this stupendous undertaking."
In 1838 the distinguished editor and poet, Willis Gaylord Clark, ventured to predict that " the reader is now living who will make a railroad trip across this vast continent." Of the premonitory symptoms of the gigantic birth which in the fulness of time was to astonish the nations, Evans writes as follows :
" But Asa Whitney," a merchant of considerable wealth, who had made a fortune in China, " was its St. John, the voice cry- ing in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way' for the North American route to the wealth of the Pacific and India. During all the forties he systematically agitated the building of this rail- road. He addressed public meetings throughout the Northern States, memorializing Congress session after session, urging upon that body and the country at large his plan for building a rail- road from the head of Lake Michigan or from Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi, to the mouth of the Columbia in Oregon. He called attention to its vast importance, and declared his be- lief in its practicability. He estimated its extreme length at 2400 miles, and agreed to construct the road in twenty years for a government land grant of sixty miles in width along the line of his proposed route. Many State legislatures passed resolu- tions favoring Whitney's project, and Congress gave it much serious consideration. At one time, indeed, it came within a single vote of passing the Senate. The details of his plan con- tained some singular features. His scheme was far-reaching, involving a system of European immigration and also from the Atlantic cities. The laborers were to be compensated in part by land. Farms were to be prepared for succeeding immigrants by a detail of workmen. These laborers on the second year would go forward to work upon the road, leaving behind them their successors as farmers and guards. Eloquently he urged, 'Mill- ions of poor and oppressed would be lifted to the dignity of free- holding American citizens, and the great route for the commerce
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of the world would be established amid the development of the resources of the region it populated and made.' As late as 1847 Asa Whitney addressed an immense assemblage at the Taber- nacle in New York, over which the Mayor presided. At the close a mob took possession of the hall and denounced the enter- prise as a swindle, an attempt of a band of conspirators to de- fraud the people by securing an immense grant of land for an impracticable and visionary project. In 1848, however, Mr. Whitney's labors were rewarded by the presentation of a favor- able report by a select committee of Congress, recommending that steps be taken to secure adequate exploration and surveys from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean."
In 1853 Congress appropriated $150,000 to make such sur- veys and ascertain the most practicable route. To the Secretary of War was left the selection of the lines to be examined and those who should conduct their explorations. This resulted in instructions to Governor Isaac I. Stevens, just appointed to the gubernatorial chair of Washington Territory, to take charge of the northern route and explore and survey a passage from the sources of the Mississippi to Puget Sound, while George B. McClellan, afterward destined to play so great a part in our civil war history, but then only a brevet-captain of engineers, proceeded direct by way of the Isthmus to Puget Sound, and with his party ex- plored the Cascade range of mountains, thence eastward until he met the main party, under Governor Stevens, who was march- ing westward from St. Paul, Minn. The decisive result of the labors of these two eminent engineers was a favorable report as to the eligibility of the passes both of the Rocky Mountains and the Cascade range, Governor Stevens asserting the entire prac- ticability of building a railroad over the last-named. His report recommended that there should be two branches from the vicin- ity of the mouth of the Snake River, one to Puget Sound via the Cascades, the other down the Columbia on its northern side. He, moreover, kept alive by messages, addresses, and personal efforts the agitation of this " northern route," doing all in his power for its accomplishment.
On January 28th, 1857, the Legislature of Oregon Territory passed an act to incorporate the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Their earliest charter names as corporators Governor Stevens and other citizens representing no less than nine States
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and Territories. The lines prescribed by this act are almost identical with the present Northern Pacific Railroad system. On July 2d, 1864, Congress granted a charter to the company. Josiah Perham, of Boston, who was instrumental in procuring the passage of the act, was its first president. The title defines the franchise as intended by Congress : " An act granting lands to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound on the Pacific coast by the North- ern route." The company were to accept in writing the condi- tions imposed, and notify the President of the United States. On December 15th, 1864, the acceptance was made. As the charter prohibited the issue of bonds, the company was handi- capped in obtaining funds. Perham and his associates, be- coming disheartened, transferred the charter to Governor J. Gregory Smith, of the Vermont Central Railroad, and his partners.
Our space will not permit us to enter into the details of peti- tions for congressional aid and alternate tides of hope and dis- couragement to which the fortunes of this great scheme were ex- posed. They asked and were denied, but still kept up their surveys, finally securing a resolution of amendment which per- mitted the issue of bonds secured by mortgage on the property of the company. With this guarantee, Jay Cooke & Co., of Philadelphia, a firm of large reputation, who had already been most successful in negotiating the great war loans for the Gov- ernment, and whose chief was regarded as one of the most emi- nent financiers of his day, undertook the raising of funds, the company executing a mortgage for this purpose on July 1st, 1870, to Jay Cooke and J. Edgar Thompson, trustees. The Ore- gon United States senators, having been largely instrumental in securing the right to issue bonds, naturally looked for a solid return in the interests of their State ; and the company, recog- nizing the claim, entered upon a policy which tended to forward the growth, progress, and prosperity of Portland. The line across the Cascades, transposed from the main line to branch, was to be indefinitely postponed, not to say ignored. With $5,000,000 advanced by Jay Cooke & Co., the building of the road commenced in February, 1870, at Duluth, and within that year the work progressed westward one hundred and fourteen miles to Brainard. On the Pacific slope work was also initiated
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in 1870. The amendatory act required the construction of twenty-five miles between Portland and Puget Sound prior to July 7th, 1871, and so the company built from the town they named Kalama, on the Columbia River, northward that dis- tance. During 1872 forty miles had been built in this direction, and were in operation. On January 1st General John W. Sprague and Governor John N. Goodwin, agents of the com- pany, formally announced the selection of the city of Olympia as the terminus on Puget Sound of the road. A few months later (July, 1873) the company at New York declared its western terminus should be at Tacoma. In the following September came the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., greatly embarrassing operations. The charter, however, was saved, as the road reached its terminus on Puget Sound on the day preceding the limit prescribed in its franchise. The work being temporarily suspended by Jay Cooke & Co.'s failure, the company was reor- ganized on a different financial basis, with Charles B. Wright, of Philadelphia, a most enterprising and liberal gentleman, as its president.
In the mean while rich coal fields had been discovered to the east of Tacoma. The Vice-President, General George Stark, made an examination of these mineral deposits, with reference to building a sufficient portion of the branch to connect them with Tacoma. His report stated that " the building of this Cas- cade branch, for the development of our coal resources, seems now to be the one wheel which, if started, will put the whole train in motion ; and I trust that ways and means to accomplish it will be devised at an early day."
During 1877 the first portion of this branch was accordingly built, connecting Tacoma with Wilkerson. In the spring of 1878 the Oregon senators secured the passage by the Senate of an act ostensibly for an extension of time to complete the road, but conditions were imposed which would forever have defeated the branch across the Cascade Mountains. The House of Repre- sentatives refused to pass the bill, so Congress declined to extend the time ; but the company continued its enterprise under doubts and discouragements which seemed to forebode ultimate defeat and destroy all hopes that a road would be constructed across the Cascade range. In 1878 and 1879 two parties, in charge re- spectively of Charles A. White and D. D. Clarke, William Mil-
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ner Roberts being the chief engineer, continued the examination of the passage of the Cascades.
Frederick Billings succeeded Charles B. Wright as President of the company, on the resignation of the latter on account of ill health. Mr. Billings, favoring the completion (1880) of the entire work, the surveys of the Cascade passes were resumed with increased vigor. Colonel Isaac W. Smith was appointed Chief Engineer in charge of the mountain survey ; Charles A. White, C. G. Bouge, D. D. Clarke, and J. Tilton Sheets, in charge of parties, examined the Cowlitz and Nahchess passes. After a careful instrumental survey, the line was located by Engineer Sheets by way of the Nahchess Pass.
As the financial world became more familiar with the prog- ress and probable profits of this great undertaking, Northern Pacific bonds became salable and the project itself less open to distrust ; nevertheless, the method of taking the bonds and fur- nishing funds contingent upon securities upon accepted sections of the road and the land grant rendered it impossible to grade the incompleted line or to advance track-laying and build the Rocky Mountain tunnels. This was the case even in face of the fact that in the fall of 1880, with the avowed intention of com- pleting the road, a loan of $40,000,000 was successfully nego- tiated. Such was the condition of things in 1881 when Henry Villard, the famous financier, assumed the presidency of the Northern Pacific. A man of less nerve and determination might well have shrunk from so arduous a task and so vast a re- sponsibility ; but active, energetic, and pushing, Mr. Villard hardly knew, or, if he knew it, declined to accept such a word as " fail." He had purchased for himself and friends a control- ling influence in the stock, and could therefore pursue his policy well assured of support and non-interference. The new president soon made himself felt. His purpose was to ally to · the Continental Trunk Line, as feeders and extensions, the lines under his management on the Pacific coast. To accomplish this and secure an identity of interest, he organized the Oregon and Transcontinental Company, which then held a large portion of the stock of the Northern Pacific, the Oregon Railway and Navi- gation Company, and the Oregon and California Railway Com- pany, which built branches for the Northern Pacific under an arrangement by which the latter company operated them and
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