USA > Washington > History of Washington; the rise and progress of an American state, Vol. IV > Part 15
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CHAPTER LIV. "THE GOD TERMINUS."
W HILE the members of the Simmons party, and many who came after them, had probably never seen a locomotive or a foot of railroad track,* they knew in a general way that rail- roads were hastening the development of other new states and territories, and they hoped to live until they should reach their own. They knew better than any other people did, or could, how far they were from the end of any track that was already stretching in their direction, for great as the dis- tance was, they had covered it with their ox teams, and almost without money. In the progressive age in which they were living, they felt sure that a transcontinental railroad was practicable and would come.
It had been talked of long before they started west. In the year 1833, only two years after the first locomotive had made its appearance in the United States, it had been sug- gested in a Michigan newspaper called the Emigrant. One year later Dr. Samuel Barlow, a village physician in western Massachusetts, began to write articles in which he pointed out the feasability and importance of such an undertaking. About the same time Dr. Parker, with whom Whitman had made his first western trip, asserted that there were no greater difficulties in the way of building such a road than lay in the way between Boston and Albany. In 1845 Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who had been in China, began to urge upon Congress, state legislatures and private capitalists, the desirability of connecting Lake Michigan with the mouth of the Columbia by a line that should cross Wisconsin and Minnesota to the Missouri River, and thence follow the route of Lewis and Clark to the ocean. So persistently did he advocate this enterprise during the following years that he
*There were in 1844 only 4,311 miles of railroad in the United States.
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came to be known in his time as, "the father of the Pacific railroad."
The rate of extension of railroad lines was increasing encouragingly year by year. During the first twenty years after building began the average rate of increase had been but 268 miles per year, but during the eight years succeeding, this average increased to 2,350 miles per year .* A single year's work, if all done on a continuous line, would connect the Sound with the Great Lakes at Chicago. Surely the coming of the rails to meet the sails did not, even in that time, seem to be such a long way off.
When in 1853 Congress provided for the exploration of four routes across the continent, the settlers all along the coast took new hope, and when Governor Stevens arrived at Olympia, first of all the explorers to complete his reconois- sance, and assured those who assembled to welcome him that the Northern route was not only practicable, but that it would be the shortest for the commerce of the world across the Pacific, and pointed out to them the grand advantages which their magnificent harbor would afford for the exchange between land and water-carriers, it began to seem probable that their great hope would be realized almost at once.
But there were other considerations than natural advan- tages that would have influence in determining which of the four routes would first be used. Political considerations, for the time being seemed to control, as in fact they did for the next half dozen years and nothing was done. Then the war came and military considerations for a time were upper- most. Then commercial considerations began to have influence, and these joined with those of a military character carried the day. Engineering advantages temporarily gave
*A Cyclopedia of Commerce Harper & Brothers, New York, in 1858.
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way before them, and the first railroad from the Missouri to the Pacific was built, as its chief engineer subsequently said, on the commercial rather than the natural line. .
During the years following Stevens arrival with his mes- sage of hope, the settlers did what they could to hasten the coming of a road by the Northern route. This was but little, and most of it was futile, but even so it was better than absolute inaction and indifference. In January 1857, while the feeling against Governor Stevens because of his martial law proclamation was still bitter, the legislature, at his suggestion, passed an act incorporating the Northern Pacific Railroad Company and naming the governor, Sena- tor Ramsay of Minnesota and General James Shields, then of the same state, Judge William A. Strong, Colonel William Cock, Elwood Evans, A. A. Denny and W. S. Ladd of Port- land among its incorporators. The company was capitalized at $15,000,000, which might be increased to $30,000,000 and was to build from one of the passes in the Rocky Moun- tains (on the border of Nebraska in that day) west across Washington by the Bitter Root Valley, and across the Coeur d'Alene Mountains to the Columbia, with a branch down the Columbia and one across the Cascades to the Sound, these two branches to be connected by a line from the Sound to the river. This act was amended in 1860 by extending the time for beginning actual construction to July 4, 1863, and that for its completion to July 4, 1870 .* But no capital
*By this amended act the following named persons were constituted commissioners: Geo. A. Barnes, G. K. Willard, U. G. Warbass, Henry Winsor. A. Frankel, D. R. Bigelow, Wm. N. Ayers, Wm. Mitchell, Wm. G. Dunlap, Milas Galliher, Isaac Lightner, Andrew J. Chambers, John N. Low, Isaac Wood, David J. Chambers, Thornton F. McElroy, John L. Clark, A. W. Stewart, Joseph White, B. F. Ruth, Nelson Barnes, Clanrick Crosby, Gabriel Jones and B. L. Henness.
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was raised and no railroad was ever built, either under the original or the amended act.
In February 1858 the legislature adopted a joint resolu- tion in which the advantages of the northern route were fully set forth. It would be a chain of Union between the Atlantic and Pacific states; it would insure the defense of the country, as armies, seamen, munitions of war, and stores for both the army and navy could be transported by it from ocean to ocean in less time, and with less expense than they were sent from New York to the great lakes in 1812; it would give direct and quick transit to mails; military, political and commercial considerations demanded it; the trade of the Pacific Ocean and eastern Asia would take its track; that with India, whose channels had been shifting for a hundred years, would shift once more and cross our continent; the American road to India would become the European track to that region, and the rich commerce of Asia would flow through our centre. The local advantages of the line, con- necting as it did with the great lakes and the river lines on both the Missouri and the Mississippi, affording cheap trans- portation for heavy merchandise, were also summarized, and Congress was reminded that this line could not only be built during the century, but it could be made the great achieve- ment of that particular administration.
The provisions of these early acts, and the declarations of this joint resolution, are summarized thus fully here to show how well advised our early legislators were, and how fully awake the people of the time were to the advantages of rail- roads. Both the acts of incorporation and the resolutions were no doubt prompted by Governor Stevens, who had since become a delegate in Congress, and who never ceased while he lived to display the greatest interest in the railroad
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whose route he had explored. In the first Congress of which he was a member, he made one speech of an hour's length, the grand purpose of which was to emphasize the fact which his survey had demonstrated, that this was the short route across the continent, and across the Pacific, and by its nearer connection with both Asia and Europe, it must become the great route of freight and passengers from Asia to Europe, and of freight from Asia to the whole valley of the Mis- sissippi.
In 1860 a railroad convention, composed of delegates from both Washington and Oregon, was held at Vancouver to which Stevens sent a letter, in which he reviewed the advantages of this route as fully and as accurately as they have ever been set forth to the present day, in a paper of similar length.
Although another line was built before the Northern was begun, the people of Washington did not despair. The new line brought them some advantages in the way of an improved mail service, and in shortening the time by which they could go east and return, though it did not widen the market for the products of their farms, mines or forests. It had grown out of the exigencies of the Civil war, and a more rapidly developed region than their own had offered greater attrac- tions to railroad builders. But while it had been building, Congress had not been allowed to forget that the Northern route was still the shortest and the best for many reasons, and that a road must sooner or later be built there. Friends of this route had been active ever since Stevens' time. They had first sought to secure national aid for a corporation chartered by the state of Maine, but this had failed, and in 1864 Thad Stevens, the great leader of the House of Repre- sentatives during the war, had introduced a bill which finally
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passed both house and senate, and was approved by Presi- dent Lincoln, giving a grant of lands to aid in building a railroad and telegraph line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound by the Northern route. But a grant of lands was not sufficient to secure the capital required. The Northern Pacific Railroad Company was organized under this act, and about $200,000 raised and expended, but no other pro- gress was made. The two years within which, under its charter, actual building must be begun, in order to hold its land grant, were about to expire, when a meeting of stock- holders and directors was held in Boston, at which the interest of the presidents of several New England railroads, and other capitalists were enlisted and a new board of directors elected.
This new board applied to Congress for further time, which was granted in 1867, and for a guaranty of its divi- dends, or other financial aid, which was refused. Some new arrangement was therefore necessary, not only to save the enterprise from failure, but to save for those interested, the money they had already advanced, and it was made by taking in some more railroad presidents, including those of the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the Northwestern, and some other capitalists and contractors, who agreed to advance $250,000, to carry on the preliminary work. Surveyors were now sent out to examine the proposed line, and make an estimate of the cost of building it. This occupied another two years, during which Congress again extended the time for commencing actual construction to 1870, and that for completing the road to 1877.
When the engineers had completed their work, they esti- mated the total cost of the road, as roads were built in that day, at $157,000,000. To raise this sum seemed next to impossible to those interested, and at the suggestion of J.
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Edgar Thompson, then president of the Pennsylvania and a member of the new company, Jay Cooke & Co., were applied to to finance the undertaking.
Jay Cooke was then the foremost banker in the United States. His principal banking office, Jay Cooke & Co., was in Philadelphia, with a branch in New York, while it controlled a National Bank in Washington and a bank in London. It had sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bonds for the government during the war, when other agencies had failed to dispose of them, and had acquired a world wide reputation among investors. When asked to become the fiscal agent for a new transcontinental railroad, no part of which had yet been built, the house took the matter under advisement until it could have the line examined on its own account. This examination was made by two parties, one working from the eastern end of the line westward, and one from the western end eastward, and in time those made a favorable report, estimating the total cost at $85,000,000.
Cooke & Co. now undertook to procure money to build the road, and entered into contracts with the company for that purpose. Some new financial plans were necessary, and they were soon made. Congress was asked to so amend the charter of the company as to permit the issue of mort- gage bonds, and to authorize the construction of a branch from Portland, Oregon, to some point on Puget Sound, to be selected as the terminus of the main line. Twenty-five miles of this branch were to be constructed by July 2, 1871, and thereafter forty miles were to be built each year, until it was completed.
The entire issue of bonds was to be $100,000,000, and they were to bear interest at the rate of seven and three- tenths per cent., payable in gold. They were to be issued
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in sums as low as $50, on which the interest on each bond would be one cent per day. The hope of all concerned was that bonds for such small amounts, bearing such a high rate of interest payable in gold, would at that time attract small investors, who would buy them with United States or national bank notes, then worth about 80 cents on the dollar. Cooke & Co. were to sell them at par, and were to retain $12 out of every $100 received, and were in addition to receive $200 in stock for every $1000 worth of bonds sold .* The stock of the company already issued amounting to $600,000, was to be exchangeable for stock at 50 cents on the dollar, and the bank was to raise $5,000,000 within thirty days, for the purpose of beginning construction. A land company to handle the town sites at stations along the line, was to be organized, and Cooke & Co. were to be the sole financial agents and depositary of the railroad.
Cooke & Co. pushed the bond sale as they had pushed that for the government, and with similar success for a time. Advertisements were published in most of the newspapers of the country, both daily and weekly, in magazines, in religious papers,-in fact everywhere where it seemed pos- sible that they would reach the attention of people who had $50 or more to invest. The desirability of the bonds as an investment were not alone exploited. The character of the country through which the road was to be built, its cli- mate, the richness of its soil and the wealth of its natural
*In these days when state railroad commissions are spending so much money, worth 100 cents on the dollar, to estimate the cost of building, or reproducing these early railroads, no account appears to be taken of the sacrifices made by these early railroad builders to raise money. The facts given above show that the builders of the Northern Pacific had to pay twelve per cent. in money, and twenty per cent. in stock to get money worth less than 80 cents on the dollar, and then pay seven and three- tenths per cent. interest in gold for it.
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products were described. Settlers were encouraged to go to it,-indeed this bond selling campaign did more to make the people of the whole country acquainted with the region which now comprises the state of Minnesota, Dakota, Mon- tana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon than all that had been done before. Homeseekers began to pour into Minnesota and the Dakotas, miners and stockraisers to seek the hills and plains of Montana and Idaho, and even the settlers in far away Washington and Oregon for a time saw their num- bers increasing with gratifying rapidity as a result of it.
This advertising also produced the results it was intended to produce in a satisfactory way. Although the bonds of the Union and central Pacific roads, some of which were guaranteed by the government, were more attractive to large investors, and their stocks sold more readily, as they were now in operation, other investors in large numbers, bought the bonds of the new line, and within two years the company had received from its financial agents, $30,000,000 from the securities it had sold.
Building was begun at both ends of the line, according to the terms of the amended acts of Congress. Some lines already built or building in Minnesota were bought, or arrangements were made for their use, and from the end of their tracks the main line was started westward. Ground was formally broken on February 15, 1870, at Thompson Junction, which later became Northern Pacific Junction, 24 miles west of Duluth, and the work was pushed rapidly westward from that point to the crossing of the Mississippi at Brainerd. Ground was also broken at Kalama, on the Columbia, in May of the same year, and within the twelve months following, the first 25 miles of the line extending northward from that point, along the trail over which
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Simmons and Jackson, and many who followed them, had first made their way into territory were completed. The whistle of the locomotive was heard for the first time in Washington, reverberating' among the hills and along the valleys which twenty-five years earlier had never known the pressure of a wheel.
The settlers had watched every step in this tedious pre- paration for the actual building of a railroad, with the keenest interest. They had tried at various times to build local railroads themselves, but so far all their plans had failed. In January 1862 the legislature chartered the Puget Sound and Columbia River Railroad Company* to build from Steilacoom to Vancouver. The authorized capital was $15,000,000, which might be increased to $50,000,000, and the road might be operated by "force and power of steam, or animals, or any combination of them." Building opera- tions were to be begun within three years and the road was to be completed within ten.
At the same session the Walla Walla Railroad Company was incorporated, which was to build a line from Walla Walla Landing on the Columbia River, to the city of Walla Walla.t
*The incorporators named were: Peter J. Moorey, J. B. Webber, P. Keach, Lafayette Balch, S. McCaw, Thompson Chambers, J. W. Nye, Lewis Lord, Richard Covington, John Aird, Lewis Sohns, Geo. W. Hart, C. Lancaster, F. J. Demarco, Geo. Woods, Enoch S. Fowler, Paul K. Hubbs, H. Z. Wheeler, J. P. Keller, A. A. Denny, H. L. Yesler, Chas. Plummer, W. W. Miller, A. J. Chambers, John Biles, H. D. Huntington, Chas. Holman, Cyrus Walker, Frank Clark and Wm. W. Morrow,
+The incorporators named in this act were: A. J. Cain, B. F. Whitman, L. A. Miller, W. J. Terry, C. H. Armstrong, I. T. Abbott, I. T. Reese, S. M. Baldwin, E. L. Bonner, D. Graig, Wm. A. Mix, Chas. Russell. J. A. Simms, Jesse Drumheller, Jas. Reynolds, D. S. Baker, Geo. E. Cole, S. D. Smith, J. J. Goodwin, Wm. Way, Neil McSlinckey, J. G. Sparks, W. A. George, J. Van Syckle, W. W. DeLacy, A. Seitel, Wm. Ball, B. F. Stone, J. Schwabacker, B. P. Standifer, T. Brown-Tatem and W. W. Johnson.
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The capital stock of this company was to be $300,000, and it was to build the road within five years from the first day of November 1863. This act was amended in January 1864, so as to extend the time for beginning work to January I, 1865, and that for completing it to January 1, 1870. At the same session the charter of the Columbia and Puget Sound Company was amended by naming several new incor- porators* and empowering it to build from Vancouver, when that point should be reached, to a point opposite Celilo, or the mouth of the Des Chutes River. The time for beginning construction was extended to five years, and for completion of the line to fifteen years from the date of the amended act.
But while the people and the legislature were thus planning and authorizing undertakings which they were utterly unable to provide or procure the capital to accomplish, they had chartered a company which was already doing a thriving transportation business on the Columbia and Snake rivers and would in time play an important part in building the railroad, the coming of which was so anxiously looked for. On December 19, 1860, the legislature had chartered the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, with a capital of $1,000,000, and the charter was amended in the following year so as to allow this to be increased to $2,000,000. The incorporators were, J. C. Ainsworth, Daniel F. Bradford, R. R. Thompson, J. S. Ruckle* and their associates. By
*The new incorporators named were: John Salter, Geo. Gallagher, W. R. Downey, Daniel Dollins, Charles Prosch, Chas. Wren, E. E. Rogers, C. C. Terry, J. H. Frost, G. A. Meigs, Captain Renton, M. S. Drew, F. A. Wilson, C. M, Bradshaw, O. B. McFadden, Seth Catlin, Hiram Cochran, S. W. Brown, E. C. Hardy, L. Fredenrich, John F. Smith, C. Crosby and C. Jacobs.
*These incorporators were at the time the individual owners of boats plying on the Columbia, Snake or Willamette Rivers.
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other acts passed about the same time and later, these incorporators and others were authorized to construct portage railroads, along the Columbia, to convey freight and passengers around the Cascades and the Dalles as far up the river as Celilo. The rush of gold hunters to eastern Washington and Idaho, during the preceding year, had overtaxed all the small steamers of that day plying on the rivers, and made demand for several new ones, which had been built or bought as profitable employment for them increased. The portage tramways around the Cascades, which Chenoweth and the Bradfords had built years earlier and over whose wooden rails the goods and families of many immigrants both to Washington and Oregon, had been transported by animal power, were now relaid with iron rails and operated by steam. Another road was also built to connect the Dalles with Celilo, and these were the first real railroads in either Washington or Oregon.
As business increased, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company grew and prospered. In time it not only controlled the transportation business on the Columbia, Willamette and Snake Rivers, but extended its operations to Puget Sound and along the coast to San Francisco.
As soon as possible after bond selling was fairly started, by Cooke & Co., a committee of the directors was sent to the coast to secure control of this navigation company, as by this means the railroad would secure control of all the transportation facilities of importance then in existence in both territories, and by connecting the river with the Sound by rail, steam transportation facilities would at once be established between all their principal settlements. The next step was to locate a point on the north bank of the Columbia, from which a railroad could most cheaply and
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quickly be built to the Sound, and where freight and passen- gers could readily be transferred between boats and trains, and to begin construction. All this was successfully arranged and the committee returned to New York.
The settlers in both territories, and particularly those in the various towns on the Sound had taken the liveliest interest in all that was so far done, but now that the building of the railroad they had so long hoped for was actually begun, another matter of far more absorbing interest for them began to command their attention.
"It was an ancient tradition," says Mr. Gibbon, "that when the capital was founded by one of the Roman kings, the God Terminus, (who presided over boundaries, and was represented according to the fashion of that time by a large stone) alone, among all the inferior deities, refused to yield his place to Jupiter himself. A favorable inference was drawn from his obstinacy, which was interpreted by the augurs as a sure presage that the boundaries of the Roman power would never recede." But the settlers saw in the location of the western terminus of the new transcontinental line, something more than an assurance that the town to be chosen and the country would not go backward. They knew that the town chosen would immediately feel a quickening influ- ence of tremendous power. The commerce of two continents would be transferred there. Immense docks and warehouses and vast webs of terminal tracks, would be required for this buisness; the shops and dry docks and other requirements for maintaining both the railroad and the ships would follow; factories in which would be manufactured the goods required by two continents, which would employ armies of men and consume the materials which their forests, mines and farms would furnish in greater profusion and abundance than any
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other portion of earth supplied, would spring up; the fires in a thousand furnaces would be lighted, and a myriad of wheels would be turning to supply the ever-varying and increasing wants of man.
As the end of a rainbow sometimes seems near at hand to children who have been told that a pot of gold waits there for that child who can get to it before the bow disappears, so the rich results that were to follow the location of the Northern Pacific terminus seemed now almost within the grasp of the settlers in several towns. The founders of some of these towns had chosen their sites with this end in view. But in the beginning it had been hard to guess which of several attractive points in the several hundred miles of shore line bordering the grand inland sea now known generally as Puget Sound, would be regarded with most favor by those who should finally determine where the first great railroad should end. The roads had not yet demon- strated as fully as they have since done, nor did those who then managed them realize as fully as they do now, that the first great requirement for a terminal city is easy access to deep water, with as much level land leading to and lying near it as can possibly be secured. As the managers them- selves did not fully understand this, it is not surprising that the settlers should not do so, and therefore that those not only at many points along the Sound, but on some of its islands as well should hope that their town, or town site, might be chosen, and the pot of gold secured for them.
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