Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/295

 well, Mr. Villard soon found that the principal part of the work devolved upon him. All through the winter of 1873, he had to spend much time in Frankfort, and the outcome of it was that he was commissioned to go to the United States as the representative of the committee, in order to have the agreement put in form by American counsel, and to attend in person to its proper execution in Oregon. He sailed for this purpose for New York with his family in April, 1874.

He there met Ben Holladay, with whom and his lawyer, S. L. M. Barlow, and United States Senator Mitchell of Oregon, Mr. Villard, with his counsel, Professor James B. Thayer of the Harvard Law School, had a protracted tussle over the details of the compromise. Holladay proved a genuine specimen of the successful Western pioneer of former days, illiterate, coarse, pretentious, boastful, false, and cunning. Mr. Villard soon discovered also that Holladay's reputed great wealth was fictitious, and that he was, on the contrary, in financial extremities. That a man of such character should have found it so easy to command millions of foreign capital was quite a puzzle and shock to him. The explanation of this, he afterwards discovered, lay in the bad faith which the business men on the Pacific coast had shown to the European bankers who placed the bonds.

Mr. Villard set out for Oregon in May, accompanied by Richard Koehler, a German railroad engineer, who had been appointed resident financial agent of the bondholders at Portland under the articles of agreement, and who has remained there ever since and is now (1900) the general manager of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company for its Oregon lines. Mr. Villard spent some weeks in California, investigating the physical and financial condition of the California Pacific lines built independently of the Central Pacific with the proceeds of securities also marketed in England and Germany. He discovered that one of these lines, against which $3,000,000 seven per cent. bonds had 18