Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/302

 continued on to San Francisco. On arriving there, Mr. Villard found a despatch from the War Department advising him that a regiment of infantry was being hurried overland by fast trains on account of the outbreak of the Modoc war, and that his Steamship Company was desired to hold a ship ready for the immediate shipment of the regiment to Portland on its arrival on the coast. Mr. Villard himself superintended the necessary preparations, and crossed the bay to Oakland to receive the regiment, in one of the cold fogs peculiar to the California coast in the summer. He had caught a severe cold while in Colorado, which the exposure at Oakland developed the same day into pneumonia. He was able to dine with his family in the evening, but was unconscious before midnight. (Shortly after, there were fearful nights, in which Kearney's "sand-lot" anarchists tried to fire the city.) The disease attacked both lungs, and in a week his life was despaired of, and his wife had finally to telegraph her relations that the physicians gave no hope and did not expect her husband to live an hour. Skilful treatment and his strong constitution saved him, but he was so reduced by the long illness that the contemplated sojourn in Oregon had to be given up, and the family returned to New York.

While he was struggling for life, an opposition steamer was put on the line to Portland, with the result that there was a great falling off in the earnings of the Steamship Company, which greatly discouraged his foreign supporters, and made his task of obtaining additional capital from them much more difficult. His principals at first approved of the vigorous policy he adopted in meeting the competition, but, after the struggle had lasted six months, they required him to make a compromise with the opposition, which went into force in the spring of 1878. This clouding of the prospects of the Steamship Company led to friction between the Oregon & California bondholders committee and the foreign Steamship creditors over the payments for the new steamers, which culminated in the