Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/308

 overland by the news that the Great Republic had run ashore at the mouth of the Columbia and was completely wrecked, but fortunately without loss of life. These tidings led him to consider the practicability of forming, under the auspices of the new Construction Company, an ocean and river navigation company out of the Oregon Steamship and the Oregon Steam Navigation Companies, and he made up his mind, before he reached Portland, to try to accomplish this object. This was the germ of his remarkable creation, the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company.

The Oregon Steam Navigation Company was formed in 1862 with a capital of $2,000,000 by a combination of individual owners of steamboats running on the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Subsequently the stock capital was increased to $5,000,000 after considerable additions to the properties of the company, paid for out of earnings. It was a close corporation, a large majority of the stock being held by five leading men of Portland, who formed the Board of Directors and exercised actual management. In 1871 these met the party, representing the Northern Pacific Railroad, which had come to the Pacific coast to locate the western terminus of the line and to arrange for the commencement of construction in Washington or Oregon. The directors of the Navigation Company, being alarmed by the prospect of railroad competition with their boats on the Columbia, tried to induce the Northern Pacific delegation to buy them out, and the latter took a proposition with them to the East for the sale of the whole of the Navigation stock for $2,000,000 or forty per cent. of the nominal value of $5,000,000. A deal was consummated in Philadelphia some months later with the purchase by Jay Cooke & Co., for account of the Northern Pacific, of three quarters of the $5,000,000 at forty per cent., half cash and half in Northern Pacific bonds at 90. The Portland directors retained the other quarter of the stock and continued in the management.

Jay Cooke & Co. held the three-quarters of the