Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 2.djvu/315

 Navigation Company, as the subscriptions sold at a premium of from forty to fifty per cent, before the lists were closed, and the shares reached 91½ at the New York Stock Exchange within a few months. The new company bought and worked a coal railroad and mine in western Washington, and purchased a large body of select agricultural lands from the Northern Pacific in the so-called Palouse country in eastern Washington; brought out three large new coal steamers from the Atlantic coast; erected a great coal dock at San Francisco, and eventually acquired the capital stock of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, which had pooled its earnings with the Railway & Navigation Company for the San Francisco-Portland line. As the last-named company had a good many dealings with the Improvement Company, Mr. Villard decided not to assume the presidency or be a director of the latter, but he directed all the investments of its capital elsewhere referred to.

Early in the summer of 1880, a change occurred in his relations to the Oregon & California. During his visit to Germany in 1879, he had informally agreed with the Frankfort committee of bondholders to bring a proposition before the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company to buy all the interest of the bondholders in the two Oregon railroads for a guarantee of principal and six per cent. interest on half their nominal holdings of Oregon & California bonds. A committee of Navigation directors, consisting of Messrs. Pullman and Endicott, was charged to examine the roads and report upon the proposition. But Mr. Villard himself withdrew it when a Scotch company commenced the construction of a competitive narrow-gauge system in the Willamette Valley. As the Navigation Company operated boats on the Willamette which affected the traffic of the railroads, he deemed it his duty to resign as president of the Oregon & California and as a member of the committee, which he did at the time stated. But the severance of his relations with that company did not