Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/116

110 Mr. McBride referred to was the Oregon member of Congress. The name of the then Oregon company was never inserted in the bill, which passed Congress and became a law on July 25, 1866, and granted twenty alternate sections of public land per mile of the railroad which has been constructed thereunder from Portland to the California line.

I have been thus particular to trace the original connected and successive steps in projecting and carrying out a great public work, to show that the Jackson County people were entitled to the credit of giving it birth, and to show how the wisdom of the original location of the line was vindicated by the actual construction of the road. In seeking the best line for a railway between two distant points, all other inducements being equal, the line of location, like all other forward movements of human effort, will proceed along the line of the least resistance. Two facts determined the location of this Oregon and California railroad. First, the line of least resistance. The physical features of the region to be developed offered a series of beautiful valleys, rich in all the resources to support a railroad, and so located as to form nearly the shortest line between the termini of the road, and through which it could be constructed centrally through the greatest length of these valleys, and at the lowest cost, and serving the majority of population and interests. Second, here on this line had settled the population of the two States, and made the then existing development of their resources, and upon which the road must rely for its support

It was not the only available, or the only line proposed, as many persons might now think. The line of the first transcontinental road had been projected to San Francisco when the first steps to secure this Oregon and California line were taken, and connection with the transcontinental