Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/321

Rh R. R. Company bonds at par and giving easy time for the money payments. The old owners of the company retained one-fourth of the stock and continued in the management, so they considered that they had made a good sale, but subsequent events proved it to be a mistake. Through the failure of Jay Cooke & Company, in 1873, the Northern Pacific was forced into liquidation, and the bonds that the Oregon Steam Navigation directors still held and could have sold for cash at about ninety cents, dropped to ten cents. The three-fourths of the capital sold to the Northern Pacific passed into the hands of the bankrupt estate of Jay Cooke & Company, and here it remained locked up for a long time. This failure served to shrink values all over the United States. The result was that Oregon Steam Navigation stock went down in the crash with other stocks. A plan was adopted by the trustees of the estate of Jay Cooke & Company to pay its creditors in kind. Each creditor accepting the proposition received fourteen per cent of his claim in Oregon Steam Navigation stock at forty per cent of its par value. This, as the creditors slowly and reluctantly came forward to accept, began to throw Oregon Steam Navigation stock on the Philadelphia and New York market. Parties taking it knew nothing about it and offered it at once for sale, and as they were ignorant of its value, the Portland directors were not slow in improving this opportunity to buy back a sufficient amount as would again give them control. Some of it was purchased as low as thirteen cents and the average cost of enough to give control was about twenty cents, so in the end, covering a period of about five years, they found themselves the owners of the large majority of the stock at about half the amount that they had sold for.

In 1879 Mr. Villard came to Oregon with the avowed purpose of purchasing the Oregon Steam Navigation property or commencing opposition. He asked J. C. Ainsworth whether he and his associates were willing to sell. Mr. Ainsworth refused to take less than $5,000,000.00. An inventory of the company's property was made, together with a statement of