Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/287

 OREGON AND CALIFORNIA RAILROAD 249 pany, was incorporated. 15 The California and Oregon Company had been incorporated June 29, 1865. 16 The in- corporators of the new company were Alpheus Bull, pres- ident of the California and Oregon Railroad Company, S. G. Elliott, surveyor, and C. Temple Emmett, attorney and director of the California and Oregon Railroad Company. The company was incorporated at Jacksonville and the stock was to be $16,000,000. The company seems to have been organized in order to obtain the Oregon portion of the land grant. In the earlier attempts the California Company seems not to have tried to obtain a grant in Oregon. During the session 1866, the California Company was again at work. Two bills granting aid were entered in Congress, one by Mr. Bidwell of California, in the House, the other by Senator Nesmith of Oregon, in the Senate. While Senator Nesmith's bill was passed, it was not as he had framed it. The bill came from the Committee on Public Lands amended like the bill in the House and passed the Senate in this form. In the House the bill was more carefully considered and when referred to the Com- mittee on Public Lands came out amended in the nature of a substitute. This bill passed the House and was sent to the Senate which passed it, and the bill became a law July 25, 1866. The grant provided 17 that the California and Oregon Railroad Company and such other company as the legis- lature of Oregon should designate should receive "every alternate section of public land, not mineral, designated by odd numbers to the amount of twenty alternate sec- tions per mile (ten on each side) of said railroad line." If the sections were already taken they could take others in lieu of them within ten miles of the limits of the grant. Patents were to be granted to the railroad on the comple- 15 Report of Secretary of State, 1866. 16 Report of Preliminary Survey. 17 14 Statutes, p. 239.
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