Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/882

620 beam, and 11.9 feet depth of hold. The Kumeric is 460 feet long, 55 feet beam and 28.6 feet depth of hold. As there were eight other steamships each more than 400 feet in length, already loading in port when the Kumeric arrived, it is apparent that the growth of Portland shipping is keeping pace with the land growth which is making the port famous.

The facts which have induced thousands of Portland's citizens to hold on patiently and stubbornly until time should prove the correctness of their views, are the facts which have made the city what it is, and will produce the great Pacific coast city of the future. The viewpoint of the pioneer was, that Portland was the nearest point that an ocean-going sailing vessel could get to the Willamette valley farms. This satisfied the founders of the city that they had located at the right point, and that here would be the city. Theirs were the views and conclusions of common sense and practical experience. They had never heard of the rule, first published in this part of the world by Major Alfred Sears, "that the commercial capital of a region will be as close to the center of production as can be reached by sL seagoing ship." This is a world-wide rule; and Portland had that in its favor to start with. And as long as agricultural, mineral and commercial development was confined to the Columbia river valley, Portland's supremacy was undisputed.

But when Villard and his transcontinental holding company fell down, and the control of the Northern Pacific Railroad passed over to the Philadelphia capitalists that had invested their money in the Tacoma townsite, and they decided to build the main line by the Northern Pacific over the Cascade mountains and ignore the Columbia river route to the ocean, then it was that the supremacy and future of Portland was disputed. Thousands of capitalists in all the eastern cities had invested their money in the stocks and bonds of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Villard, who had completed the road across the continent to a rail connection with this city had failed to make the road pay dividends. While it was no fault of his that a railroad through thousands of miles of unsettled lands, overtaken by a national wide financial panic that suspended all business, could not pay dividends, the eastern investors held him responsible and put in a management that would move everything to Tacoma.

Then came Mr. James J. Hill, riding horseback 2,000 miles across the continent through Dacotah, Montana, Idaho and Washington—a modern St. John, crying in the wilderness—and he, too, would build a great city on Puget Sound, and carry all the freight from Liverpool, New York, and America to the East Indies, in the greatest steamships ever dreamed of. And he, empire builder, laid hold of the herculean job. He built the railroad; he built the ships; he spent many millions on his city; he hauled his freight up over a mountain four thousand feet high and carefully let it slide down again; he built a tunnel miles long to cut off a few feet of that lift; he hauled all the Puget Sound lumber back over the top of that mountain; and then sat down and figured up costs, expenses, profit and loss. Mr. Hill had read, as all his Pacific coast representatives had read, a widely discussed letter published in the Oregonian, November 4, 1900, in which the author of the letter. Major Alfred Sears, asserted that, "The Northern Pacific Railroad will he forced into Portland by the most direct route possible. This is simply its helpless fate, and on which Portland may sleep. The law of commerce, as I have stated, it is the inexorable, immutable law, without exception in the world's economy."

That seemed to be plain enough; but it took Mr. Hill, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, and all the other millionaires seven years to comprehend its force and surrender to the inevitable, and raise the twenty million dollars to build the North Bank Railroad through a water level mountain pass into the city of Portland. This was a victory that counted more for Portland than all other works of men in its history. It was a distinct, unanswerable and overwhelming decision by the