Company, also came into being in 1859. Starting operations with eight small river boats, it eventually acquired the portage railroad at the Cascades and another higher up along the Columbia between The Dalles and the mouth of the Deschutes River.
Oregon's railroad history begins with a project for a line from Oregon to connect with the railroad already built from California to the East. This intention resulted in plans for two lines, one from Portland up the east side of the Willamette River, the other on the west side. A group sponsoring each plan sought for land grants from the Federal Government, and a conflict developed between the "Eastsiders" and the "Westsiders" which involved much lobbying and trickery. In 1868 both broke ground for their lines. A Kentuckian, Ben Holladay, a picturesque character typical of the financiers of his time, thrust himself into this struggle and pushed the fortunes of the East Side road. The backers of the other line came at last to an agreement with Holladay that victory should go to the line that first completed twenty miles of track. Holladay won, and the rival road was sold to him. His road, the Oregon and California, had, however, been built only to Roseburg when, in 1873, financial difficulties blocked further construction.
Henry Villard, whose gift for organization was of much importance in the development of Oregon, was a German-American who had been a newspaper reporter in the 1859 gold rush to Colorado and in the Civil War. He had come to Oregon to represent German bond-holders in Holladay's enterprises. Villard took over the Oregon and California Railroad, and resumed the building of the line. It reached Ashland in 1884 and was extended over the Siskiyous to connect with San Francisco and the East in 1887, after Villard's control of it had ended.
Villard also acquired the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which controlled traffic on the Columbia River, and, reorganizing it as the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, began building a line on the Oregon bank of the Columbia, intending to link it with a road being built northwestward across Idaho by the Union Pacific. That road, however, refused to join its tracks with Villard's. With Eastern backing, Villard managed to gain control of the Northern Pacific, then being built from Minneapolis toward the West. Confronting this opposition, the Oregon Short Line (Union Pacific) and the O. R. £ N. joined in 1884. Oregon now had its outlets to the East and to California.
The period from 1890 until well into the present century was one of almost continual railroad expansion in the state. With trunk lines established, branch lines were extended up many valleys where the set
