wards admitted to the author of this paper at a cost to him of $35,000.
Thus securing this act of the legislature in his favor, Holladay continued to push the work of construction on the grade, and sent agents to Washington to get an act through Congress enabling his Salem company to file its acceptance of the land grant act. Congress finally, on April 16, 1809, passed an act extending the time for filing acceptance of the land grant act and providing that whichever of the two companies should first complete and put in operation twenty miles of railroad from Portland southward into the Willamette Valley should be entitled to file such acceptance of grant. Holladay continued to push construction work with all his available means until in December, 1868, he had in a very cheap and imperfect manner completed and put in operation, with one engine and a car or two, twenty miles of railroad, and was thereby recognized as entitled to the land grant.
But notwithstanding this hard earned success Holladay was now face to face with a state of facts that would have paralyzed a less reckless and unscrupulous operator. It had become everywhere understood and admitted that the Salem Oregon Central Railroad Company was not a corporation and had no legal existence, and for that reason could not appropriate the right of way in any case where the landholder refused it, or enforce any other right of a corporation. The Supreme Court of Oregon afterwards decided that the Salem company was not a corporation, but a mere nullity and fraud, that it had no legal rights and could not take the land grant, and that the act of the legislature of 1868 could not heal its defects. (See the case of Elliot v. Holladay et al., p. 91, Vol. 8 of Oregon Reports.) And besides this the west side company had finally forced the Salem company to stand trial before Justice M. P. Deady, of the United States District Court
