Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/310

Iff*' 272 JOHN TDLSON GANOE 'it this, he was unable to complete twenty miles of the road, so the land grant went to the Holladay company. As we noted above, Gaston then turned his efforts to obtaining a new grant and in this was successful. At the same time two other projects were asking for aid. One was the Portland, Dalles and Salt Lake Company, which wished a grant to aid in construction of a road from the Union Pacific at Salt Lake to Portland; this was the so- called Winnemucca branch of the Central Pacific which proposed to run from Winnemucca, Nevada, to Eugene. The promoter of this project was B. J. Pengra, who had been a county surveyor in Oregon. The plan was for Pengra to obtain the grant from Eugene to Winnemucca. Gaston would obtain a grant from Portland to McMinn- ville and from McMinnville to Astoria, then later obtain a grant from McMinnville to Eugene. This would make a through connection from Winnemucca, Nevada, on the Central Pacific to Astoria. In view of such a project, Gaston was able before the passage of the bill by Congress, to negotiate a contract with Philadelphia capitalists for the construction of a hundred and fifty miles of road from Portland to Eugene. So promising was the plan that even Collis P. Huntington had agreed to give Pengra his financial backing. Again we see how the early political history of Oregon was connected with the railroads. Holladay had bought and subsidized papers as well as politicians. Not only that, by such a plan the whole of Southern Oregon would be cut out of a great deal of traffic. It must be remem- bered that Southern Oregon since the gold rush of '49 had not been an insignificant factor. The combined fac- tions, that is the Holladay and Southern Oregon groups, got through the Oregon legislature in 1868 a resolution instructing the Oregon representatives in Congress to "give their paramount support" in order to obtain "Gov- ernment aid for a Railroad from the Big Bend of the Humbolt River, State of Nevada, to the Klamath' Lake, thence through the Rogue River, Umpqua and Willamette