Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/321

OREGON AND CALIFORNIA RAILROAD 283 is no doubt that his moral character was not the best. There is no doubt he practiced deceit, especially in ob- taining sales for the bonds. Yet, on the other hand, he took an organization without funds, without credit, and gained loans to build the road. As I have attempted to show, other conditions over which he had no control were probably more potent in bringing his failure than actual mismanagement of the road. The writers that have written on the history of rail- roads, with the exception of one, have been opposed to the East Side Company. Gaston wrote the first account and each successive writer followed him. Of course, Gaston would be against Holladay; Holladay had beaten him out of the land grant and had forced him out of the Oregon Central Company (West Side). With little deviation from Gaston's account, Bancroft relates the story of the railroads, and thus Gaston's account came into vogue. Later Gaston entered into the historical field and there poured out his spleen against Holladay until the whole history of the railroad has been painted with this violent partisanship. It is plain to see that in matters of finance, Holladay outclassed Gaston or any of Gaston's colleagues, and there is little proof to all the charges of corruption made against Holladay. We are not holding that nothing dis- honest was done by Holladay, but we are holding that that phase of his career has been greatly over-emphasized while his contributions toward railroad building have been overlooked. (To be continued) I m