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http://www.endgame.org/rrcc-history.html
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Chronology of the Northern Pacific
& Related Land Grant Railroads
compiled by George Draffan
Public Information Network
PO Box 95316, Seattle WA 98145-2316
History isn't dead; it's not even past. -- William Faulkner
References cited correspond to the author's
"Bibliography on Railroad Land Grants, the Northern
Pacific Railroad, & Its Corporate Descendants."
1830 There were 23 miles of railroad in the U.S.
1850 Stephen Douglas arranges checkerboard compromise to create the first
federal land grant railroad, the Illinois Central. Illinois Central Railroad
attorney Abraham Lincoln will soon challenge Stephen Douglas for political
office, and, with the Illinois Central's help, will eventually be elected
president of the United States, from which office he will sign the largest of
the railroad land grants into law.
1850 Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, "the Granger Road," was formed with a 2.8
million acre grant. Between 1870 and 1880, Burlington sold two million acres
to 20,000 people in Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska.
1854 Minnesota & Northwest Railroad charter and grant. Fraud and bribery
caused the grant to be cancelled; the railroad was renamed Minnesota &
Pacific, then the St Paul & Pacific, and eventually the Great Northern. See
this chronology's 1857, 1862, 1879, and 1885 entries.
1857 Minnesota & Northwest rechartered Minnesota & Pacific. Granted five
million acres and several million dollars in Minnesota state bonds. Built
only 10 miles of railroad. Insolvency led to foreclosure in 1860. Reorganized
into the St. Paul & Pacific and the First Division, escaping debts but not
relinquishing grants or franchise rights. Increased grant to ten sections per
mile. Mortgaged railroad and grants to Dutch capitalists for $13 million.
Some $8 million was siphoned to phony construction. Renamed the Great
Northern in 1885-1889.
For a history of stock manipulation and bribery of the Minnesota legislature
by Russell Sage and James Hill, see Gustavus Myers, 1936. For grants, See Rae
(1952) and Gates (1968, p. 362). For grants and construction, see Yenne
(1991, p.56). See also this chronology's 1862 and 1879, and 1889 entries.
1860 There are 30,000 miles of railroad in the U.S.
1860 Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spent $100,000, twice as much as
opponent Stephen Douglas (Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity,
The Buying of the President, Avon Books, 1996, p. 17, citing Louise
Overacker, Money in Elections, Macmillan, 1932, p. 71n). Lincoln had been a
lawyer for railroads, including the Illinois Central, which had received a
land grant with Douglas' support. In 1860, Lincoln and his friend Norman B.
Judd, attorney for the Rock Island Railroad, arranged to give discount rates
to anyone who woul d come to Chicago for the Republican national convention
(Lewis, p. 17, citing Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairire Years, p.
244). Railroad officials joined Lincoln's administration, and Lincoln granted
more land to railroads than any other president (Lewis, p. 17, citing Philip
H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History, Holmes & Meier, 1980, p. 6-7).
1862 Lincoln signed the first Pacific Railway bill. The Union Pacific-Central
Pacific land grant (12 Stat. 489, Ch. 120, July 1, 1862), amended in 1864 (13
Stat. 356, Ch. 216, July 2, 1864), resulted in the Credit Mobilier scandal.
The Union Pacific got more than eleven million acres and $27 million in
bonds; the Central Pacific got eight million acres and $24 million in bonds.
1862 St. Paul & Pacific incorporated (Minnesota state grants in 1857 and 1862
gave ten sections per mile of track, for a total of 3,256,790 acres).
1864 Lincoln signs Northern Pacific land grant (July 2, 1864, Ch. 217, 13
Stat. 365).
1866 NP construction deadline extended (May 7, 1866 time extension to July 4,
1978).
1867 December. The Union Pacific's Credit Mobilier construction company, the
stock of which had been distributed among Congressmen ("where it would do us
the most good," according to U.S. Rep. Oakes Ames), paid its first dividend
-- of one hundred percent. In the ensuing scandal, many politicans were
implicated -- including James Garfield, Schuyler Colfax, and others who were
also involved in the Northern Pacific Railroad (Stewart Holbrook, The Story
of the American Railroads, p. 171).
1868. NP franchise given to eastern financiers.
1868 NP construction deadline extended (July 1, 1868 time extension to July
4, 1879).
1869 Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads - the first
transcontinental - competed with the golden spike in Utah.
1869. Summer. Survey party returns preliminary report which estimates
construction will cost $85 million, while value of land grants will be four
times greater.
1870s In 1870, George Armstrong Custer fought Southern Plains Indians for
resisting railroads; in 1873 the War Dept., at NP's request, served as
protection for railroad survey party in Yellowstone (Brown, 1977, p. 200ff).
1870 NP land grant modified by Joint Resolution 67 of May 31, 1870 (16 Stat.
378), granting additional lands and allowing the sale of mortgage bonds; in
1870-1871 Jay Cooke sold $80 million worth of them. By 1872 the NP owed Cooke
$1.5 million; the next year Cooke collapsed.
1870 There are 53,000 miles of railroad in the U.S.
1870 NP construction began at Thomsons Junction (Duluth) MN and Kalama, WA.
1870 St Paul & Pacific's First Division purchased by NP.
1871 St Paul & Pacific completes 283 miles.
1871 NP bonds in London; see Northern Pacific, 1871 in Bibliography.
1871 NP and the U.S. fight timber poaching on federal lands. NP paid federal
timber agent Tuttle to help arrest poachers -- those who cut federal timber
illegally -- because it feared it would lose its odd-numbered checkerboards
as well. NP attorney Hazard Stevens, the son of the Territorial Governor,
also seized logs cut on federal land -- some three million board feet, or 20
percent of the cut. U.S. attorney L. Holmes assigned a deputy to Stevens, and
gave NP blank subpoenas. Eventually NP was SELLING federal timber; for $100 a
50 cents per thousand board feet, a person could cut federal timber without
interference from Stevens. The U.S. General land Office finally stepped in in
June 1873, and accused Stevens of stealing from the government and the
railroad. Stevens was not charged, but NP fired him. See Ficken, 1987,
p.40,44-47. See also Steen, 1969 (p.46-47) on NP fraud.
1873 Farmers' Anti-Monopoly Convention in Des Moines stated that "all
corporations are subject to legislative control; [such control] should be at
all times so used as to prevent moneyed corporations from becoming engines of
oppression" (Grossman and Adams, Taking Care of Business, p. 18, citing
Martin, History of the Grange Movement, p. 513).
The Grangers and the Populist Movement:
By 1875, there were 800,000 members in 20,000 local Granges (John F. Stover,
American Railroads, p. 127). During the 1877 depression, the first Farmers
Alliance was formed in Texas; unlike the more conservative Grangers, the
Alliances created cooperatives and other alternatives to escape crop-liens,
indebtedness, and corporate domination of their economy. By 1886, there were
100,000 farmers in 2,000 Alliances. By 1887, 200,000 farmers had formed 3,000
Alliances; by 1889, there were 400,000 members in the National Farmers
Alliance that sought political as well as economic reforms. But by 1896, the
Populists had been "enticed" into the Democratic party, and even though
William Jennings Bryan was being funded by Anaconda Copper, Hearst, and other
corporations, big business and the press supported McKinley, in the first
big-money election; Bryan received 6.5 million votes, while McKinley received
7.1 million (White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the
American West, p. 370-377; and Zinn, A People's History of the United States,
p. 279-280, 288-289).
In 1892, with conservative Grover Cleveland's entry to the White House, Henry
Clay Frick wrote to his boss Andrew Carnegie "I cannot see that our interests
are going to be affected one way or the other by the change in
administration." (Carl Degler, The Age of the Economic Revolution 1876-1900
(Scott, Foresman, 1967, p. 129). Though earlier that summer, there had been a
deadly battle between striking steel workers and Pinkerton agents hired by
Frick to secure Carnegie's Homestead, Pennsylvania steel plant. See Leon
Wolff, Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892 and U.S. House of
Representatives, Employment of Pinkerton Detectives, 52d Cong., 2d Sess.,
Report No. 2447, Washington, D.C., 1893).
1873 NP completes Duluth to Bismarck.
1873 NP completes Kalama to Tacoma.
1873 Panic of 1873, precipitated by the failure of NP bonds being sold by Jay
Cooke. Construction of the NP stopped. NP lost the St. Paul & Pacific to GN.
1873 St. Paul & Pacific goes into receivership and foreclosure.
1874 NP defaulted on bond interest.
1874 Windom Senate Committee on railroad abuses.
1874 Granger legislation in Iowa and Wisconsin.
1875 NP, in receivership, is reorganized. A bondholders' committee purchases
NP at foreclosure sale, and the property is reconveyed to the company. By
court order, the grant land, being mostly unpatented, was not sold, as was
required in the May 31, 1870 resolution amending the grant (U.S. Bur Corps,
1913-14, Part 1, p.235).
1876 U.S. Supreme Court rules breaches of land grants don't automatically
return land to government (Schulenberg v. Harriman, 21 Wallace 44).
1876 In Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 114 (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court approved
state regulation of corporations with a public interest, in this case, the
rates grain elevators charged to farmers, writing that "[property] clothed
with the public interest, when used in a manner to make it of public
consequence... must submit to be controlled by the public for the common
good..." and ruled that the reasonableness of rates is a legislative, and not
a judicial, question
Justice Stephen J. Field dissented, aghast at the thought that "if this be
sound law... all property and all business in the state are held at the mercy
of the majority of its legislature." Field's minority opinion, which first
enunciated the view that the 14th Amendment's due process clause should
protect private business from state regulation, soon prevailed in the 1886
Santa Clara case, which actually declared that corporations were persons
protected under the Constitution (Samuel P. Hays, The Response to
Industrialism 1885-1914, p. 159). And in 1886, the state "Granger" laws were
struck down, in Wabash v. Illinois.
1876 NP builds from Tacoma to Wilkeson coal fields (completed 1877).
1876 U.S. Army General George Armstrong Custer, guarding railroad survey and
construction crews, is killed at the battle of the Little Big Horn (Brown,
1978).
1877 railroad strikes - "the Year of Violence."
1878 NP leased Western railroad (Brainerd to Sauk Rapids) for 99 years.
1878 Washington Territory constitutional convention drafts anti-railroad
section (Steen, 1969, p.63, citing Keith A. Murray's 1940 MA thesis, p.114,
and Airey, p.403). The State constitution as "adopted in 1889 contained
mechanism for railroad regulation, but left it up to the legislature to
decide just what was needed" (Steen, p.63. Pages 90-93 further discusses
early attempts at railroad legislation in Washington).
1879 Canada gave the Canadian Pacific Railway $25 million in cash and 25
million acres of land (Greever, 1951, p. 86; a total of 56 million acres were
granted to Canadian land grant railroads; CP relinquished 6.8 million acres
to pay a debt, and other railroads forfeited 17.5 million acres for failure
to build; the shorter lines were consolidated into the Canadian National
Railways system).
1879 St. Paul & Pacific's Dutch bonds are bought by JJ Hill, Hudson Bay, et
al. The bankrupt railroad is renamed the St. Paul, Minneapolis, & Manitoba.
Purchased for $6,780,000, Hill sold the grant land alone for $13 million
(Holbrook, 1953, p.192). The "Manitoba" came in when Hill built a connection
with the Canadian Pacific to get 2.6 million acres further grant lands (Minn.
Gov. signed Jan 9, 1879).
1879 December 15. Judge Sawyer rules against settler's league, leading to the
Mussel Slough massacre on May 11, 1880.
1880s Missoula-based firm Eddy, Hammond & Co. handled timber contracts for
NP, and, with NP and Marcus Daly, formed the Montana Improvement Co. to
supply local rail and mining operations. Somers Lumber Co., near Kalispell,
was a GN subsidiary (Malone, Roeder, and Lang, 1991, p.332).
1880s The Northwestern Improvement Company, a Northern Pacific subsidiary,
was indicted for theft of public timber in Washington; it had logged far from
its railroad right-of-way, and had even set up swamills on public land. It
faced federal suits for several hundred thousand dollars, but witnesses were
hard to find because locals usually favored local industry (Steen, 1969,
p.46-47, citing USDI Reports, 1885, Serial 2378, p.232-234, and 1886, Serial
2468, p.102,441).
The NP itself was indicted in Olympia, Washington for collecting stumpage in
advance for timber cut from "its" land (Steen, 1969, p.47, citing
Fairweather, 1919, p.96-99).
1880s-1890s NP had coal mines around Bozeman Pass in the 1880s; by the 1890s,
NP subsidiary Northwest Improvement Co. was replacing the Bozeman Pass mines
with mines around Red Lodge; by the 1920s, they were open pit mines. GN was
also mining coal by the 1880s, at Great Falls (Malone, Roeder, and Lang,
1991, p.337-338).
1880 May 11. Mussel Slough battle near Visalia, California in which five
settlers and two Southern Pacific Railroad agents were killed. The court
decision which led to the battle had been written by the
railroad-shareholding Ninth Circuit Court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer, who wrote
several decisions granting unlimited privileges to corporations. Orton, 32 F.
457 (C.C.D. Cal. 1879), published in connection with Southern Pacific R.R. v.
Poole, 32 F. 451 (C.C.N.D. Cal. 1887), was one of several cases involving
Sawyer and the Southern Pacific Railroad; see also the 1882 San Mateo and
1886 Santa Clara cases; and David J. Bederman, The Imagery of Injustice at
Mussel Slough: Railroad Land Grants, Corporation Law, and the "Great
Conglomerate West," Western Legal History, Summer/Fall 1988 1(2): 258.
1880 There are 93,000 miles railroad in the U.S.
1880 NP reaches Yellowstone River in Montana.
1880 Drexel, Morgan & Co. participated in a banker's syndicate which raised
$40 million in bonds for the "badly battered" Northern Pacific (Josephson,
1934, p.291-292).
1880-1881 Villard gains control of NP by buying stock, to prevent it from
competing with his O&C, Oregon Central, Oregon Steamship, and Kansas Pacific
businesses (Hedges, 1924 and 1930; Whitesmith, 1931).
1881 St Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba completes 600 miles.
1881 NP Dakota Territory branch lines completed.
1881 Hill bought Minneapolis & St Cloud (along with ten sections of land
grant per mile) (Yenne, 1991, p.60).
1882 In the San Mateo Railroad Tax Case, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Judge
Lorenzo Sawyer declared corporations to be persons; Judge Field was also
involved (County of San Mateo v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 13 F. 722 (C.C.D.
Cal. 1882). See David J. Bederman, The Imagery of Injustice at Mussel Slough:
Railroad Land Grants, Corporation Law, and the "Great Conglomerate West,"
Western Legal History, Summer/Fall 1988 1(2): 258). See the 1886 Santa Clara
decision.
1882 NP held 7.7 million acres in Washington Territory; two million of it was
commercial timberland (Ficken, 1987, p.45).
1882 Hill became president of St Paul, Minneapolis.
188? Hill gets Reservation Act (prohibiting railroads crossing reservations)
changed so railroad can cross Montana.
1882 St Paul, Minneapolis completes 1,058 miles.
1882 NP reaches Big Horn River.
1882 NP completes Wallula to Lake Pend d Oreille.
1883 Southern Pacific construction completed.
1883 Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad construction completed at
Gold Creek, Montana, on September 8; the last spike (the same steel spike
used as the first, at Carletin, Minnesota, in 1870) was driven by Henry
Villard and former U.S. President Grant (Yenne, 1981, p.38).
1883 NP completes Wallula-Tacoma-Portland. The U.S. Division of Forestry
warns that lumbermen were "transferring operations from the nearly exhausted
pineries of the lakes and upper Mississippi to the fir forests beyond the
Rocky Mountains" (Division of Forestry Report, 1883, pp. 447-448).
1883 St Paul, Minneapolis completes 1,350 miles.
1884 Villard resigns as NP president over increasing bond debt and fall in
stock value.
1884 NP completes 2,453 miles (including 478 miles of branches).
1884-1890. Between 1884 and 1887, Congress reclaimed 28 million acres not
earned by five unfinished railroads; in 1887 Interior Secretary Lamar revoked
lieu land withdrawals and restored 21 million acres to public entry; in 1890
the general forfeiture act recovered 5.6 million acres (Greever, 1951, p. 84).
1885 St Paul, Minneapolis completes 1,470 miles.
1885 Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe construction completed.
1885 U.S. General Lands Office Commissioner William Sparks and his timber
agent Haley accuse the Montana Improvement Company (aka Anaconda and Northern
Pacific) with cutting 45 million board feet from public lands, but the
proceedings were dropped when the federal funds allocated to the case were
exhausted (Rae, 1938, p. 17, citing GLO Annual Reports, 1885, pp. 311-312 and
1887, p. 83). The MIC was replaced by the Big Blackfoot Milling Company in
1891 (Toole and Butcher, 1968, p. 354, 356, and 357, citing Land Office
Reports and the Helena Independent Weekly).
1886 U.S. Senate "Cullom" Committee on railroad abuses (leads to Interstate
Commerce Act).
"The [Interstate Commerce] Commission, as its functions have now been limited
by the courts, is, or can be made of great use to the railroads. It satisfies
the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same
time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such
a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the
business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier
between railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against
hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests... The part of
wisdom is not to destroy the Commission but to utilize it" (U.S. Attorney
General Richard Olney, in an 1892 letter to his friend Charles E. Perkins,
president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad; quoted in Robert
Fellmeth's The Interstate Commerce Omission: The Public Interest and the ICC,
Grossman Publishers, 1970, p. xiv-xv).
1886 GN obtains Montana Central.
1886 "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question of whether the
provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a
state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of
the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it
does." With that, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down local taxes on railroad
property--and declared that corporations were persons; Santa Clara County v.
Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886)).
Sixty years later, Justice William O. Douglas stated that "there was no
history, logic or reason given to support that view" (Grossman and Adams,
Taking Care of Business, p. 20, citing Douglas in Wheeling Steel Corporation
v. Glander, 337 U.S. 562, 1949).
There were, however, the facts that U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Judge Lorenzo
Sawyer was a shareholder in the Central Pacific Railroad, and that he and
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field were close friends of Leland
Stanford and other parties involved. "Sawyer was uniquely placed to expand
the rights and prerogatives of corporations," that "what is extraordinary is
the extent to which Sawyer used unorthodox techniques of statutory
interpretation and judicial review in granting the corporation additional
powers... [Sawyer's decisions] "served as an avenue for the expansion of a
corporate construction of economic life, the judicial approval of vast
aggregations of wealth and power, and the subordination of the public trust
under public utilities" (David J. Bederman, The Imagery of Injustice at
Mussel Slough: Railroad Land Grants, Corporation Law, and the "Great
Conglomerate West," Western Legal History, Summer/Fall 1988 1(2): 257-269,
citing Shuck, Bench and Bar in California. See also David C. Frederick,
Railroads, Robber Barons, and the Saving of Stanford University, Western
Legal History, Summer/Fall 1991, 4(2): p. 229, note 20, and p. 253, note 132,
citing Swisher, Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law, p. 265; and Charles
McCurdy's "Justice Field and the Jurisprudence of Government-Business
Relations: Some Parameters of Laissez Faire Constitutionalism, 1863-1897" in
Friedman, Lawrence and Harry N. Scheiber, eds. American Law and the
Constitutional Order: Historical Perspectives. Harvard University Press,
1988).
"... of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court
between 1890 and 1910, nineteen dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with
corporations" (Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 255).
1886 In Wabash v. Illinois, the Supreme Court struck down state Granger laws
regulating railroad rates charged to farmers, declaring that interstate
commerce could only be regulated by the federal government. In 1886 alone,
the Court struck down 230 state laws passed to regulate corporations (Zinn, A
People's History of the United States, p. 255).
1887 U.S. Pacific Railway Commission investigates Central and Southern
Pacific (50th Cong., 1st Sess., Exec. Doc. 51).
1887 The first U.S. regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission,
was created to regulate a "natural" monopoly -- the railroads.
1887 GN completes Great Falls to Helena.
1887-1888 NP crosses Cascades.
1887-1888 NP sells 80,000 acres in Washington to the St. Paul & Tacoma Lumber
Co. The "St. Paul railroad and timber crowd that moved west in 1888 with the
construction of the Northern Pacific" included C.H. Jones; P.D. Norton of the
Weyerhaeuser-related Laird Norton; Addison G. Foster, who was soon a U.S.
Senator from Washington State and fought to reduce the Olympic Forest
Reserve; Chauncy Griggs, partner of Hill and vice president of the St. Paul
and Tacoma Lumber Company (Lien, 1991, p.20); and Henry Hewitt Jr., who in
1890 founded the town of Everett, Washington with John D. Rockefeller,
because of Northern Pacific's arrival, and established mills at Port Gardner
(Ficken, 1987, p. 59, 61, 101; Steen, 1969, p.62, citing Cox, 1937, p.5).
1888 GN reaches Butte, Montana.
1889 Minneapolis & St. Cloud was renamed the Great Northern Railway. In 1890,
Great Northern took over the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba (Yenne, 1991,
p.62ff). The prevalent claim that GN was the only transcontinental built
without federal aid is not true. Most of the lines that went into the GN
system got State and/or federal grants: the Minneapolis & St. Cloud; the St.
Paul & Pacific (1862 grant of 3.3 million acres); and the St. Paul, Minnesota
& Manitoba (1879 grant of 2.6 million acres). See John B. Rae's "The Great
Northern's Land Grant" in the Journal of Economic History, 12 (Spring 1952),
p. 140-145; Paul Gates (1968, p.362); Mercer (1982, p.56), and the Great
Northern entry in our Profiles section.
1889 Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
1890 GN completes 3,260 miles.
1890 There were 164,000 miles of railroad in U.S.
1890 General railroad land grant forfeiture statute (26 Stat. 496). Eleven
railroads forfeited 5.6 million acres, including Southern Pacific (1,075,200
acres) and Northern Pacific (2,000,000 acres). See Ellis, 1946, p.54-55, who
cites U.S. House Reports, 52d Cong., 1st Sess., No. 1426.
1890 Weyerhaeuser, Musser, Laird Norton, and Denkmann buy 212,722 acres in
eight Minnesota counties from the Northern Pacific railroad for $452,330
(Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 1963, p.105-106). The Pine Tree Lumber Co. was
created; its debt was paid off by 1899; over the next five years, Pine Tree
paid 120 percent in dividends and was cutting 70 to 93 million board feet per
year. By 1922, Pine Tree had paid stockholders $11.5 million; Fred
Weyerhaeuser had 11 percent of the stock (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 1963,
p.182, 186). Yet Pine Tree forfeited cutover lands to avoid paying taxes
(Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 1963, p.148-149).
1891 GN issues orders to vacate farmers, some of whom had been there for 20
years, from 65,000 acres of Red River Dakota lands that were to be granted to
the Manitoba Railroad (one of GN's predecessors). The U.S. Supreme Court
agreed. Congress passed an act to allow GN to select federal land in lieu;
Hill picked timberland in Montana, Idaho, and Washington that had been picked
out while on tour with Weyerhaeuser (Holbrook, 1955, p.145-146).
1891 Creative Act authorized forest reserves: Yellowstone was the first in
1892; 14 more (inlcuding the Pacific Forest Reserve) were created in 1893,
for a total of about 14 million acres; in 1897 21 million acres were added by
Cleveland, which McKinley suspended (C. Raines, pers. comm., and Hidy, Hill &
Nevins, p. 291).
1891 March 3. "Between March 1, 1898, and May 15, 1924, 1,103,424 acres in
the first indemnity limits, under the 1864 grant, and 961,992 acres in the
second indemnity limits of the same grant, were withdrawn and placed in
national forests and other Government reservations. During the same period
155,727 acres from the first indemnity limits of the grant of 1870, and
213,001 acres from the second indemnity limits laid down under that grant, w
ere withdrawn for the same purposes. This action was taken, in the main,
pursuant to an Act of March 3, 1891 [28 Stat.1095, 1103] (U.S. v. NP, 311
U.S. 270, 1940). See 1939 entry for eventual decision to compensate NP for
the loss of 1,453,061 acres.
1893 February 20. Pacific Forest Reserve.
1893 A West Coast Lumberman article (April 1893, p.16, cited by Steen, 1969,
p.119) stated that "about a year ago Peter Musser, Frederick Weyerhouser
[sic] and others bought a tract of fine timber land in Oregon, containing
850,000 acres", with a land company incorporated in Iowa and capitalized at
$2 million. In Feb. 1897, the West Coast Lumberman reported (p.153) that
Weyerhaeuser had 264 mills and 24,825,624 acres in Oregon and Washington and
72,843,729 acres "in the white pine and yellow pine districts." As Steen
understates, "these estimates are, of course, patently absurd and should have
been recognized as such... [and] can be viewed either as irresponsible
reporting or blinding awe of the Weyerhaeuser name" (Steen, 1969 p.120).
1893 Great Northern transcontinental railroad completed (St. Paul MN to
Everett WA).
1893 Santa Fe goes into receivership.
1893 Union Pacific goes into receivership.
1893 NP, now composed of 54 railroads, goes into receivership again.
Reorganized as the NP Railway Co. in 1896.
1894 American Railway Union strikes, Coxey's Army of the unemployed, and
other widespread unrest following the panic of 1893. William Hogan and 500
followers broke into the Northern Pacific's Butte, Montana roundhouse and
commandeered a train. U.S. Army troops seized them; trial was held in Helena.
But support for strikers was widespread; Washington State militias refused to
board an NP train manned by a non-ARU crew (Schwantes; and W.T. White, 1984,
p.14, 15).
1894 Barden v. NP (154 U.S. 288, 1894) rules against NP patenting of mineral
lands in Montana.
1894 Pullman strike
1894 Hill and Morgan obtain backing of NP principals and London investors to
combine NP and GN. They get half the NP stock and a majority of the board of
directors. GN stockholder Thomas W. Peterson sues against the merger.
1896 Minnesota Supreme Court held the consolidation of parallel and
"competing" railroads (GN and NP) to be illegal (Pearsall V. GN, 161 U.S.
646), so they are set up with joint ownership by individuals instead of by a
corporation.
1896 September 1. J.P. Morgan refinances NP with 100- and 150-year bonds; the
NP estate was listed as worth $241 million; Morgan received $44 million on
the deal (1924-1928 NP Land Grants Hearings, p. 3013). Morgan's bonds used
grant land as collateral; these liens on the development of the grant lands
were removed in 1988.
Bankrupt NP Railroad sells lands to NP Railway; Railroad ceases to exist;
Railway becomes holding company.
"At the 1896 foreclosure of later mortgages, all patented lands were so sold
[though not in "small tracts" of 160 acres, as required by the May 31, 1870
land grant amendment], but the new railway company was reported in every
instance the highest bidder." At least one claim brought by a settler on
these lands was lost (Heath v. NP, 38 L.D., 770 and "it is established by
many court decisions that Congress alone, rather than individual settlers,
would have the right to challenge the railroad company for nonperformance of
the condition" (U.S. Bur Corps, 1913-14, Part 1, p.235-236).
See October 1897 entry for land transfer to Morgan's Walter Horn.
1896-1900 NP continues branch line construction.
1897 Under threat of foreclosure, NP offers Morgan all its lands for $1.75
million.
1897 February 22. Cleveland signs proclamation creating the Forest Reserves,
effective March 1, 1898; the Pacific Forest Reserve is reformed into a
Rainier Forest Reserve of 2.5 million acres; of which the Northern Pacific
owned nearly half. McKinley then signed the Pettigrew Amendment as an
appropriations rider, suspending the establishment of six Western forest
reserves for a year, in order to let Timber and Stone claims to be made; this
authorized the Forest Reserves to sell timber and stone, use water for
mining, milling, irrigation, etc., and providing in lieu lands for inholders
McKinley (C. Raines, pers. comm, May 1995).
A January 1907 Cosmopolitan Magazine article by Charles Norcross claimed that
Interior Secretary Cornelius Bliss, who urged the amendment, "was then, as
always, a corporation and railroad man. Allison, Hill, and Gorman were the
senators on the committee that passed the bill. It has been charged, and
circumstances lend plausibility to the charge, that the scheme was concocted
in the land office of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company in St. Paul, and
for the benefit of the Weyerhaeuser interests." Norcross (p. 258) shows
railroads that had grant lands within national forest reservations: Santa Fe
(1,368,960 acres), Southern Pacific (543,000 acres), and Northern Pacific
(1,401,000).
HHN (p.293) also discusses the benefits Northern Pacific and Weyerhaeuser
received from the Pettigrew Amendment.
Mount Rainier Park Act & amendments create Mt. Rainier National Park and
Rainier National Forest from the Pacific Forest Reserve. NP traded 450,000
acres of worthless land for 444,159 acres of timberland in OR, WA, ID, MT,
ND, MN, and WI (U.S. Bur. Corps, Part 1, p.237-239).
1897 October. Morgan's Walter B. Horn received 3,075,346 acres and
transferred it to NP's Northwest Improvement Company (1924-1928 NP Land
grants Hearings, p. 3416-3418).
1898 GN completes Washington state feeder lines (east and west sides: Seattle
to New Westminster, BC; Spokane Falls to Nelson, BC; Northport to Rossland,
BC)
1898 Weyerhaeuser establishes the Coast Lumber Co. to market shingles to the
Midwest (Ficken, 1987, p.93).
1899 Rockefeller acquires Anaconda Copper mines, renamed Amalgamated Copper.
1899 NP sells timber in Montana to Big Blackfoot Milling Co. (U.S. Bur.
Corps, Part 1, p.201-202).
1899 Weyerhaeuser establishes the Sound Timber Company with 45,000 acres on
northern Puget Sound (Ficken, 1987, p.93). Weyerhaeuser associate Humbird was
operating the Victoria Lumber & Manufacturing Co. on Vancouver Island
(Ficken, 1987, p.248).
1899 March 2. Mount Rainier Park Act creates the park as subset of the Forest
Reserve. The Northern Pacific traded worthless land for good land in OR, WA,
ID, MT, ND, MN, and WI.
1899 December - January 1900. Northern Pacific sells Washington timberland to
Weyerhaeuser.
Ficken's version:
In the summer of 1899, Weyerhaeuser offered NP $5 an acre for a million
acres. The final deal called for $6 an acre for 900,000 acres west of the
Cascades, and a fifteen-year monopoly on rail transportation of Weyerhaeuser
lumber. Most of the land was in southwest Washington; a quarter of it had
never been surveyed (Ficken, 1987, p.95,97). Weyerhaeuser made the down
payment of $3 million on January 3, 1900. The rest was to be paid in eight
semi-annual payments of $300,000. A third of the $5.4 million price came from
Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the rest from a dozen investors. Thirty percent of
the stock was owned by Weyerhaeuser, 20 percent by Laird, Norton & Co., the
rest by O.H. Ingram, Robert L. McCormick, Sumner T. McKnight, and others
(Ficken, 1987, p.95-99). Previous to this sale, NP had never sold more than
600,000 acres in a year in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho combined (Ficken,
1987, p.248). By March 1900, Weyerhaeuser manager George S. Long's office was
in the NP building in Tacoma (Ficken, 1987, p.96). G.S. Long immediately
began acquiring the even sections "to clean up the... ownership", and had
purchased some 1.5 billion board feet by the end of 1900 (Ficken, 1987,
p.98). Despite selling 19,000 acres of the land between June 1900 and
mid-1903 to small mills to reassure them of a supply of timber (Ficken, 1987,
p.97), company records show Long advising Weyerhaeuser that the big firms
should "continue the policy of adding to their holdings... and thus bring
about at an earlier date the time when they can control the market
conditions" (Ficken, 1987, p.99).
Hidy, Hill & Nevin's version:
The Northern Pacific railroad sells a million acres of forestland along its
Seattle & North branch (Anacortes to Hamilton) in Washington to Frederick
Weyerhaeuser and 15 investors, with an implied obligation to NP to produce
lumber as freight. Weyerhaeuser began purchasing more land to fill in the
railroad land grant checkerboards (HHN p.222). The purchase price was $5.4
million ($3 million down, rest over eight years at five percent interest, to
total $6.5 million). Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann at $1.8 million, Laird Norton
at $1.2 million, rest by others. In 1912 the U.S. Bureau of Corporations
estimated the purchase price to have been ten cents per thousand board feet
for some 17 billion board feet; this was an underestimate (HHN p.213, and
p.226 at note 29). [The underestimate was considerable, since many species,
like hemlock, were considered at the time to be worthless].
1900 J.J. Hill forms the Great Northern Steamship Company, capitalized at $6
million, to run from Seattle to Yokohama and Hong Kong; he envisioned traffic
in lumber, wheat, and cotton. See Best, 1973.
1900 There were 193,000 miles railroad in the U.S.
1900 GN is composed of fifteen railroad's operating over 5,000 miles.
1901 NP and GN jointly acquire 97 percent of the CB&Q (the Burlington),
gaining access to Chicago, Omaha, and St. Louis. The cost of $108 million was
financed by the issuance of bonds (Holbrook, Moguls; Macfarlane, 1953).
1901 Hill and Morgan, fighting E.H. Harriman for control of the Northern
Pacific, create a holding company (Northern Securities) for the NP, GN, and
CB&Q, so that no one can buy control of $400 million conglomerate.
1902 Minnesota (and then U.S.) sued Northern Securities for violation of
Sherman Anti-Trust.
1902 Weyerhaeuser buys the Bell-Nelson Lumber Co. in Everett in January
(Ficken, 1987, p.99).
1903 Elkins Act to strengthen prohibition of rebates.
1904 U.S. Supreme Court rules Northern Securities to be in violation of the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and orders it dissolved (Northern Securities v. U.S.,
193 U.S. 197). "I have not yet read the complete decision," Hill said, "but I
wish to say that the three roads are still there, and there they will remain,
despite the learned jurists of the Supreme Court of the United States. The
properties are as good as ever, and they will continue to make money for
their stockholders" (Yenne, 1981, p.74). The shareholders of each railroad
are given a share of the other railroads' stock. "Two certificates of stock
are now issued instead of one. They are printed in different colors. That is
the main difference," remarked Hill (Holbrook, 1955, p.144). To separate, NP
and GN put a wall down the middle of their St. Paul offices.
1905 NP and GN create the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway.
1906 Lake Superior Co. shares gifted to GN, part of a series of transactions
where GN bought cutover Wright & Davis timberland in the Mesabi Range in
Minnesota, and leased it to U.S. Steel. GN carried some 26 million tons of
iron ore for $45 million (Holbrook, 1955, p.146).
1906 Hepburn Act increases power of ICC, allowing it to set maximum rates.
Prohibits railroads from hauling commodities in which they have an interest
(but courts ruled that holding companies owning railroads and coal mining
could haul the coal on the railroad - U.S. v Delaware & Hudson, 213 U.S. 366,
1913).
1906 NP selected indemnity lands withdrawn for Gallatin National Forest: the
U.S. sues when NP refuses to return them.
1907. Mount Rainier Forest Reserve expanded (C. Raines, pers. comm. May 1995).
1907 NP sells Montana forestland to Amalgamated (Anaconda) Copper. See U.S.
Bureau of Corporations, 1913-1914, Part 1, p.18,234,241; and Schwennesen,
July 21, 1993.
The contract with Anaconda's Marcus Daly included 967,309 acres; the price
agreed on for timber was 50 cents per acre and 50 cents per thousand board
feet (1924-1928 Northern Pacific Land Grants Hearings, p. 3416; the contract
text is printed at p. 3553).
In 1972, Anaconda sold 670,000 acres of this land to Champion International
(Malone, Roeder, and Lang, 1991, p.325-326); the land was included in
Champion's 1993 sale of its Montana timber operations to Plum Creek
(Schwennesen, July 21, 1993). "... Anaconda's timberland in Montana was
assessed at $9.7 million but sold for $117 million..." (Benjamin I. Page, Who
Gets What From Government, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, p.
39).
1907 Pacific Coast Lumber Manufacturer's Association and SW Washington Lumber
Manufacturer's Association filed suit with the ICC against 123 railroads for
violating rate regulations; Hill and Harriman were accused of fixing rates.
Hill testified in March 1908. The ICC ruled partially in favor of the
lumbermen (Steen, 1969, p.200-201).
1907 In March, the Great Northern Steamship "Dakota" struck a rock in Tokyo
Bay and sank. See Best, 1973.
1907 Hill resigns as GN president and becomes chairman; replaced by son Louis.
1908 Spokane, Portland & Seattle, operated jointly by GN and NP, is finished.
1908. "Last opening of Indian country to homesteaders"; via the Milwaukee
Railroad, on the Standing Rock Reservation, at Lemmon, South Dakota (Kathleen
Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography).
1910 Mann-Elkins Act strengthens ICC by plugging loopholes regarding short
and long haul rates.
1910 There are 240,000 miles railroad in the U.S.
1910 Glacier National Park bill passed, with lobbying by JJ Hill. GN built
the Glacier Park and the Many Glacier Hotels (opened in 1913 and 1915). GN
subsidiary Glacier Park Co. ran the park concession until 1961, when Don
Hummel bought it; Greyhound took over in 1981 (Yenne, 1991, p.80-82).
1910 J. J. Hill, at the National Conservation Congress, supports state rather
than federal control of forests (Lien, 1991, p.45, citing Robbins, 1976,
p.349).
1910 Yale gives J.J. Hill an honorary Doctor of Law degree. Harvard Business
School later named a professorship after Hill.
1910 Wellington, Washington; 96 killed.
1911 GN, building south through Oregon, agrees to stop at Bend, ending the
Hill-Harriman "Deschutes rail war." Harriman's Southern Pacific gets the
route to San Francisco; Louis Hill gets Minnesota lumbermen to build two
ponderosa pine mills (Brooks Scanlon).
1912 Hill resigns as GN chairman; replaced by son Louis.
1913 U.S. v. Delaware & Hudson, 213 U.S. 366, ruled that holding companies
owning railroads and coal mining could haul the coal on the railroad,
contradicting Hepburn Act prohibition.
1913-1914. The U.S. Bureau of Corporations "The Lumber Industry" report shows
(Part 1, p.15-17) the three largest holders of timber in the U.S. to be
Southern Pacific (71 bbf in Oregon and 35 bbf in California, on some
3,842,000 timbered acres of its 13,879,932-acre total holdings); Northern
Pacific (36.2 bbf on 3 million timbered acres of its total 9,950,000 acres);
and Weyerhaeuser (77 bbf in Washington and 18.7 bbf in Oregon, on some
1,945,000 acres). The three were estimated to hold 11 percent of the timber
in the U.S.
Weyerhaeuser had obtained most of its timber from the NP. The Bureau said
Weyerhaeuser-associated companies owned almost 291.9 billion board feet of
timber in the Pacific Northwest (228.5 bbf), the South (48.7 bbf), and the
the Lake States (14.7 bbf). Of the 1,945,000 acres owned by Weyerhaeuser,
1,525,000 acres, or 78 percent, was purchased from the Northern Pacific (U.S.
Bureau of Corporations, 1913, p.18,103).
The reaction of Weyerhaeuser-related Potlatch manager A.W. Laird (of the
Weyerhaeuser-related Laird-Norton company) was that Gifford Pinchot's
"'timber famine'... propaganda worked a very serious harm to the lumber
industry by concentrating in private hands large bodies of timber for
speculative purposes that have been subsequently forced upon the market
through the sawmill channel of liquidation and increased burden of a
legitimate operator" (Quoted in Timberman, Aug. 1915, p.31, according to
Steen, 1969, p.234).
1915 Three million acres of O&C land were revested (O&C v. U.S., 238 U.S.
393, 1915). Timber sold to highest bidder; proceeds split between feds,
state, counties.
-----
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All My Relations.
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Amen.
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