But, in order to secure this capital, it was necessary to publish to the world the enormous profits the earlier companies were making. The effects were twofold and immediate. One was to open the eyes of the farmers of Oregon to the fact that they were paying for the transport to market of their crops sums utterly disproportionate to the cost and risk of the services rendered. And thus it was certain that ere long measures would be taken in the Legislature of Oregon, similar in purport to those adopted in other States, to check and curb the power of discrimination, which was the engine used to force the traffic on to the boats and trains of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. The measure to that end introduced in the session of the Legislature of 1880 was, it is true, defeated by the strenuous efforts of the company, aided by their Portland friends. But that success was dearly bought, and the process was so patent as to awaken the farmers, with whom the real power dwells, in a fashion that will soon be felt.
The other result, equally inevitable, was to call into active life plans, long in preparation, for constructing an east and west line across the State, relying on Yaquina Bay as the outport, and on the trade of the Willamette Valley as the mainstay of the road.
But the enterprise had other features to recommend it. The Willamette Valley and Coast Railroad Company had been originated four or five years back by the farmers of the valley to construct a railroad between Corvallis and Yaquina Bay. It had obtained a charter from the Legislature giving it authority to extend its line across the State to the eastern boundary, at a point directly _en route_ to Boisé City, Idaho.
This had been long ago marked out as the probable limit where connection either with a branch from the Union Pacific Railroad, or with some other road pushing westward to the ocean, might be made.
The Willamette Valley and Coast Railroad received in its charter from the State immunity from taxation for twenty years, and also a grant of all the rich tide and overflowed lands in Benton County, amounting to probably upward of one hundred thousand acres.
Not content with this, the framer of this scheme had obtained the right of purchase, on the basis of value of land in Eastern Oregon ten years ago, of the grant of lands in aid of the construction of the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountains Military Wagon-road, amounting to eight hundred and fifty thousand acres. A sketch of the history of this road has been given before in these pages, and of the character of the country through which it runs.