228 LESLIE M. SCOTT
October 24, 1874; session laws, page 15). The project was then promoted by the Oregon Central Pacific Railway Com- pany, of Oregon, incorporated September 16, 1874. The Leg- islature renewed this offer in 1880, to the Astoria and Win- nemucca Railway Company (session laws, page 55). These tenders lapsed. The "narrow gauge," construction of which began in 1878 under Gaston, pursued, in Willamette Valley, the Winnemucca idea of 1870 and 1874. In 1880 William Reid, representing Scotch buyers, rescued the Gaston road from bankruptcy, extended it in 1880-81 south to Airlie and north to Dundee, near Portland, and built a new line from Wil- lamette River near Woodburn, south to Coburg (both lines Southern Pacific since 1887). The project from its beginning aimed at Central Pacific connections and Astoria hoped to be its terminus.
Villard went to the wall in 1884, and in November of that year the O. R. & N. Co. repudiated the "narrow gauge" lease. The hapless Scotch system, run down and dilapidated, re- verted to its foreign owners and to William Reid. Nor could the scheme of Central Pacific connections be then renewed, for Huntington was preparing to secure control of the Oregon & California which he effected in March, 1887.
Thus ended the twenty-year-old plan of connecting Oregon with the Central Pacific in Nevada; never since has it been revived.
Astoria did not give up, however, in 1881, when Villard killed the narrow gauge-Central Pacific project; it kept after him so persistently that near the end of his regime, in 1883, he caused surveys to be run under H. G. Hurlburt In Sep- tember, 1883, when Villard came to Portland with the "last spike" excursion of the Northern Pacific, he found his en- gineers had estimated the cost of the Astoria line at $50,000 a mile a prohibitive figure; whereupon he wrote to E. C. Holden, secretary of the Astoria Chamber of Commerce : "We must, therefore, abandon the project." (Oregonian, Septem- ber 17, 1883). Villard was then at the end of his resources and could not build the Astoria road, however cheaply. He
