I’ve written before about rail development in Oregon and the fierce competition between the East Side line and the West Side line in laying rails around Portland. Ben Holladay was the owner of the successful East Side line, and he had his finger (indeed, his whole fist) in many other transportation projects around Portland and elsewhere in the West.
Ben Holladay began his involvement in Western transportation developments when he bought the Overland Stage line in 1861. In 1862, he also acquired the Pony Express in 1862. Holladay made major improvements on these routes. By 1864, he controlled most of the stage and freight traffic between the Missouri River and Salt Lake City, including more than 2,000 miles of stage lines, thus earning himself the moniker the “Stagecoach King”. https://www.stylemg.com/2018/02/28/167445/in-history-stagecoach-king-ben-holladay Then, in 1866 Holladay sold his stage routes to Wells Fargo for $1.5 million, after realizing that the railroad would make stagecoaches irrelevant.
After disposing of his stagecoach operations, Holladay moved to Oregon, where he owned steamships and also developed the East Side Railroad. After winning the competition with the West Side line, he bought out the West Siders, and built the Oregon and California Railroad Company. That rail line reached Albany, Oregon, by 1870 and Roseburg by 1872. On the West Side of the Willamette, Holladay built rails to Hillsboro by 1871 and extended that line to St. Joseph, Oregon, (near McMinnville) by 1872.
Holladay was also responsible for the development of the first streetcar line in Portland. The Portland Street Railway opened a 2-mile line in December 1872. The line began with four cars and ten horses. The streetcar line was built with rails recycled from another railroad by turning the rails upside down. The line began construction in September 1872, but when the cars arrived, the builders discovered that the cars didn’t fit the rails, and the track had to be rebuilt.
Unfortunately, after 1872, Holladay’s railroad development stalled, due to financial difficulties. With the depression of 1873, Holladay lost most of his fortune.
Apparently, Holladay was not well liked. One source called him “wholly destitute of fixed principles of honesty, morality, or common decency.” Others said he was “illiterate, coarse, boastful, false, and cunning,” and “clever, shrewd, cunning, illiterate, coarse, and completely unscrupulous.” Even his attorney described him as possessing “many of the characteristics of Napoleon.”
I plan to use Holladay as a supporting character in my current novel, and I hope he comes across as unlikeable on my pages as he apparently was in real life. Still, despite his supposedly unpleasant personality, he did much to promote transportation in the West.
What people (fictional or real) have you read about whom you disliked but who were responsible for great achievements?
I had the Chouteau family as villains in my tetralogy Lives in turmoil – namely Auguste and Jean Pierre Chouteau, the town lords of St Louis. They were in real life – one does not get very rich without…availing themselves of any opportunity and harvesting the profits of others’ work.
Lots of places in Missouri are still named after the Chouteaus.