Wallis Nash: an English Thief in Corvallis, Oregon
Wallis Nash operated an English law office with Judah Benjamin, the fugitive slaver, when a convict calling himself 'Colonel' Thomas Edgarton Hogg walked into Wallis Nash's English law office with a proposal: Hogg would pay Nash to come to Oregon and return to England, pretending to be a tourist who had somehow stumbled upon a golden investment opportunity in a remote little Oregon town. The 'investment opportunity' was Hogg's railroad scam.
Nash was a man of few principles and made his trip and wrote his tract, actually a book intended to appear like the travel journals popular in his day. Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, for example, sold 70,000 copies its first year.
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| A clickable map of Mark Twain's travels in Innocents Abroad, from UV. |
Hogg had previously raised vast amounts of capital from investors in San Francisco, though not an inch of railroad had as yet been built. More than 5 million dollars, an enormous sum after the Civil War - would eventually be listed as being unaccounted for.
The English who followed Nash fared better than their San Franciscan predecessors. Having had the experience of 3 centuries in bilking the peoples of India and China, the English syndicate, they found America, and the various laws for homesteads and mining, ripe for fraud. Steven A.D. Puter, eventually imprisoned for Land Fraud, described one method:
"As soon as the land was surveyed and thrown open to entry, the California Redwood Company, with offices in Eureka, began to hire men to file on the entire tract under the Timber and Stone Act referred to. At that time, the persons desiring to avail themselves of its provisions, were not required to make a personal examination of the portions they wished to file on, nor were they obliged to go to the land office to make final proof. All that was necessary in this connection was for the entryman [an 'entryman' was the the person whose name appeared on the application] to appear at the land office at the time of making the filing, exhibit his first papers to show that he was either a citizen of the United States, or had declared his intention to become such, or, in the case of his being a bona-fide citizen, to make oath to that effect, and his entry would be allowed. This law has since been amended, so as to necessitate the personal appearance of the entryman at the land office, both at the time of filing and when making final proof. Under these conditions, the company was enabled to run men into the land office by the hundreds. I have known agents of the company to take at one time as many as twenty-five men from “Coffee Jack’s’ ...to the county court house, where they would take out their first papers, declare their intention to become citizens of the-United States, after which they would proceed direct to the land office and make their filings, all the location papers having previously been made out. Then they would appear before Fred W. Bell, a notary public, and execute an acknowledgement of a blank deed, receive the stipulated price of $50, and return to their ships, or to the boarding house from whence they came. The description of the tract filed on was afterwards inserted and the transfer of title completed to the corporation. As fast as this land came into the market, the company gobbled it all up in this fashion, and as soon as the whole tract had been secured, they sent their representative, Edward Everdeen, who was then connected with the Humboldt County Bank, to England, where a sale of the entire body of land embraced in a number of different townships, was consummated to a Scotch syndicate. Pending the transfer to the Scottish syndicate, the California Redwood Company was pulling out the patents to the different claims pretty fast, and at a cost of $25 each. Concluding that they could get the patents more quickly and at a cheaper figure, by sending their own attorney to Washington, D. C., they adopted this course, but it proved disastrous, as the General Land Office evidently became cognizant of the fact that there was an abnormal rush for the issuance of patents, and it excited their suspicions that a fraud was being perpetrated. In consequence, all the unpatented claims were suspended by order of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and special agents sent out to investigate and report on the status of the entries. The first agent that put in an appearance was soon picked up by the company at Eureka. His report to the Commissioner did not indicate that any frauds were being committed, and other agents that followed him told the same story, because they, too, had been bought off. Special Agent B. F. Bergin, the fourth one sent out, was made of the right kind of stuff, and could not be purchased..."
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| In this photo, taken by the wife of the Land Office Registrar in 1907, 224 Oregonians line up to fraudulently 'homestead' Forest Reserve land. It was, of course, impossible in 1907, to make a living farming 360 acres of uncleared land, as the law required each to do in order to be eligible. |
Puter's techniques were profitable. They were, however, dwarfed by the profits in wagon roads and railroads. Between 1850 and 1870, ten percent of the lower 48 states given to railroad companies, ostensibly to build transcontinental railroads. In reality, the railroads themselves usually ended in receivership after having sold the land or used it as security to raise immense sums of capital which then disappeared, as with Hogg, Avery and Nash, for example. The money wasn't in railroads. It was in the land, and especially the timber stands on the land.
The Northern Pacific Railroad was given 40 million acres in a 100-mile wide band running 2,000 miles from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound, most of which was sold to Weyerhaeuser and other companies.
It was the land that interested Hogg, not the railroad business, when he first broached the idea with Nash. He told Nash that he had been a Colonel in the Civil War, and
"that after the war, that left him a prisoner at Fort Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay, he spent some time recovering fully from wounds and sufferings in war, and then he found himself at loose ends, all his property in New Orleans, where he had been a merchant, having disappeared. He said that he had heard of large Government grants of lands in Oregon for road construction." (-Wallis Nash, There and Back in 1877)
Hogg and Nash teamed up with Joe Avery and secured land for both railroads and wagon roads. The connection with Avery was useful for the favorable articles which spewed daily from the local newspaper, and for the local capital which flowed into the trio's hands. It was also useful when the Morrill Act establishing OSU (then Oregon Agricultural College, because Avery, as the town's founder, had himself appointed as head of the 3-person Board of Commissioners which picked out the 90,000 acres land for the College, provided by the federal government as an endowment. As the alumni association writes it:
"In later years, the work of Avery’s committee was criticized for neglecting what was called a "golden opportunity" to acquire valuable timber lands that would in time be worth millions. Instead, the farming acreage they chose was very hard to sell because of its isolation. In fact, many years would pass before income derived from these sales would be of much help.
In their defense, it must be noted Avery
and company may have been handicapped in going after these lands by forces
beyond their control. The period 1868-1883 is generally considered the great age
of railroad construction in the Pacific Northwest. At the same time the Morrill
Act was authorizing land grants to help create a system of agricultural schools
for the country, the federal government was also giving land
grants to railroad company investors, men like Ben Hallady, Henry Villard, T.
Edgenton Hogg, Wallace Nash and others, to help fund the construction of rail
lines throughout the region."
In reality, Ben Halloday never
built railroads west of the Albany. As president of Northern Pacific, Henry
Villard was no more a competitor in Oregon than he was elsewhere in the nation.
Avery, however, was in business with Nash and Hogg, which means he was, when
picking out the land for OSU, careful to avoid the lucrative timberlands which
the trio wanted for their railroad and wagon grants, and instead chose marginal
and isolated homesteads for the university, an ironic development since in its
later attempts at currying respectability, OSU asked Nash to sit on its Board,
which he did, and named Nash Hall after a man who had stolen bread from the
mouths of students and faculty alike.
Nash prospered and eventually retired to his estate north of Corvallis (Nashville). The railroad schemes which he and Hogg and Avery and hundreds like them, across the United States would eventually give rise to the creation of the Grange movement, the Populist and Progressive movements, and Frank Norris's best seller, the Octopus.