by Hill, the company now
entered upon a new stage in its career.

The outstanding dramatic event in the story of the modern Northern
Pacific was the famous corner which occurred in the spring of 1901 as a
result of a contest between the Hill and the Harriman interests for the
control of the property. The details of this operation, which sent the
price of Northern Pacific stock up to $1000 a share and precipitated a
stock-market panic, form part of the story of the Harriman lines. The
contest resulted in the formation of the Northern Securities Company, a
corporation of $400,000,000 capital, devised as a holding company under
the joint control of the Hill and Harriman interests, for the purpose of
retaining a majority of the stocks of the Northern Pacific and the Great
Northern.

The Hill interests, jointly with the Morgan control of the Northern
Pacific, had been quietly accumulating stock in the Chicago, Burlington
and Quincy Railroad, and Harriman felt that there was grave danger to
the Union Pacific in this move, as the Burlington had already penetrated
into the Union Pacific territory and might at any time start to build
through to the coast its own line parallel to the Union Pacific.
Harriman consequently began to buy up Northern Pacific stock in the open
market and thus, together with the efforts of the Hill and Morgan people
to retain and strengthen their control, brought about the corner.

The Northern Securities Company was designed to harmonize all interests
and to keep the control of the Burlington property jointly in the hands
of Harriman and Hill. But as the result of a suit under the Sherman
AntiTrust Act, this combination was declared illegal, and in 1904 the
company was dissolved. The final outcome of the situation was that the
Northern Pacific, sharing with the Great Northern the joint control
of the Burlington lines, was left indisputably in the hands of the
Hill-Morgan group, where it has ever since remained. These three great
railroad systems, the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, and the
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, constituting nearly twenty thousand
miles of railroad, have been known ever since as Hill lines.

Since the dramatic days of the Harriman-Hill contest the history of the
Northern Pacific system has been simply a striking reflection of the
growth in population and wealth of the great Northwest. The States
through which it operates have grown with astounding rapidity during
the