not well supplied with cash has already been indicated. When the steam locomotive was approaching completion J. C. Ainsworth, the president of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, wrote a letter[1] to C. W. Stevens in which he said
"I have today succeeded in getting Col. Ruckel to arrange for the payment of the 'Pony.Ladd and Tilton agree to pay for it through J. W. Ladd of San Francisco. When he arranges for it give him a bill of sale of the Pony as he is to hold it till he is reimbursed. You will collect the full cost of $4,000 as I do not want the $1,000 paid by Captain Lyles to apply on the 'Pony'."
From this it appears that the builder's price of the little locomotive was $4,000, and that already it was designated as the "Pony" though not yet completed. It seems probable that the name "Pony" was adopted for one of two reasons—a flight of fancy that connected this first unit of a transcontinental railroad with the Pony Express which before the completion of the first overland telegraph line crossed the plains and mountains from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, or a touch of humor that suggested it for the engine as a junior edition of the "iron horse," a name then applied to locomotives much more commonly than in the present period.
On the last day of March, 1862, on board the steamer Pacific, Captain A. M . Burns, the little pioneer engine arrived in Portland. The Pacific under a schedule then in effect by agreement between the owners of the San Francisco-Portland-Puget Sound coastwise steamship Tines, had gone first to Victoria before coming to Portland, so that our pioneer locomotive had been on the water from March 24, when the ship left San Francisco. The Daily Oregonian's local news editor, browsing around for items of interest, discovered the little engine on the wharf, and mistaking it for the locomotive ordered but not yet built for the Oregon Steam Navigation Company's new Dalles
- ↑ Letter J. C. Ainsworth to C. W. Stevens, Febraury 22, 1862.
