

Pirate, jailbird, hustler, tycoon: “Colonel” Hogg and his railroad

Desperate for some ready cash after his steamer wrecked on the beach, the would-be magnate hastily built a “railroad to nowhere” over Santiam Pass in an attempt to swindle the federal government. It probably would have worked, but ...

The aftermath of a train wreck on the Oregon Pacific Railroad line during the 1880s, when T. Edgenton Hogg was running the line. (Image: Salem Public Library)



A portrait of Colonel T. Edgenton Hogg as he appeared in 1862, when he was a confederate privateer. (Image: Oregon Historical Society)

The sawed-off mountaintop the railroad grade traverses as it does this is named after the man who built that track — a charismatic hustler named “Colonel” Thomas Edgenton Hogg (pronounced "hoag").

Colonel Hogg was, at one time or another, a pirate, a shipping magnate, a jailbird lifer (in Alcatraz, no less) and a railroad baron. He was, it seems, always a hustler, forever working one angle or another.


Hogg’s pseudo-Naval career was not a long one, but it was more bonkers than you can probably imagine (here's a link to an Offbeat Oregon column telling the full story). In short, the problem was, although a privateer is technically a type of pirate, privateers are not expected to act like pirates. They’re supposed to act like Navy officers. Navy officers don't typically disguise themselves as civilian passengers aboard enemy civilian freighters, hijack them on the high seas, maroon their crews on a wild remote coast, sail to Belize, and sell the stolen cargo to the British, lying about where it came from. But, that's exactly what Hogg and his men did.

When the British learned the real story, they not only refused to  do business with him but had a good try at arresting him, forcing him to flee the country and abandon his newly-conquered ship.

Then Hogg tried to run the same play again, but this time on a Yankee steamer that could be outfitted with guns and put into service as a Confederate commerce raider. But the Yankees found out about the plan, and when Hogg and his men boarded the ship they planned to hijack, they found a small, well-armed detachment of Union troops waiting for them.




The 150-year-old rock cribbing on the side of Hogg Rock as it appeared around 2010, leading up to and over the pass and ending in the middle of nowhere. (Image: Curtis Irish)





Santiam Pass as seen from Hoodoo. The potato-shaped promontory in the foreground is Hogg Rock; the highway traveling nearly all the way around it is U.S. Highway 20; and the peak in the background is Three Finger Jack. (Image: Shaun Che)







The S.S. Yaquina City, T. Edgenton Hogg’s steamer, stranded on the beach by the entrance to the bay after a rudder cable snapped at an inopportune time. (Image: Salem Public Library)











(Sources: Marcola-area historian Curtis Irish; “Colonel Hogg’s Great Railroad to the Pacific,” Oregon Coast Aquarium Oceanscape Network, oceanscape.aquarium.org; Sandler, Rich. The Rise and Fall of Yaquina City, a research paper written for Geography 422 at Oregon State University, 2008)

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