Editing Northern Pacific Railway (section)

===Organization===
[[File:NorthernPacificLandGrant.jpg|thumb|right|Map of NPR Land Grant, c1890]]
The 38th [[United States Congress]] chartered the Northern Pacific Railway Company on July 2, 1864, with the goals of connecting the [[Great Lakes]] with [[Puget Sound]] on the northwestern coast of the [[United States]] on the [[Pacific Ocean]], opening vast new lands for farming, ranching, lumbering and mining, and linking the federal territory of Washington and state of Oregon to the rest of the country (plus connecting the [[Great Plains|northern Great Plains]] of central [[Canada]] to the [[Northern United States|northern states of the U.S]]. and especially its [[Midwestern United States|Midwestern]] big cities, manufacturing centers and markets.<ref name=Gamble>{{cite book |last=Lubetkin |first=M. John |title=Jay Cooke's Gamble-The Northern Pacific Railroad, the Sioux and the Panic of 1873 |publisher=University of Oklahoma Press |location=Norman, OK |pages=32–33 |isbn=978-0-8061-3740-7 |year=2006}}</ref>

The U.S. Congress granted the Northern Pacific Railroad a generous potential bonanza of {{Convert|60|e6acre|sqmi km2}} of land adjacent to the line in exchange for building rail transportation to an undeveloped western territory. [[Josiah Perham]] was elected its first president on December 7, 1864.<ref name=Gamble/> It could not use all the land and in the end took just under two-thirds of the allotted grant of 40 million acres.<ref>{{cite book|author=Carlos A. Schwantes|title=The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=JImlIbueaXcC&pg=PA173|year=1996|publisher=U of Nebraska Press|page=173|isbn=978-0803292284}}</ref>