No record of the amount disposed of in these years is available,[204] but it is known that in 1884 the number of shares standing in the names of Huntington, Stanford, Crocker, and the Hopkins interests was considerably less than a majority of the stock outstanding.[205] Mr. Jackson, employee in the secretary’s office of the Central Pacific in 1885, estimated the amount at from 30,000 to 35,000 shares apiece.[206] According to Mr. Brown, who inventoried the stock of the associates in 1884, the combined holdings of Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and Mrs. Hopkins, including stock in the name of the Pacific Improvement Company, were 157,535 shares out of a total outstanding of 592,755 shares at this date.[207] Timothy Hopkins later suggested that Brown’s figures might have included only stock free and available, and that the associates might have owned other stock pledged as collateral, but this was only a suggestion, without proof. As final bits of evidence, it is on record that Crocker possessed 34,049 shares of Central Pacific stock at his death in 1889,[208] while Stanford told the United States Pacific Railway Commission in 1887 that he owned 32,000 shares.[209] The conclusion to which this evidence leads is that Huntington and his friends did not own as much as 30 per cent of the Central Pacific shares outstanding when they met together in New York in 1884. Their control of the company depended on the proxies which were sent them, and in particular upon the fact that the individual liability imposed on corporation stockholders under California law led new purchasers of Central Pacific stock to delay recording their ownership, or even to place their stock under the name of third persons in New York. Dividends were collected by presentation of coupons clipped from stock certificates.[210] Mr. Klink testified that the majority of the stock was voted by proxy in 1885, and that the bulk of it was in the name of people in the New York office of the company. On the other hand, during the period in which the ownership of the Central Pacific became scattered, the stock of the Southern Pacific continued to be closely held by the original associates: Stanford, Huntington, Crocker, and the estate of Mark Hopkins.