When the Fire-Canoes Took the Place of the Log-Canoes
Variety of Craft that have Navigated the Columbia--The _Beaver_,
_Carolina_, _Columbia_, and _Lot Whitcomb_--Beginning of Steamboating
above the Cascades--Steamboats above The Dalles--Rival Companies on
the River--The Oregon Steam Navigation Company--Great Business
Developments of the Decade of the Sixties--Specimen Shipments in
1862--The Steamboat Ride from Portland to Lewiston--Some of the
Steamboat Men of the Period--Story of W. H. Gray and his Sailboat on
the Snake River--Descending The Dalles--Captain Coe's Account of the
First Steamboat Ride on the Upper Columbia and the Snake--Navigation
above Colville and on the Lakes--The Locks and Prospects of Future
Navigation--Remarkable Trips on the River--Some Steamboats of the
Present.
We have learned that our River has been navigated by boats of almost every
description. At one time it was the hollowed cedar-log canoes of the
aborgines. Again, the bateaux of the trappers were the chief craft to cut
the blue lakes and the white rapids. At yet other times it was the
flat-boats of the immigrants. Sailing ships of every sort--frigates,
galleons, caravels, men-of-war, full-rigged ships, barks, brigs,
schooners, and sloops--crowded early to the silver gate of the River.
In due process of time the "Fire-canoes," as the natives called steamers,
let loose their trails of smoke amid the tops of the "continuous woods."
The _Beaver_, a small steamship belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company
and sent from England, entered the River in 1836, the first steamer to ply
these waters. The Company afterwards sent her to Puget Sound, and, if we
are correctly informed, she is still afloat on the Gulf of Georgia. In
1850 the first American steamship, the _Carolina_, crossed the Bar. In the
same year a little double-ender, called the _Columbia_, began running
between Portland and Astoria.
[Illustration: Tirzah Trask, a Umatilla Indian Girl--Taken as an Ideal of
Sacajawea. Photo. by Lee Moorehouse, Pendleton.]
The first river steamer of any size to ply upon the Willamette and
Columbia was the _Lot Whitcomb_. This steamer was built by Whitcomb and
Jennings. J. C. Ainsworth was the first captain, and Jacob Kamm was the
first engineer. Both these men became leaders in every species of
steamboating enterprise. In 1851 Dan Bradford and B. B. Bishop inaugurated
a movement to connect the up-river region with the lower river by getting
a small iron propeller called the _Jason P. Flint_ from the East and
putting her together at the Cascades, whence she made the run to Portland.
The _Flint_ has been named as first to run above the Cascades, but the
author has the authority of Mr. Bishop for stating that the first steamer
to run above the Cascades was the _Eagle_. That steamer was brought in
sections by Allen McKinley to the upper Cascades in 1853, there put
together, and set to plying on the part of the river between the Cascades
and The Dalles. In 1854, the _Mary_ was built and launched above the
Cascades, the next year the _Wasco_ followed, and in 1856 the _Hassalo_
began to toot her jubilant horn at the precipices of the mid-Columbia. In
1859 R. R. Thompson and Lawrence Coe built the _Colonel Wright_, the
first steamer on the upper section of the River. In the same year the same
men built at the upper Cascades a steamer called the _Venture_. This craft
met with a curious catastrophe. For on her very first trip she swung too
far into the channel and was carried over the upper Cascades, at the point
where the Cascade Locks are now located. She was subsequently raised,
rebuilt, and rechristened the _Umatilla_.
This part of the period of steamboat building was cotemporary with the
Indian wars of 1855 and 1856. The steamers, _Wasco_, _Mary_, and _Eagle_
were of much service in rescuing victims of the murderous assault on the
Cascades by the Klickitats.
While the enterprising steamboat builders were thus making their way
up-river in the very teeth of Indian warfare, steamboats were in course of
construction on the Willamette. The _Jennie Clark_ in 1854 and the _Carrie
Ladd_ in 1858 were built for the firm of Abernethy, Clark & Company. These
both, the latter especially, were really elegant steamers for the time.
The close of the Indian wars in 1859 saw a quite well-organised steamer
service between Portland and The Dalles, and the great rush into the upper
country was just beginning. The _Senorita_, the _Belle_, and the
_Multnomah_, under the management of Benjamin Stark, were on the run from
Portland to the Cascades. A rival steamer, the _Mountain Buck_, owned by
Ruckle and Olmstead, was on the same route. These steamers connected with
boats on the Cascades-Dalles section by means of portages five miles long
around the rapids. There was a portage on each side of the River. That on
the north side was operated by Bradford & Company, and their steamers
were the _Hassalo_ and the _Mary_. Ruckle and Olmstead owned the portage
on the south side of the River, and their steamer was the _Wasco_. Sharp
competition arose between the Bradford and Stark interests on one side and
Ruckle and Olmstead on the other. The Stark Company was known as the
Columbia River Navigation Company, and the rival was the Oregon
Transportation Company. J. C. Ainsworth now joined the Stark party with
the _Carrie Ladd_. So efficient did this reinforcement prove to be that
the Transportation Company proposed to them a combination. This was
effected in April, 1859, and the new organisation became known as the
Union Transportation Company. This was soon found to be too loose a
consolidation to accomplish the desired ends, and the parties interested
set about a new combination to embrace all the steamboat men from Celilo
to Astoria. The result was the formation of the Oregon Steam Navigation
Company, which came into legal existence on December 20, 1860. Its stock
in steamboats, sailboats, wharf-boats, and miscellaneous property was
stated at $172,500.
Such was the genesis of the "O. S. N. Co." In a valuable article by Irene
Lincoln Poppleton in the _Oregon Historical Quarterly_ for September,
1908, to which we here make acknowledgments, it is said that no assessment
was ever levied on the stock of this company, but that from the proceeds
of the business the management expended in gold nearly three million
dollars in developing their property, besides paying to the stockholders
in dividends over two million and a half dollars. Never perhaps was there
such a record of money-making on such a capitalisation.
The source of the enormous business of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company
was the rush into Idaho, Montana, and Eastern Oregon and Washington by the
miners, cowboys, speculators, and adventurers of the early sixties. The
up-river country, as described more at length in another chapter, wakened
suddenly from the lethargy of centuries, and the wilderness teemed with
life. That was the great steamboat age. Money flowed in streams. Fortunes
were made and lost in a day.
When first organised in 1860, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company had a
nondescript lot of steamers, mainly small and weak. The two portages, one
of five miles around the Cascades and the other of fourteen miles from The
Dalles to Celilo Falls, were unequal to their task. The portages at the
Cascades on both sides of the River were made by very inadequate wooden
tramways. That at The Dalles was made by teams. Such quantities of freight
were discharged from the steamers that sometimes the whole portage was
lined with freight from end to end. The portages were not acquired by the
company with the steamboat property, and as a result the portage owners
reaped the larger share of the profits. During high water the portage on
the Oregon side at the Cascades had a monopoly of the business, and it
took one-half the freight income from Portland to The Dalles. This was
holding the whip-hand with a vengeance, and the vigorous directors of the
steamboat company could not endure it. Accordingly, they absorbed the
rights of the portage owners, built a railroad from Celilo to The Dalles
on the Oregon side, and one around the Cascades on the Washington side.
The company was reorganised under the laws of Oregon in October, 1862,
with a declared capitalisation of two million dollars.
Business on the River in 1863 was something enormous. Hardly ever did a
steamer make a trip with less than two hundred passengers. Freight was
offered in such quantities at Portland that trucks had to stand in line
for blocks, waiting to deliver and receive their loads. New boats were
built of a much better class. Two rival companies, the Independent Line
and the People's Transportation Line, made a vigorous struggle to secure a
share of the business, but they were eventually overpowered. Some
conception of the amount of business may be gained from the fact that the
steamers transported passengers to an amount of fares running from $1000
to $6000 a trip. On April 29, 1862, the _Tenino_, leaving Celilo for the
Lewiston trip, had a passenger load amounting to $10,945, and a few trips
later reported receipts of $18,000, for freight, passengers, meals, and
berths. The steamships sailing from Portland to San Francisco showed
equally remarkable records. On June 25, 1861, the _Sierra Nevada_ conveyed
a treasure shipment of $228,000; July 14th, $110,000; August 24th,
$195,558; December 5th, $750,000. The number of passengers carried on The
Dalles-Lewiston route in 1864 was 36,000 and the tons of freight were
21,834.
It was a magnificent steamboat ride in those days from Portland to
Lewiston. The fare was sixty dollars; meals and berths, one dollar each. A
traveller would leave Portland at five A.M. on, perhaps, the _Wilson G.
Hunt_, reach the Cascades sixty-five miles distant at eleven A.M., proceed
by rail five miles to the upper Cascades, there transfer to the _Oneonta_
or _Idaho_ for The Dalles, passing in that run from the humid, low-lying,
heavily timbered West-of-the-mountains, to the dry, breezy, hilly
East-of-the-mountains. Reaching The Dalles, fifty miles farther east, he
would be conveyed by another portage railroad, fourteen miles more, to
Celilo. There the _Tenino_, _Yakima_, _Nez Perce Chief_, or _Owyhee_ was
waiting. With the earliest light of the morning the steamer would head
right into the impetuous current of the River, bound for Lewiston, two
hundred and eighty miles farther yet, taking two days, sometimes three,
though only one to return. Those steamers were mainly of the
light-draught, stern-wheel structure, which still characterises the
Columbia River boats. They were swift and roomy and well adapted to the
turbulent waters of the upper River.
The captains, pilots, and pursers of that period were as fine a set of men
as ever turned a wheel. Bold, bluff, genial, hearty, and obliging they
were, even though given to occasional outbursts of expletives and
possessing voluminous repertoires of "cuss-words" such as would startle
the effete East. Any old Oregonian who may chance to cast his eyes upon
these pages will recall, as with the pangs of childhood homesickness, the
forms and features of steamboat men of that day; the polite yet determined
Ainsworth, the brusque and rotund Reed, the bluff and hearty Knaggs, the
frolicsome and never disconcerted Ingalls, the dark, powerful, and
nonchalant Coe, the patriarchal beard of Stump, the loquacious
"Commodore" Wolf, who used to point out to astonished tourists the
"diabolical strata" on the banks of the River, the massive and
good-natured Strang, the genial and elegant O'Neil, the suave and witty
Snow, the tall and handsome Sampson, the rich Scotch brogue of McNulty,
and dozens of others, whose combined adventures would fill a volume. One
of the most experienced pilots of the upper River was Captain "Eph"
Baughman, who has been running on the Snake and Columbia rivers for fifty
years, and is yet active at the date of this publication. W. H. Gray, who
came to Waiilatpu with Whitman as secular agent of the mission, became a
river man of much skill. He gave four sons, John, William, Alfred, and
James, to the service of the River, all four of them being skilled
captains. A story narrated to the author by Captain William Gray, now of
Pasco, Washington, well illustrates the character of the old Columbia
River navigators. W. H. Gray was the first man to run a sailboat of much
size with regular freight up Snake River. That was in 1860 before any
steamers were running on that stream. Mr. Gray built his boat, a fifty-ton
sloop, on Oosyoos Lake on the Okanogan River. In it he descended that
river to its entrance into the Columbia. Thence be descended the Columbia,
running down the Entiat, Rock Island, Cabinet, and Priest Rapids, no mean
undertaking of itself. Reaching the mouth of the Snake, he took on a load
of freight and started up the swift stream. At Five-mile Rapids he found
that his sail was insufficient to carry the sloop up. Men had said that it
was impossible. His crew all prophesied disaster. The stubborn captain
merely declared, "There is no such word as fail in my dictionary." He
directed his son and another of the crew to take the small boat, load her
with a long coil of rope, make their way up the stream until they got
above the rapid, there to land on an islet of rock, fasten the rope to
that rock, then pay it out till it was swept down the rapid. They were
then to descend the rapid in the small boat. "Very likely you may be
upset," added the skipper encouragingly, "but if you are, you know how to
swim." They were upset, sure enough, but they did know how to swim. They
righted their boat, picked up the end of the floating rope, and reached
the sloop with it. The rope was attached to the capstan, and the sloop was
wound up by it above the swiftest part of the rapid to a point where the
sail was sufficient to carry, and on they went rejoicing. Any account of
steamboating on the Columbia would be incomplete without reference to
Captain James Troup, who was born on the Columbia, and almost from early
boyhood ran steamers upon it and its tributaries. He made a specialty of
running steamers down the Dalles and the Cascades, an undertaking
sometimes rendered necessary by the fact that more boats were built in
proportion to demand on the upper than the lower River. These were taken
down the Dalles, and sometimes down the Cascades. Once down, they could
not return. The first steamer to run down the Tumwater Falls was the
_Okanogan_, on May 22, 1866, piloted by Captain T. J. Stump.
The author enjoyed the great privilege of descending the Dalles in the _D.
S. Baker_ in the year 1888, Captain Troup being in command. At that
strange point in the River, the whole vast volume is compressed into a
channel but one hundred and sixty feet wide at low water and much deeper
than wide. Like a huge mill-race this channel continues nearly straight
for two miles, when it is hurled with frightful force against a massive
bluff. Deflected from the bluff, it turns at a sharp angle to be split in
sunder by a low reef of rock. When the _Baker_ was drawn into the suck of
the current at the head of the "chute" she swept down the channel, which
was almost black, with streaks of foam, to the bluff, two miles in four
minutes. There feeling the tremendous refluent wave, she went careening
over and over toward the sunken reef. The skilled captain had her
perfectly in hand, and precisely at the right moment, rang the signal
bell, "Ahead, full speed," and ahead she went, just barely scratching her
side on the rock. Thus close was it necessary to calculate distance. If
the steamer had struck the tooth-like point of the reef broadside on, she
would have been broken in two and carried in fragments on either side.
Having passed this danger point, she glided into the beautiful calm bay
below and the feat was accomplished. Captain J. C. Ainsworth and Captain
James Troup were the two captains above all others to whom the company
entrusted the critical task of running steamers over the rapids.
In the _Overland Monthly_ of June, 1886, there is a valuable account by
Captain Lawrence Coe of the maiden journey of the _Colonel Wright_ from
Celilo up what they then termed the upper Columbia.
This first journey on that section of the River was made in April, 1859.
The pilot was Captain Lew White. The highest point reached was Wallula,
the site of the old Hudson's Bay fort. The current was a powerful one to
withstand, no soundings had ever been made, and no boats except canoes,
bateaux, flatboats, and a few small sailboats, had ever made the trip. No
one had any conception of the location of a channel adapted to a
steamboat. No difficulty was experienced, however, except at the Umatilla
Rapids. This is a most singular obstruction. Three separate reefs, at
intervals of half a mile, extend right across the River. There are narrow
breaks in these reefs, but not in line with each other. Through them the
water pours with tremendous velocity, and on account of their irregular
locations a steamer must zigzag across the River at imminent risk of being
borne broadside on to the reef. The passage of the Umatilla Rapids is not
difficult at high water, for then the steamer glides over the rocks in a
straight course.
In the August _Overland_ of the same year, Captain Coe narrates the first
steamboat trip up Snake River. This was in June, 1860, just at the time of
the beginning of the gold excitement. The _Colonel Wright_ was loaded with
picks, rockers, and other mining implements, as well as provisions and
passengers. Most of the freight and passengers were put off at Wallula, to
go thence overland. Part continued on to test the experiment of making way
against the wicked-looking current of Snake River. After three days and a
half from the starting point a few miles above Celilo, the _Colonel
Wright_ halted at a place which was called Slaterville, thirty-seven miles
up the Clearwater from its junction with the Snake. There the remainder
of the cargo was discharged, to be hauled in waggons to the Oro Fino
mines. The steamer _Okanogan_ followed the _Colonel Wright_ within a few
weeks, and navigation on the Snake may be said to have fairly begun.
During that same time the city of Lewiston, named in honour of Meriwether
Lewis, the explorer, was founded at the junction of the Snake and
Clearwater rivers.
While parts of the Columbia and it chief tributary, the Snake, were thus
opened to navigation by 1860, no "fire-canoe" had yet appeared on that
magnificent stretch of navigable water from Colville into the Arrow Lakes.
From contemporary files of the _Daily Mountaineer_ of The Dalles, we learn
that Captain Lew White launched the _Forty-nine_ in November, 1865, at
Colville. In December the _Forty-nine_ ascended the Columbia one hundred
and sixty miles, nearly to the head of lower Arrow Lake, whence, meeting
floating ice, she returned. From the _Mountaineer_ we learn also that in
the early months of 1866 a steamer was constructed at the mouth of Boise
River for navigation of the far upper Snake. At the same time also the
steamer _Mary Moody_ was constructed by Z. F. Moody, on Pend Oreille Lake,
the first steamer on any of the lakes except the Arrow Lakes of the
Columbia.
With the close of the decade of the sixties, it may be said that the
Columbia and its tributaries had fairly entered upon the steamboat era.
While many steamers were added within the succeeding years, the steamboat
business was never so active on the upper River as during that early age.
After the building of the railroads along the River and into interior
valleys and eastward, it became apparent that the heavy handicap of
rehandling freight at two portages would forbid the steamers from
competing with the railroads. In 1879 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company
sold out to the Villard interests for $5,000,000, and the Oregon Railroad
and Navigation Company was the result.
Since that time there have been few steamboats on that part of the River
above The Dalles. The section between The Dalles and the Cascades was
joined to the tide-water section by the opening of the Government locks at
the Cascades in 1896, and since that time many of the finest steamers on
the River do an immense tourist business between The Dalles and Portland.
It is only a question of a few years till the locks at Celilo will be
completed, and then the whole vast Inland Empire, with its enormous
production, will be thrown open to the sea. Then there will come on a new
age of steamboat navigation, and with it the electric railroad. The
steamer and the trolley car will set the whole Columbia Basin next door to
tide-water. When improvements now in view by Government are completed, our
River will be one of the most superb steamer courses in the world. That
may truthfully be said already of the two hundred and twenty miles from
The Dalles to the Ocean, as well as of the three hundred miles from Kettle
Falls, Washington, to Death Rapids, B. C.
The Government engineers in Senate Document, 344, February, 1890, name the
amount of navigable water on the Columbia and its tributaries at 1664
miles. This may, perhaps, be an underestimation, since President Roosevelt
has recently referred to it as twenty-five hundred miles, in which he
probably included the lakes. Generally speaking, the rivers of the Pacific
slope descend from high altitudes in comparatively short distances, and
are necessarily swift. Hence we can expect no such vast extent of
navigable water on them as the Mississippi and its affluents offer. Aside
from the Columbia itself, the main streams, east of the Cascade Mountains
offering steamboat transportation, are the Snake, Okanogan, and Kootenai,
together with Lakes Pend Oreille, Chelan, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead,
Okanogan, Kootenai, Arrow, Christina, and Slocan. On the west side are the
Willamette, Cowlitz, and Lewis rivers.
It would fill a volume to narrate even a tithe of the thrilling tales of
daring and tragedy which gather around the subject of boating in all its
forms on the Columbia.
One of the most remarkable steamboat journeys was that elsewhere described
in this work, under command of Captain F. P. Armstrong, of the _North
Star_, from Jennings, Montana, on the Kootenai to Canal Flats and thence
through the canal to Lake Columbia. With that should be coupled as equally
daring and more difficult, the trip down Snake River, from the Seven
Devils to Lewiston, in a steamer piloted by Captain W. P. Gray.
Undoubtedly the most remarkable journey in any other sort of craft than a
steamboat was that undertaken by a party of eighteen miners in 1865. They
built a large sailing boat at Colville and in her ran up the entire course
of the River, never having their boat entirely out of water, though our
informant says that they must have had her on skids part of the way. They
reached the very head of the Columbia, over seven hundred miles above
their starting point, hauled their boat across Canal Flats, launched her
again on the Kootenai, and so descended that furious stream to Fort Steele
on Wild Horse Creek. The full history of that journey would be deserving
of a place in any record of daring exploration.
In concluding this chapter, it may be said that there are now upon the
lower Columbia some of the swiftest and most beautiful "fire-canoes" in
the world. These ply on the two great scenic routes, one from Portland to
Astoria, and the other from Portland to The Dalles. The most noted of
these swift steamers at present writing are the _Hassalo_ (No. 2), the _T.
J. Potter_, the _Charles D. Spencer_, and the _Bailey Gatzert_.