Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/553

 Counting in the original townsite proprietors, Coffin, Chapman and Lownsdale, we can add to their efforts those of Captain J. C. Ainsworth, Jacob Kamm, Henry W. Corbett, Henry Failing, C. H. Lewis, Captain John H. Couch, Captain George H. Flanders, William G. Ladd, Simeon G. Reed and R. R. Thompson, to whose brains and energy Portland is indebted for its present masterful position in the commerce and general prosperity of the country.

Captain Ainsworth had settled first at Oregon City, and with his brotherin-law, Dierdorff, had been carrying on a general store and trading establishment at that point. But seeing the natural advantages of Portland, and early getting into the steamboat business, so shaped his affairs as to transfer all his interests to this point, and as the transportation on the Columbia river developed, became the executive head of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company—the first large transportation company of the North Pacific coast. Ainsworth's last work on behalf of the city was in extending transportation to Eastern Oregon, building htethe [sic] portage railway at the Cascades and The Dalles, and in exploring the Columbia to its headwaters and into Kootenai lake, where vast mineral wealth has followed the discoveries made by Ainsworth 's exploring parties. And while Ainsworth added vastly to the fortune of himself. Reed and Thompson, by the sale of the property of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company to the Northern Pacific Railway Company, that transaction enabled Heni-y Villard to get such control of the railroads leading to the great Columbia basin, as to hold the transcontinental business to Portland long enough to demonstrate its superior and exclusive advantages as the gateway to the Pacific; and thus eventually, as has now been established, control the heavy transportation between the coast of Oregon and Washington and the Atlantic states.

Of this group of men, Jacob Kamm is entitled to be ranked the first in steamboat development. Before Lot Whitcomb could build the first steamboat, he was compelled to bring Mr. Kamm from California to superintend the construction. In this pioneer work, Mr. Kamm, with his own hands, put all the machinery together even down to riveting the boiler sheets. From this beginning, Jacob Kamm went on with work on other steamers, and had supervision as master mechanic, chief engineer and part owner of the steamboats Jennie Clark, Carrie Ladd, Mountain Buck. Senorita, the Mary, Hassalo, Rival, Surprise and Elk. Mr. Kamm was the first and only man to put steamboat transportation on the upper Snake river. He was the sole owner of the ocean steamer, George S. Wright, which he ran from Portland to Victoria, Sitka and Alaska, being the only capitalist Portland had that would make a fight to hold that trade to Portland. In latter years he organized the Vancouver Transportation Company, and put on the steamers Lurline and Undine. His work in building up the city is incalculable. Mr. Kamm .was born in Switzerland, in 1823, and is yet a citizen of Portland, with all his faculties unimpaired at the age of 89. He learned the steamboat business from engineer's assistant up to owner of ocean steamships; commencing at the engine room on a Mississippi steamboat—another splendid example of what a poor boy can do with patient work and honest endeavor.

Henry W. Corbett, born in Westborough, Mass., in 1827, commenced at the foot of the ladder of fortune and fame in a wholesale dry goods store in New York City, where he spent seven years in hard work. At the end of that time