Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/99

Rh improvements were owned either by private corporations or by the raih'oads themselves. At the falls of the Willamette, fifteen miles above Portland, a private canal company with its tolls taxed the river traffic nearly out of existence. On the Columbia the owners of the portage railways were also the owners of the railroad paralleling the river. Naturally it was their interest and, from their position of vantage, within their power to block completely the movement of traffic on the river.

Water transportation was not, however, to lapse into a mere tradition in the Columbia basin because of the untoward influence of private monopoly at these portage gateways. Considerable areas of rich and rapidly developing country on the north bank of the Columbia had as yet no railway and kept several lines of boats busy. Another section of country far up the Snake, but magnificently endowed with resources, was not for a long time reached by a railway. It, too, had to rely on a navigable section of that largest tributary of the Columbia for connection with the outside world. The mere idea, too, of a great Columbian waterway had been ardently cherished for more than a century and had too firm a hold in the national consciousness to be completely stifled by the repression of private monopoly. As the dream of Thomas Jefferson it had been back of the leading motive impelling him to urge time and again transcontinental exploration. In his instructions to Meriwether Lewis, when the Lewis and Clark expedition was about to set out, he says: "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, and such principal streams of it, as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for purposes of commerce." The same idea of the larger use of the Columbia as one of the two connecting channels of a transcontinental waterway had been an important feature of the imperial project of John Jacob Astor. And the Hudson Bay Company had actually used it for a generation as