Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/184



156 Leslie M. Scott

in the Pacific Northwest, until the rush to the Klondike, in 1897, burst upon an astonished world and exceeded any other similar movement in history since that to California. Farmers of Willamette Valley and Cowlitz and Puget Sound, carpenters and blacksmiths of the towns and villages — there were no cities then — and workingmen in all vocations, dropped their implements (1861), secured pack horses for the journey beyond The Dalles, boarded the river steamers of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company and hied them to the Idaho placer fields.

In the years 1861-64 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company transported to the upper country 60,320 tons, of which nearly 22,000 tons belonged to the year 1864. In this period the num- ber of passengers up and down river was nearly 100,000; 36,000 in 1864.*® Careful estimate places the number of persons in the mining camps of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, in 1862, at 30,000.^ This number greatly increased in the next three years, and especially in Montana. The boats for Portland, up river, in 1862, often carried more than 200 pas- sengers each. In April and May, 1862, the total revenue at The Dalles from passenger trips on three steamboats, then ply- ing the Upper River, was more than $50,000. One steamer took in more than $18,000 for freight and passengers, in one trip.«»

The first steamboat on the Willamette and Lower Columbia rivers, the Columbia, had appeared in 1850;*^* on the Middle River (Cascades-Celilo), the James P. Flint, in 1851 f^ on the Upper River (above Celilo), the Colonel Wright, in 1858, which next year opened navigation to Priest Rapids and above Lewiston.^ On Eraser River, steamboats began running in

48 See the Quarterly^ vol. ix, p. 290; vol. xvi, p. 167.

49 Ihid., p. 156.

50 Ihid.

51 The first steamboat was the Columbia, built at Asltoria, in the Summer of 1850. The second was the Lot IVhiUomb, launched at Milwaukee December as, 1850.

52 The Flint was built by the Bradfords and J. O. Van Bergen (Wriijht'a Marxnt History of the Northwest, p. 34). This boat was taken to the Lower River in 18^2. The next steamboat on the Middle River was the Allan, in i853-«6. owned by Allan, McKinlay and Companv, old Hudson's Bay men (.ibid., p. 38). The third was the Mary, built in 1854 by the Bradfords and Lawrence W. Coe. The fourth was the Hassalo. built bv the Bradfords (tWrf., p. 6s).

53 The Colonel Wright was built by Robert R. Thompson and Lawrence W. Coe at the mouth of Deschutes River.