Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/196



It was in the very nature of things that the first, and for some years the only, regularly operated method of public transportation locally in the youthful Territory of Oregon and the southern border of Washington Territory was found in vessels plying on the Columbia and Willamette rivers, along which streams the earliest settlements were made. Portland by 1851 had begun to be recognized, though but a clearing in the forest primeval, as the coming metropolis, and from it a small but growing fleet of primitive and low-powered steamboats and other water craft took their leave at fairly constant intervals for the Willamette Falls at Oregon City on the south, the port of Astoria on the west and the Cascades of the Columbia river on the east. At Oregon City was a portage around the falls, beyond which light draft steamboats and other vessels operated to the limits of navigation on the Willamette. At the Cascades was another portage, much longer than that at Oregon City, above which the Columbia was navigable to The Dalles, and beyond the portage there for a hundred miles and more to and beyond the confluence of the Snake, which river also was navigable for half the year.

It is proposed here to discuss only the Cascades portage and particularly that section of it which was on the left or Oregon bank of the Columbia river, though it will be necessary to refer from time to time to the portage on the opposite or Washington side of the great river of the West. Upon the latter side, the "north bank" in common parlance, the first railroad, of most modest character it is true, yet the first railroad upon the Pacific Coast of North America, was built in 1851 to facilitate the passage of freight over the portage. It was the annual autumn arrival of overland immigration, coupled with the frequent transportation of army supplies and soldiers that gave the steamboats operating between Portland and the upper Columbia, and, therefore, the