Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/265

Rh ney, Wm. Grant, L. B. Seeley and others. They employed an engineer, W. S. Gore, to locate the proposed canal on the ground and prepare plans and estimates for its construction. The next procedure was to begin condemnation proceedings to obtain title to the land they proposed to occupy, and this was secured for $400 and costs. A further step was the voyage of the Willamette River Transportation Company's steamboat Willamette Chief on Sunday, December 12, 1875, to the Cascades, when under Captain Baughman a point nearly one and onehalf miles higher, it is said, than any other steamboat had ventured, was reached. The Willamette Chief according to a map published in the Portland Oregonian of February 3, 1876, reached the site of the future locks. Of this enterprise, J. C. Ainsworth wrote that it was "more political than business," and intended for the purpose of asking congressional aid with a view to employing a large number of men and thereby helping to control the eastern Oregon vote for Senator Mitchell. The Oregon Steam Navigation Company's attorney, William Strong, in a letter to S. G. Reed, vice president on April 9, 1878, referred to the canal company's "pretended condemnation of two or three years ago" as made by a corporation "formed for the sole purpose, apparently, of getting a prima facie claim there." The Columbia River Improvement Company had not done anything else, Strong said, than to make this attempt to condemn the land. They were heard from later, however, for in March, 1881, after the United States Government had condemned the route now occupied by the canal and locks, Augustus C. Kinney as president of the Improvement Company demanded and obtained $1,000 of the sum paid by the government to the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, thus obtaining $600 of profit out of his company's "pretended con-