Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/271

 reminder of the beginning of the portage twenty years earlier, the artist added a smaller sketch labeled "1860," showing two balky mules attached to a car resembling the old horse drawn street cars, on a track upon the river bank, while below a small steamboat is moored.

No work was done on the railroad in 1879 because first, at the beginning of the year the directors of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company strengthened the company's position on the rivers by combining with the most powerful opposition they had to face, the Willamette River Transportation Company, and by buying six-sevenths of the capital stock of Dr. Baker's Walla Walla and Columbia River Railroad, and, second, in June, 1879, the control of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company passed into the hands of Henry Villard who with eastern capitalists then formed the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company which proceeded to build a standard gauge railroad along the Columbia river connecting Portland with eastern Oregon and Washington with permanent bands of steel. The day of the steamboat as the chief dependence of the population was over. A new era had begun.

The Oregon Railway and Navigation Company found on the unused grade of the Oregon Portage Railroad 236 tons (five track miles) of thirty pound steel rails, which were too light weight for their use, and fifty-six pound rails were laid upon the line which engineers Brazee and McCartney had been constructing since 1873. On November 20, 1882, the first train from Portland rolled over the route of the little pioneer locomotive of 1862, on its way to The Dalles, Walla Walla, Dayton and Pendleton and to transfer some of its passengers at Wallula to the Northern Pacific main line then being extended eastward through Spokane.

The United States Goverment began in 1877 the preparatory work for the present canal at Cascade Locks, and condemned the land which was taken for it by legal