Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/272

 process begun in February and terminated in September, 1878, thus cutting off a substantial acreage that had been part of the Oregon Portage property. The building of the canal and locks was a long job, only completed on November 6, 1896, when the first steamboats passed through the excavation. In connection with the canal construction the Goverment improved the river channel below, blasting out the rocks which had made the passage difficult.

The "Sliding Mountain" as it came to be known, regarding which the engineers had complained in the seventies, was an annual annoyance and a heavy expense to the railroad company until a few years ago when the cause was discovered and remedied by the placing of a series of drainage tunnels leading from the depths of the hillside into the river, thus emptying the subterranean water pockets and draining the ground, stopping entirely the movement of the surface.

The Tooth bridge is a bridge no longer—long ago replaced by a solid embankment, and the six by six inch sticks on which the Oregon Pony locomotive made its twenty miles an hour are now represented by ninety pound steel rails laid on heavy fir cross ties embedded in crushed rock ballast. Yet here was Oregon's first railroad, here first in the Pacific northwest the steam locomotive drew.its hot breath; here the key to the interior of Oregon once was said to be. Remember this, twentieth century traveler, as you journey today up the Columbia's world-famed gorge, "through the rocky portals of the golden west * * * to the teeming cities of the Mississippi," or beyond, drawn by a present day prototype of that original "actual, live, smoking, panting, fire breathing iron horse," the Oregon Pony of 1862.

What of the Pony, indeed? In 1905 it was decided to hold an exposition at Portland, in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Lewis and Clark's great expedition from St. Louis to Astoria and back, and for