Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/264

196 stantial foothold that its future could not be shaken. This left only Milton and St. Helens to contest supremacy with Portland's ambition.

It was soon shown that Milton, notwithstanding that it was boomed by a ship and a successful shipmaster, was too close to St. Helens ever to become a great city, just as Oregon City had conclusively shown that Portland was too close to Oregon City to ever achieve greatness. But St. Helens was the only town that ever gave Portland anything of a contest for the metropolis. Prior to the location of Portland, nearly all the ocean transportation came to and sailed from Vancouver, being almost wholly in the hands of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Lewis and Clark had given the world the idea that large ships could not come into the Willamette river. On their report to the president they say, speaking of what a great harbor the Columbia river might be: "That large sloops could come up as high as the tide water, and vessels of three hundred tons burden could reach the entrance of the Multnomah (Willamette) river." At that time (1806) the largest vessel afloat did not carry more than a thousand tons, but the thousand-ton vessel could have come to Portland townsite as easily as it got over the Columbia bar. But everybody understood then that it would be in the end the ocean transportation that would locate the city. To secure that was to secure the city. Captain Couch and others, with little sailing vessels, had worked their way up to Portland without tugboats to tow them, for there were no such helpers in those days. But that was not decisive. Would the ocean steamers come to Portland? That was put to the test when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the first proprietors of steamships regularly running to the Columbia river, bought a tract of land at St. Helens, erected a dock and warehouse and stopped all their steamers at that point. One of the most enterprising men in Oregon at that time, or even since, was Lot Whitcomb, who was energetically pushing the fortunes of his town of Milwaukee. He had town lots to sell; he soon had a steamboat; and he had a sawmill at Milwaukee that was making and shipping to the then mushroom gold diggers' town of San Francisco the very first lumber shipped from Oregon—and he was making a pile of money. And so he pushed his town. The steamship company was pushing St. Helens, and sending freight up the river in little boats of all sorts—and Portland was practically between the Whitcomb devil and the deep sea.

But Portland had some energetic men. The townsite proprietors, Stephen Coffin, W. W. Chapman and Daniel H. Lownsdale, were not only enterprising and energetic men, but they were able to see further into the future and make more of their opportunities than others. They saw their opportunity; the opportunity that is

And they lost no time in purchasing an ocean steamship that should ply between Portland and San Francisco. This vessel, the Gold Hunter, was kept on the San Francisco route until both Whitcomb of Milwaukee, and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company abandoned their opposition to Portland; the steamship company running all their ships to Portland, and Whitcomb running his steamboat from Portland to other points. It cost Coffin, Chapman and Lownsdale an immense sacrifice in town lots to purchase the Gold Hunter and run her until the contest was decided. But they were equal to the occasion, and if their successors in real estate holding and business at Portland had pos-