Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/373

Rh quired has been built up by hard labor, increased and preserved by skill and prudence.

The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, a New York corporation, which had the mail contract between Panama and Oregon, brought out a large iron steamer called the Willamette. She was built for the company at Wilmington, Delaware, and brought around Cape Horn under sail as a three masted schooner, arriving in the fall of 1851. She was soon fitted up and commenced running, under Captain Durbrow, between Portland and Astoria in connection with the company's sea steamer. She was an elegant boat in all her appointments, had fine accommodation for passengers and great freight capacity. In fact, she was altogether too large for the trade, and in August, 1852, her owners took her to California and ran her on the Sacramento. One good thing she did, she put fare down to $10. Fare on this route went down slowly; first $26, then $15, then $10, then $8, and then $3; it is now $2. It is only within a few years that the passenger trade on the lower Columbia has been of any considerable value, or would support a single weekly steamboat. It has now become of more importance.

About the same time, 1851, a small wooden boat, a propeller, called the Black Hawk, ran between Portland and Oregon City. She made money very rapidly for her owners.

The other boats built for, or run above the falls of the Willamette, were the "Portland," built opposite Portland, in 1853, by A. S. Murray, John Torrance and James Clinton. She was afterwards taken above the falls where she ran for some time. On the 17th of March, 1857, she was carried over the falls in high water, leaving hardly a vestige of the boat, and drowning her captain, Arthur Jamison, and one deck hand.

There was the Canemah, sidewheeler, built in 1851, by A. F. Hedges, afterward killed by the Indians in Colonel Kelly's fight on the Touchet in 1856, Alanson Beers and Hamilton Campbell. She ran between Canemah and Corvallis. The heaviest load she ever carried was 35 tons. Passage on her was $5 to Salem. She made little or no money for her owners, though she had a mail contract.

The Oregon, built and owned by Ben Simpson & Co., in 1852, was a sidewheel boat of good size, but proved very poor property.

The Shoalwater, built by the owners of the Canemah in 1852-3, as a lowwater boat, commanded by Captain Lem White, the pioneer captain upon the upper Columbia, proved to be a failure. She changed her name several times — was the Phoenix, Franklin and Minnie Holmes. Her bad luck followed her under every alias. In the spring of 1854 she collapsed a flue near Rock Island while stopping at a landing; none were killed, but several were more or less seriously injured, and all badly scared. H. N. V. Holmes, a prominent resident of Polk county, was badly injured, but jumped overboard and swam across to the eastern shore before he knew that he was hurt.

There were other steamboats during this time and afterward upon that portion of the river which time forbids me to name. What I have already stated is sufficient to give a general idea of the growth of navigation up to the time when corporations commenced their operations. These boats that I have named, and others built and owned by private individuals, held the field from 1862-3, when the People's Transportation Company, a corporation under the general incorporation law of Oregon, entered upon its career. They built the canal, basin and warehouse on the east side of the river, and carried on a profitable trade between Portland and the various points up the river, finally selling out to Ben Holladay, who, with his railroad and river steamboats, then held command of the trade of the entire Willamette valley."

An account of the internal commerce of Oregon would be incomplete without a history of the origin and growth of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company. I shall speak of it historically only, how it originated and what it has