Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/387



spirit. Jacob Kamm built and put in operation a line of steamboats on the upper Snake river, and ran the steamer Norma into the heart of Idaho. He also purchased the ocean steamer George S. Wright, and was the first and only Portland man to try to develop the Alaska trade and hold it to Portland. Kamm's enterprise in going into new fields of business to develop trade for the city of Portland was greater and more courageous than that of any other man ever connected with the steamboat business of this city.

And besides Mr. Kamm, there was Mr. Leonard White who built and run a steamboat named "The Forty-Nine," far up the Columbia river into British territory, nearly two hundred miles above the national boundary line, as early as 1865. Mr. White did a good business there until and during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. And although he was somewhat remote from his base of supplies, he still claimed Portland as his home port, and, like Mr, Kamm, is still on deck and could run a steamboat as well as ever.

Efforts are being now made by the Portland Chamber of Commerce to se- cure co-operation between the provincial government of Canada and the gov- ernment of the United States looking to the improvement of the Columbia river in British Columbia in connection with like improvements of the river in the state of Washington, so that a continuous and connected line of river trans- portation may be finally completed between Portland and the head of naviga- tion on the Columbia river — a distance of about one thousand miles, by river and lakes. And it is entirely feasible, after opening the Columbia to its head- waters, to construct a short canal of about two miles over a level country and carry boats from the Columbia into the Kootenai river, and then successfully navigate the boat down the Kootenai into Kootenai lake, a hundred miles long, and then by another canal and locks of one mile pass the boat back into the Columbia four hundred miles below the point it left the Columbia to enter the Kootenai, making altogether a stretch of navigable water from Astoria to the outlet from Kootenai lake of over fifteen hundred miles and developing one of the richest mineral regions on the globe.