Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/959

Rh cemented on top of the falls, thereby heightening and increasing their efficiency.

In 1882, at a cost of more than $10,000, a fish ladder was built at the falls, all of which was swept out by a flood in 1885. Other attempts have been made, money has been spent in blasting, building, and repairing, but with indifferent success, owing to the building of dams at the mills, changing the course of the currents.

As early as 1846 the citizens of Oregon City held a mass meeting and sent a petition to congress for a government railroad across the Rocky mountains to Oregon City. At intervals from that time the subject was agitated and preliminary surveys were made, until in the sixties arrangements were made for rights of way for the Oregon and California railroad.

Before the Locks and Transportation Company had completed their open river to the interior, the Ben Holladay line had blasted a roadway and laid its rails under the bluffs at Oregon City. The old Cliff House and McLoughlin House were turned into hotels and were full of men when the railroad was building in 1870. The first Clackamas bridge washed out, another must take its place before the close of 1870 to hold the right of way. December was flitting by. "Can you, or can you not complete this bridge?" Ben Holladay demanded of the foreman. The man hesitated. "Speak," commanded Ben Holladay, "Say the word. If you can't I'll find a gang who will." The bridge was done on time, men working by the flare of torches on the last night of 1870, and on New Year's dawn of 1871 the road was open and a train passed through on the new laid irons. The struggle of ages was ending. Canemah hill was no more a scene of toiling oxen, the falls were practically annihilated, and by land or water grain, merchandise, wealth, could pass the old Thermopylae where red men fought in ages gone and white men struggled for a foothold. (This railroad subject properly belongs to Mr. Gaston.)

From a very early time Oregon City was called the Lowell of the Pacific coast. The first flouring mills were at the falls, and the first saw mills. In 1864 Mr. L. E. Pratt, who had already built a woolen mill at Salem, drew up plans for the second mill in the state at Oregon City, procured the machinery and put the mill in operation with capital of $100,000 supplied by Oregon City merchants, the Charmans, Arthur Warner, Latourette and others. Everybody took stock in the woolen mill. Schuyler Colfax, on a congressional junketing tour through the Willamette valley in 1864 spoke in the woolen mill before the machinery was put in, and articles written by him for the New York Herald brought skilled workmen who have made Oregon City their home ever since.

The present proprietors, the Jacobs Brothers, began as peddlers with Oregon City as headquarters. Samuel Marks, a merchant, furnished them goods. Presently they bought Marks out, owned the store, and quietly began buying up woolen mill stock at fifty cents on the dollar. Good financiers, today they own the Oregon City woolen mills, now grown to be the largest west of the Mississippi river, and manufacture for the wholesale trade, blankets, robes, cassimeres, flannels, shirts, pants, mackinaws and have also a large garment factory in connection. Several fires have devastated the plant, which has each time been rebuilt larger, and now 350 hands are employed, using 1,500.000 pounds of wool with an annual output of a million dollars per annum. This substantial brick establishment stands on the site of the old Hudson's Bay stockade and store. The only serious labor trouble occurred in 1885, when forty Chinamen, awakened from their beds at midnight, were escorted by a committee to a boat in waiting, and told never to return. Their places in the woolen mill were immediately filled by white men and women.