Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/294

238 The source of the enormous business of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company was the rush into Idaho, Montana, and Eastern Oregon and Washington by the miners, cowboys, speculators, and adventurers of the early sixties. The up-river country, as described more at length in another chapter, wakened suddenly from the lethargy of centuries, and the wilderness teemed with life. That was the great steamboat age. Money flowed in streams. Fortunes were made and lost in a day.

When first organised in 1860, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company had a nondescript lot of steamers, mainly small and weak. The two portages, one of five miles around the Cascades and the other of fourteen miles from The Dalles to Celilo Falls, were unequal to their task. The portages at the Cascades on both sides of the River were made by very inadequate wooden tramways. That at The Dalles was made by teams. Such quantities of freight were discharged from the steamers that sometimes the whole portage was lined with freight from end to end. The portages were not acquired by the company with the steamboat property, and as a result the portage owners reaped the larger share of the profits. During high water the portage on the Oregon side at the Cascades had a monopoly of the business, and it took one-half the freight income from Portland to The Dalles. This was holding the whip-hand with a vengeance, and the vigorous directors of the steamboat company could not endure it. Accordingly, they absorbed the rights of the portage owners, built a railroad from Celilo to The Dalles on the Oregon side, and one around the Cas-