Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/45

Rh In the matter of interior transportation there was not in 1848 much improvement over the Indian canoe or the fur company's barge and bateau. The maritime industries seem rather to have been neglected in early times on the north-west coast notwithstanding its natural features seemed to suggest the usefulness if not the necessity of seamanship and nautical science. Since the building of the little thirty-ton schooner Dolly at Astoria in 1811 for the Pacific Fur Company, few vessels of any description had been constructed in Oregon. Kelley related that he saw in 1834 a ship-yard at Vancouver where several vessels had been built, and where ships were repaired, which is likely enough, but they were small and clumsy affairs, and few probably ever went to sea. Some barges and a sloop or two are mentioned by the earliest settlers as on the rivers carrying wheat from Oregon City to Vancouver, which served also to convey families of settlers down the Columbia. The Star of Oregon built in the Willamette in 1841, was the second vessel belonging to Americans constructed in these waters.

The first vessel constructed by an individual owner, or for colonial trade, was a sloop of twenty-five tons, built in 1845 by an Englishman named Cook, and called the Calapooya. I have also mentioned that she proved of great service to the immigrants of that year on the Columbia and Lower Willamette. The first keel-boats above the falls were owned by Robert Newell, and built in the winter of 1845–6, to ply between