Page:Willamette Landings.djvu/29

 years rose to leadership in commercial and civic life. Henry W. Corbett, William S. Ladd, Josiah and Henry Failing, Cicero H. Lewis, John C. Ainsworth and others in time became sustaining pillars in the industrial structure.' The Oregonian, begun in 1850, became a lusty mouthpiece for the growing commonwealth. Its successive editors, Thomas Dryer, Simeon Francis, and Harvey W. Scott were widely known.

The discovery of gold in Idaho and eastern Oregon in the early 1860's, brought a second boom to Portland's commercial life. Freight and passengers for the upper Columbia and many Snake River points, were taken aboard steamers at Portland's wharves. Rates of shipment, often exorbitant, were usually paid with little protest. Customarily, an empty wagon shipped aboard a riverboat was measured from tongue-tip to end-gate and assessed for the square feet it thus occupied; the tongue was then removed, placed under the wagon, and the wagon-bed piled full of a miscellaneous freight being paid for by another shipper. During that era the few villages east of the Cascades and on the route of the Oregon Trail assumed the aspects of towns, with much of their staple goods and building commodities coming from Portland merchants.

Oregon's first railroad—other than a few short portage lines—crept southward out of Portland in 1869, with the first locomotive laboring into Oregon City on Christmas Day and continuing to Parrott Creek. From there it slowly continued up the valley. This quicker route to market for Willamette Valley produce was destined to reshape the economic order of the towns located upon it. Increased prosperity came to Portland, although for some years yet the riverboats contributed greatly to the town's commercial leadership of the Oregon country.

"As we approach Portland," wrote Mrs. Victor in 1872, on a trip by boat up the river, "we observe its new, yet thrifty, appearance; the evidence of forests sacrificed to the growth of a town; and the increasing good taste and costliness of its buildings going up or recently built in the newest portions of the city. A low, level margin of ground, beautifully ornamented with majestic oaks, intervenes between us and the higher ground on which the town is built. Passing