FootNote
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While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Oregon Pioneer Ship builders
and River Navigators-Col. Nesmith's Account
of Early Navigation on the Columbia and
Willamette Judge Strong's Review of the
Growth and Development of Oregon Steamship
Companies-Names and Character of Early
Steamships and the Men who ran them-List of
the Steamers Built by the Peoples'
Transportation, Oregon Steamship Navigation
and Oregon Railway and Navigation
Companies-Independent Vessels and Their
Owners.
In approaching this subject one
finds that, as in all other lines, Portland
has gradually become the center of all the
navigation companies of Oregon. To indicate
the sources of her present facilities it
will therefore be proper to mention the
efforts made in other places in our State
which ultimated upon Portland. This can be
done in no manner so satisfactorily as by
inserting here two extracts; one of them
being from a speech of Senator J. W.
Nesmith, and the other from Hon. Win.
Strong, before the Oregon Pioneer
Association.
The former is a racy
narrative of the very earliest efforts at
navigation; and the latter shows the origin
of our steamboat companies. Both the men
named were personally cognizant of the facts
in the case. Says Nesmith:
It is my purpose to speak briefly of the
inception of our external and internal
commerce, as inaugurated by the efforts of
the early pioneers.
Forty years ago the few American citizens in
Oregon were isolated from the out-side
world. Some adventurous and enterprising
persons conceived the idea of a vessel of a
capacity to cross the Columbia river bar and
navigate the ocean. Those persons were
mostly old Rocky Mountain beaver trappers,
and sailors who had drifted like waifs to
the Willamette Valley. Their names were
Joseph Gale, John Canan, Ralph Kilbourn,
Pleasant Armstrong, Henry Woods, George
Davis and Jacob Green. Felix Hathaway was
employed as master ship carpenter, and
Thomas Hubbard and J. L. Parrish did the
blacksmith work. In the latter part of 1840,
there was laid the keel of the schooner
Star of Oregon, upon the east side of
Swan Island, near the junction of the
Willamette and Columbia rivers. The
representatives of the Hudson's Bay Co.
either dreading commercial competition, or
doubtful about their pay, at first refused
to furnish any supplies. But through the
earnest representation of Commodore
Wilkes-then here in command of the American
exploring squadron, who offered to become
responsible for the payment-Dr. M'Loughlin
furnished all such necessary articles as
were in store at Vancouver. (According to
another account current among old pioneers,
the boat builders feigned to be persuaded by
M'Loughlin to give up their plan, and go to
raising wheat for him. He supplied them with
ropes, nails, bagging, etc., etc., such as
was necessary for agriculture, and was
greatly astonished when in passing the
island he saw his farmers industriously
building the craft which he had attempted to
inhibit, expressing his vexation in the
words, "Curse these Americans; they always
do get ahead of us.") On the 19th day of
May, 1841, the schooner was launched. She
had only been planked up to the water ways,
and in that condition was worked up to the
falls of the Willamette. Owing to the
destitution of means and the scarcity of
provisions, the enterprising ship builders
were compelled to suspend work upon their
vessel until May, 1842. On the 25th of
August the vessel was completed, and the
crew went on board at the falls. They
consisted of the following named persons:
Joseph Gale, captain; John Canan, Pleasant
Armstrong, Ralph Kilbourn, Jacob Green and
one Indian boy ten years old. There was but
one passenger, a Mr. Piffenhauser. Capt.
Wilkes furnished them with an anchor,
hawser, nautical instruments, a flag and a
clearance. On the 12th of September, 1842,
she crossed the bar of the Columbia, coming
very near being wrecked in the breakers, and
took latitude and departure from Cape
Disappointment just as the sun touched the
western horizon.
That night there arose a terrific storm,
which lasted thirty-six hours, during which
Captain Gale, who was the only experienced
seaman on board, never left the helm. The
little Star behaved beautifully in
the storm, and after a voyage of five days
anchored in the foreign port of Yerba Buena,
as San Francisco was then called.
The Star was 48 feet eight inches on the
keel, 53 feet eight inches over all, with
ten feet and nine inches in the widest part,
and drew in good ballast trim four feet and
six inches of water. Her frame was of swamp
white oak, her knees of seasoned red fir
roots; her beam and castings of red fir. She
was clinker built, and of the Baltimore
clipper model. She was planked with clear
cedar, dressed to 1 1/4 inches, which was
spiked to every rib with a wrought iron
spike half an inch square, and clinched on
the inside. The deck was double; and she was
what is known as a fore and aft schooner,
having no top sails, but simply fore and
main sails, jib and flying jib. She was
painted black, with a small white ribbon
running from stem to stern, and was one of
the handsomest little crafts that ever sat
upon the water. Capt. Gale and the crew, who
were the owners of the Star, sold her
at the bay of San Francisco in the fall of
1842 to a French captain named Josa Lamonton,
who had recently wrecked his vessel. The
price was 350 cows.
Shortly after Captain Gale arrived in San
Francisco, the captains of several vessels
then in the harbor came on board his
schooner, and when passing around the stern
read Star of Oregon, he heard them
swear that there was no such port in the
world.
Gale and his crew remained in California all
winter, and in the spring of 1843 started to
Oregon with a party of forty-two men, who
brought with them an aggregate of 1250 head
of cattle, 600 head of mares, colts, horses
and mules, and 3000 sheep. They were
seventy-five days in reaching the Willamette
Valley. On their arrival with their herds
the monopoly in stock cattle came to an end
in Oregon.
Captain Joseph Gale, the master spirit of
the enterprise, was born, I believe, in the
District of Columbia, and in his younger
days followed the sea, where he obtained a
good knowledge of navigation and seamanship.
Captain Wilkes, before he would give him his
papers, examined him satisfactorily upon
these subjects.. Abandoning the sea he found
his way to the Rocky Mountains, and was for
several years a trapper. I knew him well and
lived with him in the winter of 1843-4, and
often listened to his thrilling adventures
of the sea and land. He then had the
American flag that Wilkes gave him, and made
a sort of canopy of it, under which he
slept. No saint was ever more devoted to his
shrine than was Gale to that dear old flag.
In the summer of 1844, Aaron Cook, a bluff
old Englishman, strongly imbued with
American sentiments, conceived the idea of
building a schooner to supercede the Indian
canoes then doing the carrying trade on the
Columbia and Willamette rivers. Cook
employed Edwin W. and M. B. Otie and myself
as the carpenters to construct the craft. We
built her in a cove or recess of the rocks
just in front of Frank Ermotinger's house,
near the upper end of Oregon City.
None of us had any knowledge of
ship-building, but by dint of perseverance
we constructed a schooner of about
thirty-five tons but-then. She was called
the Calipooiah. Jack Warner did the
caulking, paying and rigging. Warner was a
young Scotchman with a good education, which
he never turned to any practical account. He
ran away from school in the "Land o' Cakes"
and took to the sea, where he picked up a
good deal of knowledge pertaining to the
sailors' craft. I recollect one day when
Jack, with a kettle of hot pitch and a long
-handled swab, was pitching the hull of the
Calipooiah, he was accosted by an
"uncouth Missourian," who had evidently
never seen anything of the kind before, with
an inquiry as to his occupation. Jack
responded in broad Scotch: "I am a landscape
painter by profession, and am doing a wee
bit of adornment for Capt. Cook's schooner."
In the month of August, 1844, we had
launched and finished the Calipooiah
and went on a pleasure excursion to the
mouth of the Columbia. The crew and
passengers consisted of Captain Aaron Cook,
Jack Warner, Jack Campbell, Rev. A. F.
Waller and family, W. H. Gray and wife, A.
E. Wilson, Robert Shortess, W. W. Raymond,
E. W. Otie, M. B. Otie and J. W. Nesmith.
There might have been others on board; if
so, their names have escaped me. The after
portion had a small cabin, which was given
up for the accommodation of the ladies and
children. Forward was a box filled with
earth, upon which a fire was made for
cooking purposes. We had our own blankets
and slept upon the deck. The weather was
delightful, and we listlessly drifted down
the Willamette and Columbia rivers,
sometimes aided by the wind. Portland was
then a solitude like any other part of the
forest-clad bank. There were then no revenue
officers here under pretense of "protecting"
American industries, and no custom house
boat boarded us.
In four days we reached Astoria, or Fort
George, as the single old shanty on the
place, in charge of an old Scotchman, was
called. The river was full of fish, and the
shores abounded in game. We had our rifles
along, and subsisted upon wild delicacies.
There were then numerous large Indian
villages along the margin of the river, and
the canoes of the natives were rarely out of
sight. The Indians often came on hoard to
dispose of salmon; their price was a bullet
and a charge of powder for a fish.
The grand old river existed then in its
natural state, as Lewis and Clark found it
forty years before. I believe that there was
but one American settler's cabin on the
hanks of the Columbia from its source to the
ocean. That was on the south side of the
river, and belonged to Henry Hunt and Ben
Wood, who were building a saw-mill at that
point.
On an Island near Cathlamet some of us went
ashore to visit a large Indian village,
where the natives lived in large and
comparatively comfortable houses. They
showed us some articles which they said were
presented to them by Lewis and Clarke, among
which were a faded cotton handkerchief and a
small mirror, about two inches square, in a
small tin case. The corners of the case were
worn off and the sides worn through by much
handling. The Indians seemed to regard the
articles with great veneration, and would
not dispose of them to us for any price we
were able to offer.
The only vessel we saw in the river was Her
Majesty's sloop-of-war Modeste, of
eighteen guns, under command of Capt. Thomas
Bailie. 'We passed her in a long niche in
the river, as she lay at anchor. We had a
spanking breeze, and, with all our sail set
and the American flag flying at our
mast-head, we proudly ran close under her
broadside. A long line of officers and
sailors looked down over the hammocks and
from the quarter-deck at our unpainted and
primitive craft in apparently as much
astonishment as if we were the Flying
Dutchman or some other phantom ship from
the moon to plant the Stars and Stripes upon
the neutral waters of the Columbia." The
steamer Eliza Anderson, launched
November 27, 1858, was entirely built at
Portland, of Oregon fir timber, and at this
date, July, 1889, is running on Puget Sound
with most of her original timber as
apparently sound as the day it was put in
her.
Judge Strong, at one time attorney of the
old O. S. N. Company, succinctly begins his
narrative at the annual meeting of the
Pioneer Association in 1878 by stating what
he found upon reaching the Columbia:
Astoria at that time was a small place, or
rather two places, the upper and lower town,
between which there was great rivalry. They
were about a mile apart, with no road
connecting them except by water and along
the beach. The upper town was known to the
people of lower Astoria as "Adairville." The
lower town was designated by its rival as "
Old Fort George," or " McClure's Astoria." A
road between the two places would have
weakened the differences of both, isolation
being the protection of either. In the upper
town was the custom house, in the lower two
companies of the First U. S. Engineers,
under command of Major J. S. Hathaway. There
were not, excepting the military and those
attached to them, and the custom house
officials, to the best of my recollection,
to exceed twenty-five men in both towns.
At the time of our arrival in the country
there was considerable commerce carried on,
principally in sailing vessels, between the
Columbia river and San Francisco. The
exports were chiefly lumber; the imports
generally merchandise.
The Pacific Mail steamer Caroline had
made a trip in the month of May or June,
1850, bringing up furniture for the Grand
Hotel at Pacific City, and as passengers,
Dr. Elijah White, Judge Alonzo Skinner, J.
D. Holman and others, who were the founders
and proprietors of the city. Some of the
proprietors still live, but the city has
been long since buried and the place where
it stood has returned to the primeval forest
from which it was taken. The Mail Company's
steamers Oregon and Panama had
each made one trip to the river that summer,
but regular mail service by steamer from San
Francisco was not established until the
arrival of the steamer Columbia in
the winter or spring of 1850-51. The usual
length of time of receiving letters from the
States was from six weeks to two months. It
took, however, three months to send and get
an answer from an interior State, and
postage on a single letter was forty cents.
After the arrival of the Columbia,
they came with great regularity once a
month, and a year or two afterwards
semi-monthly.
In 1852 the railroad across the Isthmus was
completed, thus greatly improving that
route. A route had been established across
Nicaragua, which for a time was quite
popular, but was finally abandoned on
account of internal disturbances in the
country, in part, and in part on account of
competition and increased facilities upon
the Isthmus route. The date when the
Nicaragua route commenced to be used and was
discontinued I am not able at this time to
give. The price of passage by the Isthmus
route, before their opposition, was from
$200 to $250, which included only a limited
amount of baggage. Freights were
extraordinarily high, amounting to a
prohibition upon all excepting merchandise.
In 1857 the Overland Stage Company was
organized and commenced carrying the letter
mail between St. Joe, Missouri, and
Placerville, California, under a contract
with the Postmaster General, under an act of
Congress, approved March 3d, 1857. The act
authorized a semi-monthly, weekly, or
semi-weekly service, at a cost per annum not
exceeding $300,000 for semi-monthly,
$450,000 for weekly, and $600,000 for
semi-weekly service-the mail to he carried
in good four-horse coaches or spring,
wagons, suitable for passengers, through in
twenty-five days. The original contract was
for six years, but was extended, and the
line run until the railroad was completed in
1869. After the route was opened, twenty-two
days was the schedule time. The stages run
full both ways. fare $250. The starting and
arrival of the stages were great events at
both ends of the line. A pony express from
San Francisco to St. Joe was started in
1859, and run about a year and a half. It
made the trip in ten days.
