The Columbia River Part 12

The next year after the Joseph War, or in 1878, occurred the Bannock War, the scene of which was mainly Umatilla County in Oregon and other parts adjoining the River. Though at first, as has happened so many times, the Indians met with successes, the end was their inevitable defeat.

With the close of the Bannock War it may be said that Indian warfare practically ended. The war-whoop ceased to be heard and the tomahawk was brandished no more along the Columbia.

CHAPTER X

When the Fire-Canoes Took the Place of the Log-Canoes

Variety of Craft that have Navigated the Columbia--The _Beaver_, _Carolina_, _Columbia_, and _Lot Whitcomb_--Beginning of Steamboating above the Cascades--Steamboats above The Dalles--Rival Companies on the River--The Oregon Steam Navigation Company--Great Business Developments of the Decade of the Sixties--Specimen s.h.i.+pments in 1862--The Steamboat Ride from Portland to Lewiston--Some of the Steamboat Men of the Period--Story of W. H. Gray and his Sailboat on the Snake River--Descending The Dalles--Captain Coe's Account of the First Steamboat Ride on the Upper Columbia and the Snake--Navigation above Colville and on the Lakes--The Locks and Prospects of Future Navigation--Remarkable Trips on the River--Some Steamboats of the Present.

We have learned that our River has been navigated by boats of almost every description. At one time it was the hollowed cedar-log canoes of the aborgines. Again, the bateaux of the trappers were the chief craft to cut the blue lakes and the white rapids. At yet other times it was the flat-boats of the immigrants. Sailing s.h.i.+ps of every sort--frigates, galleons, caravels, men-of-war, full-rigged s.h.i.+ps, barks, brigs, schooners, and sloops--crowded early to the silver gate of the River.

In due process of time the "Fire-canoes," as the natives called steamers, let loose their trails of smoke amid the tops of the "continuous woods."

The _Beaver_, a small steams.h.i.+p belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company and sent from England, entered the River in 1836, the first steamer to ply these waters. The Company afterwards sent her to Puget Sound, and, if we are correctly informed, she is still afloat on the Gulf of Georgia. In 1850 the first American steams.h.i.+p, the _Carolina_, crossed the Bar. In the same year a little double-ender, called the _Columbia_, began running between Portland and Astoria.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Tirzah Trask, a Umatilla Indian Girl--Taken as an Ideal of Sacajawea. Photo. by Lee Moorehouse, Pendleton.]

The first river steamer of any size to ply upon the Willamette and Columbia was the _Lot Whitcomb_. This steamer was built by Whitcomb and Jennings. J. C. Ainsworth was the first captain, and Jacob Kamm was the first engineer. Both these men became leaders in every species of steamboating enterprise. In 1851 Dan Bradford and B. B. Bishop inaugurated a movement to connect the up-river region with the lower river by getting a small iron propeller called the _Jason P. Flint_ from the East and putting her together at the Cascades, whence she made the run to Portland.

The _Flint_ has been named as first to run above the Cascades, but the author has the authority of Mr. Bishop for stating that the first steamer to run above the Cascades was the _Eagle_. That steamer was brought in sections by Allen McKinley to the upper Cascades in 1853, there put together, and set to plying on the part of the river between the Cascades and The Dalles. In 1854, the _Mary_ was built and launched above the Cascades, the next year the _Wasco_ followed, and in 1856 the _Ha.s.salo_ began to toot her jubilant horn at the precipices of the mid-Columbia. In 1859 R. R. Thompson and Lawrence Coe built the _Colonel Wright_, the first steamer on the upper section of the River. In the same year the same men built at the upper Cascades a steamer called the _Venture_. This craft met with a curious catastrophe. For on her very first trip she swung too far into the channel and was carried over the upper Cascades, at the point where the Cascade Locks are now located. She was subsequently raised, rebuilt, and rechristened the _Umatilla_.

This part of the period of steamboat building was cotemporary with the Indian wars of 1855 and 1856. The steamers, _Wasco_, _Mary_, and _Eagle_ were of much service in rescuing victims of the murderous a.s.sault on the Cascades by the Klickitats.

While the enterprising steamboat builders were thus making their way up-river in the very teeth of Indian warfare, steamboats were in course of construction on the Willamette. The _Jennie Clark_ in 1854 and the _Carrie Ladd_ in 1858 were built for the firm of Abernethy, Clark & Company. These both, the latter especially, were really elegant steamers for the time.

The close of the Indian wars in 1859 saw a quite well-organised steamer service between Portland and The Dalles, and the great rush into the upper country was just beginning. The _Senorita_, the _Belle_, and the _Multnomah_, under the management of Benjamin Stark, were on the run from Portland to the Cascades. A rival steamer, the _Mountain Buck_, owned by Ruckle and Olmstead, was on the same route. These steamers connected with boats on the Cascades-Dalles section by means of portages five miles long around the rapids. There was a portage on each side of the River. That on the north side was operated by Bradford & Company, and their steamers were the _Ha.s.salo_ and the _Mary_. Ruckle and Olmstead owned the portage on the south side of the River, and their steamer was the _Wasco_. Sharp compet.i.tion arose between the Bradford and Stark interests on one side and Ruckle and Olmstead on the other. The Stark Company was known as the Columbia River Navigation Company, and the rival was the Oregon Transportation Company. J. C. Ainsworth now joined the Stark party with the _Carrie Ladd_. So efficient did this reinforcement prove to be that the Transportation Company proposed to them a combination. This was effected in April, 1859, and the new organisation became known as the Union Transportation Company. This was soon found to be too loose a consolidation to accomplish the desired ends, and the parties interested set about a new combination to embrace all the steamboat men from Celilo to Astoria. The result was the formation of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which came into legal existence on December 20, 1860. Its stock in steamboats, sailboats, wharf-boats, and miscellaneous property was stated at $172,500.

Such was the genesis of the "O. S. N. Co." In a valuable article by Irene Lincoln Poppleton in the _Oregon Historical Quarterly_ for September, 1908, to which we here make acknowledgments, it is said that no a.s.sessment was ever levied on the stock of this company, but that from the proceeds of the business the management expended in gold nearly three million dollars in developing their property, besides paying to the stockholders in dividends over two million and a half dollars. Never perhaps was there such a record of money-making on such a capitalisation.

The source of the enormous business of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company was the rush into Idaho, Montana, and Eastern Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton 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 quant.i.ties 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 Cascades on the Was.h.i.+ngton side.

The company was reorganised under the laws of Oregon in October, 1862, with a declared capitalisation of two million dollars.

Business on the River in 1863 was something enormous. Hardly ever did a steamer make a trip with less than two hundred pa.s.sengers. Freight was offered in such quant.i.ties at Portland that trucks had to stand in line for blocks, waiting to deliver and receive their loads. New boats were built of a much better cla.s.s. Two rival companies, the Independent Line and the People's Transportation Line, made a vigorous struggle to secure a share of the business, but they were eventually overpowered. Some conception of the amount of business may be gained from the fact that the steamers transported pa.s.sengers to an amount of fares running from $1000 to $6000 a trip. On April 29, 1862, the _Tenino_, leaving Celilo for the Lewiston trip, had a pa.s.senger load amounting to $10,945, and a few trips later reported receipts of $18,000, for freight, pa.s.sengers, meals, and berths. The steams.h.i.+ps sailing from Portland to San Francisco showed equally remarkable records. On June 25, 1861, the _Sierra Nevada_ conveyed a treasure s.h.i.+pment of $228,000; July 14th, $110,000; August 24th, $195,558; December 5th, $750,000. The number of pa.s.sengers carried on The Dalles-Lewiston route in 1864 was 36,000 and the tons of freight were 21,834.

It was a magnificent steamboat ride in those days from Portland to Lewiston. The fare was sixty dollars; meals and berths, one dollar each. A traveller would leave Portland at five A.M. on, perhaps, the _Wilson G.

Hunt_, reach the Cascades sixty-five miles distant at eleven A.M., proceed by rail five miles to the upper Cascades, there transfer to the _Oneonta_ or _Idaho_ for The Dalles, pa.s.sing in that run from the humid, low-lying, heavily timbered West-of-the-mountains, to the dry, breezy, hilly East-of-the-mountains. Reaching The Dalles, fifty miles farther east, he would be conveyed by another portage railroad, fourteen miles more, to Celilo. There the _Tenino_, _Yakima_, _Nez Perce Chief_, or _Owyhee_ was waiting. With the earliest light of the morning the steamer would head right into the impetuous current of the River, bound for Lewiston, two hundred and eighty miles farther yet, taking two days, sometimes three, though only one to return. Those steamers were mainly of the light-draught, stern-wheel structure, which still characterises the Columbia River boats. They were swift and roomy and well adapted to the turbulent waters of the upper River.

The captains, pilots, and pursers of that period were as fine a set of men as ever turned a wheel. Bold, bluff, genial, hearty, and obliging they were, even though given to occasional outbursts of expletives and possessing voluminous repertoires of "cuss-words" such as would startle the effete East. Any old Oregonian who may chance to cast his eyes upon these pages will recall, as with the pangs of childhood homesickness, the forms and features of steamboat men of that day; the polite yet determined Ainsworth, the brusque and rotund Reed, the bluff and hearty Knaggs, the frolicsome and never disconcerted Ingalls, the dark, powerful, and nonchalant Coe, the patriarchal beard of Stump, the loquacious "Commodore" Wolf, who used to point out to astonished tourists the "diabolical strata" on the banks of the River, the ma.s.sive and good-natured Strang, the genial and elegant O'Neil, the suave and witty Snow, the tall and handsome Sampson, the rich Scotch brogue of McNulty, and dozens of others, whose combined adventures would fill a volume. One of the most experienced pilots of the upper River was Captain "Eph"

Baughman, who has been running on the Snake and Columbia rivers for fifty years, and is yet active at the date of this publication. W. H. Gray, who came to Waiilatpu with Whitman as secular agent of the mission, became a river man of much skill. He gave four sons, John, William, Alfred, and James, to the service of the River, all four of them being skilled captains. A story narrated to the author by Captain William Gray, now of Pasco, Was.h.i.+ngton, well ill.u.s.trates the character of the old Columbia River navigators. W. H. Gray was the first man to run a sailboat of much size with regular freight up Snake River. That was in 1860 before any steamers were running on that stream. Mr. Gray built his boat, a fifty-ton sloop, on Oosyoos Lake on the Okanogan River. In it he descended that river to its entrance into the Columbia. Thence be descended the Columbia, running down the Entiat, Rock Island, Cabinet, and Priest Rapids, no mean undertaking of itself. Reaching the mouth of the Snake, he took on a load of freight and started up the swift stream. At Five-mile Rapids he found that his sail was insufficient to carry the sloop up. Men had said that it was impossible. His crew all prophesied disaster. The stubborn captain merely declared, "There is no such word as fail in my dictionary." He directed his son and another of the crew to take the small boat, load her with a long coil of rope, make their way up the stream until they got above the rapid, there to land on an islet of rock, fasten the rope to that rock, then pay it out till it was swept down the rapid. They were then to descend the rapid in the small boat. "Very likely you may be upset," added the skipper encouragingly, "but if you are, you know how to swim." They were upset, sure enough, but they did know how to swim. They righted their boat, picked up the end of the floating rope, and reached the sloop with it. The rope was attached to the capstan, and the sloop was wound up by it above the swiftest part of the rapid to a point where the sail was sufficient to carry, and on they went rejoicing. Any account of steamboating on the Columbia would be incomplete without reference to Captain James Troup, who was born on the Columbia, and almost from early boyhood ran steamers upon it and its tributaries. He made a specialty of running steamers down the Dalles and the Cascades, an undertaking sometimes rendered necessary by the fact that more boats were built in proportion to demand on the upper than the lower River. These were taken down the Dalles, and sometimes down the Cascades. Once down, they could not return. The first steamer to run down the Tumwater Falls was the _Okanogan_, on May 22, 1866, piloted by Captain T. J. Stump.

The author enjoyed the great privilege of descending the Dalles in the _D.

S. Baker_ in the year 1888, Captain Troup being in command. At that strange point in the River, the whole vast volume is compressed into a channel but one hundred and sixty feet wide at low water and much deeper than wide. Like a huge mill-race this channel continues nearly straight for two miles, when it is hurled with frightful force against a ma.s.sive bluff. Deflected from the bluff, it turns at a sharp angle to be split in sunder by a low reef of rock. When the _Baker_ was drawn into the suck of the current at the head of the "chute" she swept down the channel, which was almost black, with streaks of foam, to the bluff, two miles in four minutes. There feeling the tremendous refluent wave, she went careening over and over toward the sunken reef. The skilled captain had her perfectly in hand, and precisely at the right moment, rang the signal bell, "Ahead, full speed," and ahead she went, just barely scratching her side on the rock. Thus close was it necessary to calculate distance. If the steamer had struck the tooth-like point of the reef broadside on, she would have been broken in two and carried in fragments on either side.

Having pa.s.sed this danger point, she glided into the beautiful calm bay below and the feat was accomplished. Captain J. C. Ainsworth and Captain James Troup were the two captains above all others to whom the company entrusted the critical task of running steamers over the rapids.

In the _Overland Monthly_ of June, 1886, there is a valuable account by Captain Lawrence Coe of the maiden journey of the _Colonel Wright_ from Celilo up what they then termed the upper Columbia.

This first journey on that section of the River was made in April, 1859.

The pilot was Captain Lew White. The highest point reached was Wallula, the site of the old Hudson's Bay fort. The current was a powerful one to withstand, no soundings had ever been made, and no boats except canoes, bateaux, flatboats, and a few small sailboats, had ever made the trip. No one had any conception of the location of a channel adapted to a steamboat. No difficulty was experienced, however, except at the Umatilla Rapids. This is a most singular obstruction. Three separate reefs, at intervals of half a mile, extend right across the River. There are narrow breaks in these reefs, but not in line with each other. Through them the water pours with tremendous velocity, and on account of their irregular locations a steamer must zigzag across the River at imminent risk of being borne broadside on to the reef. The pa.s.sage of the Umatilla Rapids is not difficult at high water, for then the steamer glides over the rocks in a straight course.

In the August _Overland_ of the same year, Captain Coe narrates the first steamboat trip up Snake River. This was in June, 1860, just at the time of the beginning of the gold excitement. The _Colonel Wright_ was loaded with picks, rockers, and other mining implements, as well as provisions and pa.s.sengers. Most of the freight and pa.s.sengers were put off at Wallula, to go thence overland. Part continued on to test the experiment of making way against the wicked-looking current of Snake River. After three days and a half from the starting point a few miles above Celilo, the _Colonel Wright_ halted at a place which was called Slaterville, thirty-seven miles up the Clearwater from its junction with the Snake. There the remainder of the cargo was discharged, to be hauled in waggons to the Oro Fino mines. The steamer _Okanogan_ followed the _Colonel Wright_ within a few weeks, and navigation on the Snake may be said to have fairly begun.

During that same time the city of Lewiston, named in honour of Meriwether Lewis, the explorer, was founded at the junction of the Snake and Clearwater rivers.

While parts of the Columbia and it chief tributary, the Snake, were thus opened to navigation by 1860, no "fire-canoe" had yet appeared on that magnificent stretch of navigable water from Colville into the Arrow Lakes.

From contemporary files of the _Daily Mountaineer_ of The Dalles, we learn that Captain Lew White launched the _Forty-nine_ in November, 1865, at Colville. In December the _Forty-nine_ ascended the Columbia one hundred and sixty miles, nearly to the head of lower Arrow Lake, whence, meeting floating ice, she returned. From the _Mountaineer_ we learn also that in the early months of 1866 a steamer was constructed at the mouth of Boise River for navigation of the far upper Snake. At the same time also the steamer _Mary Moody_ was constructed by Z. F. Moody, on Pend Oreille Lake, the first steamer on any of the lakes except the Arrow Lakes of the Columbia.

With the close of the decade of the sixties, it may be said that the Columbia and its tributaries had fairly entered upon the steamboat era.

While many steamers were added within the succeeding years, the steamboat business was never so active on the upper River as during that early age.

After the building of the railroads along the River and into interior valleys and eastward, it became apparent that the heavy handicap of rehandling freight at two portages would forbid the steamers from competing with the railroads. In 1879 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company sold out to the Villard interests for $5,000,000, and the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company was the result.

Since that time there have been few steamboats on that part of the River above The Dalles. The section between The Dalles and the Cascades was joined to the tide-water section by the opening of the Government locks at the Cascades in 1896, and since that time many of the finest steamers on the River do an immense tourist business between The Dalles and Portland.

It is only a question of a few years till the locks at Celilo will be completed, and then the whole vast Inland Empire, with its enormous production, will be thrown open to the sea. Then there will come on a new age of steamboat navigation, and with it the electric railroad. The steamer and the trolley car will set the whole Columbia Basin next door to tide-water. When improvements now in view by Government are completed, our River will be one of the most superb steamer courses in the world. That may truthfully be said already of the two hundred and twenty miles from The Dalles to the Ocean, as well as of the three hundred miles from Kettle Falls, Was.h.i.+ngton, to Death Rapids, B. C.

The Government engineers in Senate Doc.u.ment, 344, February, 1890, name the amount of navigable water on the Columbia and its tributaries at 1664 miles. This may, perhaps, be an underestimation, since President Roosevelt has recently referred to it as twenty-five hundred miles, in which he probably included the lakes. Generally speaking, the rivers of the Pacific slope descend from high alt.i.tudes in comparatively short distances, and are necessarily swift. Hence we can expect no such vast extent of navigable water on them as the Mississippi and its affluents offer. Aside from the Columbia itself, the main streams, east of the Cascade Mountains offering steamboat transportation, are the Snake, Okanogan, and Kootenai, together with Lakes Pend Oreille, Chelan, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Okanogan, Kootenai, Arrow, Christina, and Slocan. On the west side are the Willamette, Cowlitz, and Lewis rivers.

It would fill a volume to narrate even a t.i.the of the thrilling tales of daring and tragedy which gather around the subject of boating in all its forms on the Columbia.

One of the most remarkable steamboat journeys was that elsewhere described in this work, under command of Captain F. P. Armstrong, of the _North Star_, from Jennings, Montana, on the Kootenai to Ca.n.a.l Flats and thence through the ca.n.a.l to Lake Columbia. With that should be coupled as equally daring and more difficult, the trip down Snake River, from the Seven Devils to Lewiston, in a steamer piloted by Captain W. P. Gray.

Undoubtedly the most remarkable journey in any other sort of craft than a steamboat was that undertaken by a party of eighteen miners in 1865. They built a large sailing boat at Colville and in her ran up the entire course of the River, never having their boat entirely out of water, though our informant says that they must have had her on skids part of the way. They reached the very head of the Columbia, over seven hundred miles above their starting point, hauled their boat across Ca.n.a.l Flats, launched her again on the Kootenai, and so descended that furious stream to Fort Steele on Wild Horse Creek. The full history of that journey would be deserving of a place in any record of daring exploration.

In concluding this chapter, it may be said that there are now upon the lower Columbia some of the swiftest and most beautiful "fire-canoes" in the world. These ply on the two great scenic routes, one from Portland to Astoria, and the other from Portland to The Dalles. The most noted of these swift steamers at present writing are the _Ha.s.salo_ (No. 2), the _T.

J. Potter_, the _Charles D. Spencer_, and the _Bailey Gatzert_.

CHAPTER XI

Era of the Miner, the Cowboy, the Farmer, the Boomer, and the Railroad Builder

Early Gold-hunters--Gold in California--Effects of that Discovery on the Columbia River Country--Growth of Towns on the Columbia--Discovery of Gold in the Colville Country--Gold on the Clearwater--Stampede to the Idaho Mines--Cowboys Rush in with the Miners--Sudden Development of Industries at Walla Walla, Lewiston, and Other Towns--Profits and Fare in the Mines in 1861--The Hard Winter--Development of the Farming Industry--The Boomers--The Hard Times--The Railroad Age--Beginning of Railroading in the Willamette Valley--Ben Holladay--Transcontinental Railways--Henry Villard--His Great Building and his Downfall--The Present Railroads on the River--Dr. D. S. Baker and the Pioneer Railroad on the Upper River.

The age of gold in the Columbia pressed hard upon that of the trappers.

But it dawned first far south.

The Spaniards had sought the precious metals with boundless energy. Richly had the treasures of the Montezumas and the Incas rewarded their reckless cupidity. But as they moved northward they met with nothing but disappointment. The El Dorados of their ardent fancy had vanished as they turned toward Oregon and California.

In 1848 the guns of Stockton and Fremont thundered the salvos of American occupation over the Sierras. Just as the sovereignty of Uncle Sam was acknowledged, the long-sought discovery of gold startled the world.

In 1838 a gay, mercurial Switzer, Captain Sutter, had made his way with a band of trappers across the plains to Oregon, and thence had gone to California. A das.h.i.+ng adventurer, without money, but with boundless _sang-froid_ and _bonhommie_, Sutter had marvellously interested all whom he met and in some inexplicable manner had got money and credit sufficient to build a fort and start an immense ranch on the Sacramento, almost on the site of the present capital of the Golden State. "Sutter's fort"

became one of the most notable places in California. In 1844 James W.

Marshall went to the Columbia, but after only a year's stay made his way to California. In 1847 he entered into partners.h.i.+p with Sutter in a sawmill enterprise at Coloma on the south fork of the American River.

There, while at work in the mill-race on the 19th of January, 1848, Marshall discovered s.h.i.+ning particles. Gold!