The Columbia River: Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce

by William Denison Lyman

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 massive 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 passed 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 passage 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 passengers. Most of the freight and passengers 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 Boisé 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, Washington, to Death Rapids, B. C.

The Government engineers in Senate Document, 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 altitudes 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, Cœur 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 tithe 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 Canal Flats and thence through the canal 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.