THE WATERWAYS OF THE
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
By
CLARENCE B. BAGLEY
Seattle, Washington
REPRINTED FROM "THE PACIFIC OCEAN IN HISTORY"BY H. MORSE STEPHENS AND HERBERT E. BOLTON.THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1917, By The Macmillan Company.
THE WATERWAYS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
Clarence B. Bagley
Recently, as I have studied this subject its magnitude hasgrown more apparent. The space allotted my paper will permitlittle more than a historical sketch. It has been my life work togather together the written and printed history of the PacificNorthwest, but I am not a professional writer of it.
For my purpose this caption refers to the Columbia River andits tributaries, and Puget Sound and the rivers emptying into it,including the Fraser, and their watersheds. The Columbia andFraser are the only rivers that break through the great mountainranges which parallel the shore of Washington and Oregon. Withthe Pacific Ocean only a few miles away, with its intricate networkof great and lesser rivers, and its inland tidal waters whose aggregatelittoral exceeds the distance between Cape Cod and CapeFlattery, it is remarkable how much of the exploration and industrialand commercial development of the Pacific Northwest hascome from the East towards the West.
Alexander Mackenzie in 1793, when he discovered the upperreaches of the Great River; Lewis and Clark in 1805; SimonFraser and John Stuart in 1805-6; Daniel W. Harmon in 1810;David Thompson in 1811, and a little later Wilson Price Hunt,and thereafter nearly all the leading men of the Northwest Companyand the Hudson's Bay Company, braved the hardships anddangers of the trip over the Rocky Mountains and down the turbulentwaters of the Columbia or the Fraser.
John McLoughlin, James Douglas and Peter Skene Ogden,Nathaniel J. Wyeth and the first missionaries, John C. Frémont,B. L. E. Bonneville, all led expeditions westward. Astoria wasfounded from the sea, and the expeditions of Astor's party toestablish inland posts went up the river from the west, but they[299]were all failures. For nearly seventy years the canoe and thebateau, the ox team or the horse team attached to the prairieschooner, were the instruments whereby the pioneers searched outthe country and peopled its valleys and plains.
During the period between 1842 and 1855, old Oregon wasmostly peopled by immigrants from the Mississippi valley, whocame overland. After the completion of the railroad across theIsthmus in 1855, immigrants from near the Atlantic seaboardtook steamer at New York City for Aspinwall, crossed the Isthmusby rail, thence to San Francisco by steamer and to Oregon andWashington by sailing craft or steamer. Troubles with Indiansbetween the Missouri and Columbia, of frequence in the later'fifties, followed closely by the great Civil War period, materiallychecked the influx of population overland. In fact, not untilthe completion of the Northern Pacific in 1883, and soon afterwardof the Oregon Shortline, did the real development of Oregon andWashington begin.
In 1850 there were in old Oregon only 13,000 white settlers,1049 of whom lived north of the Columbia River; in 1860 Oregonhad 52,000,