COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL | THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 2020 | 9A
Offbeat Oregon
Sternwheelers on Willamette once towed barns, caught flying fish
By Finn J.D. John
for The Sentinel
T
he Willamette River
was running high
and wild on the
morning of Feb. 5, 1890, as
Alden and Arthur Graham
set out from Oregon City in
their sternwheel riverboat
for the daily run to Port-
land.
They arrived in Portland
in what must have been re-
cord time, dodging logs and
small floating buildings
along the way, and prompt-
ly canceled the return trip.
It was just too dangerous to
even try charging into the
teeth of all the fast-moving
debris.
But after they arrived,
they learned that theirs was
the only riverboat between
Willamette Falls and the
Portland bridges — and
there were some things
floating down the river
that could potentially dam-
age or even destroy those
bridges. So, back out into
the torrent they went, to
the rescue.
“Our first job was to
meet two warehouses of
furniture owned by I.F.
Powers that had gone adrift
upstream,” Alden recalls, in
his unpublished memoir.
“The first one we missed,
and it crashed into the
Morrison Bridge. But the
second one we caught and
towed to safety.”
Then it was down to Ross
Island to rescue a herd of
dairy cows that were about
to be swept away by the ris-
ing waters.
The brothers finished the
night with a moonlit run up
the river to intercept a barn
which had floated off its
footings and was on its way
to the bridges. This they
found securely jammed
up on the banks near Ross
Island, so they left it alone
and called it a night.
“It had taken us over
an hour to get that far up-
stream but less than half
that time to return,” Alden
writes, “drifting stern-first
and taking no chances on
fouling our (paddle)wheel
or rudder and becoming a
casualty ourselves!”
It wasn’t exactly “just an-
other day” in the life of the
owners of a small steam-
boat line, but it wasn’t un-
expected either. In fact,
during the 1861 flood, at
least one riverboat steamed
out across the flooded val-
ley floor, going from house
to house to rescue people
stuck on the roofs.
Throughout the late
1800s, the sternwheel riv-
erboat was the predom-
inant icon of life along
the Willamette and lower
Columbia rivers — as the
sidewheel boat was along
the Mississippi.
A
lden Graham hadn’t
had any thoughts of
starting a steamboat line
when he first arrived in
Portland from Nova Sco-
tia. He was the son of a
ship captain there, and
his brother Arthur had
followed in the old man’s
footsteps; but Alden had
decided to seek his fortune
in Oregon, and so, in 1879,
off he went.
In his new home, he tried
several lines of work before
settling into a position at
Lipman & Wolfe’s dry-
goods store. And he was
rapidly rising through the
ranks there when a week-
end excursion changed his
life.
“Two of us (rowing club
members) paddled from
Portland to Ilwaco, near
the mouth of the Colum-
bia, in our canoes,” Alden
writes. “It took us three and
a half days. We returned
to Portland via steamboat,
an enjoyable experience
which also opened my eyes
to the possibilities present
in the booming steamboat
transportation business.
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I devoted my spare time to
scouting around for a small
steamboat operation that
we Grahams could handle.”
Alden also started writ-
ing letters to his father,
John, and brothers, Arthur
and Newton, urging them
to come west and join him
in the venture. Soon they
did.
The result, in 1885, was
the purchase of a tatty lit-
tle 100-foot sternwheeler,
the Altona — which broth-
er Arthur, the former ship
captain, immediately set
about restoring to immac-
ulate and perfect order.
T
he Grahams named
their operation the Or-
egon City Transportation
Co., but locals all referred
to them as “The Yellow
Stack Line,” because Arthur
had painted the smoke-
stack of the Altona bright
yellow.
The line fit nicely into a
little niche between the big
freight operations that were
then scrapping for the Wil-
lamette Valley wheat-ship-
ping business above the
falls, and the even-bigger
Oregon Railway & Naviga-
tion Co., which was at the
time battling it out with
U.B. Scott for the Columbia
River passenger business.
They specialized in
twice-daily runs from Or-
egon City to Portland.
And they’d chosen wise-
ly — there was literally no
competition for that run in
1885. The larger operators
considered it too small to
put a boat on.
“We would stop any
place for anything,” Alden
recalls. “A single passen-
ger or a few bags of farm
produce. A cloth ‘flag’ on
a stick with a note attached
giving the shipper and
consignee’s name was suf-
ficient to assure shipment
to either Portland or Ore-
gon City. … This resulted
in goodwill which carried
on through the years and
helped us when we did get
competition later on.”
Sometimes they didn’t
even have to stop the boat
to take on cargo. “During
the salmon run each year
… commercial fishermen
with boatloads of netted
salmon between Portland
and Oregon City would
hail us, and, as we slowed
down, would come along-
side and toss their salmon
aboard for shipment to
Portland,” Alden writes.
“These were loose fish, so
each shipment had to be
separated from others by
making cordwood bins,
with each bin duly tallied
and tagged by the purser
as to number of salmon,
shipper, and consignee.
Our biggest year for loose
salmon was 1889, when we
carried 16,874.”
T
ime marched on. In
1893 an electric rail-
road was built linking Port-
land with Oregon City, and
the competition cut deeply
into the Grahams’ passen-
ger business; the riverboat
ride was scenic and love-
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board, but the train ride
was much faster.
Their fleet having ex-
panded to two boats,
they found they only had
enough business for one;
so they sent the other boat
through the Oregon City
locks to battle it out with
the freighters on the upper
river.
They expected a hard
fight. But at about the
same time, someone dis-
covered hops as a Willa-
mette Valley cash crop,
and suddenly there was a
huge seasonal demand for
transportation of hop pick-
ers to and from the fields.
This boom was very timely
for the Grahams, who had
expected to have to fight
for market share with the
wheat-freighters.
Right up through the
outbreak of the First World
War the Grahams’ fleet of
“Yellow Stack” riverboats
continued to ply the upper
Willamette, bringing loads
of passengers, hops and
wheat down the river to Or-
egon City over high waters
or low shoals. After 1911 or
so the passenger business
dried up, as the Oregon
Electric Railway extended
service all the way to Eu-
gene; but there was always
freight to be hauled, and so
much of it that they actual-
ly had another boat built,
the Grahamona, a 150-foot
humdinger that could pack
250 tons and drew just
three feet of water.
But around the time of
the war, the “Good Roads”
initiatives had created a
national infrastructure of
highways that the river-
boats couldn’t beat.
Heavy motor trucks were
less expensive to run than
steamboats, and they could
pick up a farmer’s wheat
from his actual barn rather
than requiring everything
to be hauled to the wharf
for shipping.
By 1918, the Grahams,
recognizing the writing on
the wall, shut down their
operation and sold off their
floating stock.
“The Grahamona made
her last run from Corval-
lis (to Oregon City) for the
O.C.T. Co. in May, 1918,”
Alden writes, “and, as I
write this in 1941, no oth-
er steamboat line has been
able to restore the reliable
Willamette River service
we carried out for the 32
years of our corporate life.
I doubt if any ever will. It
was the end of the steam-
boat era.”
(Sources: “Dad’s Memo-
ry Locker: Recollections of
Portland and Willamette
River Steamboating a Cen-
tury Ago,” an article by A.G.
Graham published in the
September 1982 issue of Or-
egon Historical Quarterly).
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