ances of the year ending July 15, 1890, amounted to eighty-nine million dollars for Portland.
The foreign trade of Portland is carried on in sailing vessels and by irregular steamship service. The trade with Europe employs between one and two hundred vessels annually, each vessel under a special charter.
Trade with Australia, South America, and the islands of the Pacific is carried on in a similar manner. Only two regular lines exist, one to New York and one to China. Of steamship lines there is one to San Francisco, one to Alaska, one to Puget Sound and British Columbia ports, one to the coast ports of Washington, and one projected and soon to be put in operation to Japan.
Portland is not eminent as a manufacturing city, although its domestic business is divided between eighty-eight kinds of manufactures and one hundred and fifty other lines of trade, which together employ between seven and eight thousand persons, the annual product of whose labor is estimated at twenty million one hundred and eighty-three thousand and forty-four dollars. Formerly only lumber and flour were produced for export. Mills were followed by foundries and machine-shops, whose output in 1889 was two million and fifty thousand dollars. Sash- and door-factories abound, and carriage-making is carried on to considerable extent. A cordage-manufactory had an output for 1889 valued at eight hundred thousand dollars, and a bag-, tent-, and sail-factory turned out about the same amount of goods during the year.
Many of the heavy expenditures of Portland capital have been made outside of Portland proper, as, for instance, in the construction of the smelter at Linnton and the Oregon Iron- and Steel-Works at Oswego.
Iron-beds were early known to exist near the Wallamet and Columbia Eivers, but the only development has been at Oswego, six miles from Portland, where there is an extensive deposit. The ore is a brown hematite, in a vein from six to fifteen feet in thickness. It is mined at slight expense, being near the surface. In 1862 six tons were taken out and tested in San Francisco, the test showing from fifty-six to sixty-five per cent, of metal of a superior quality. Thereupon, in 1865, the
