independent of San Francisco interests. He was compelled to meet and answer
all manner of objections, and found the prevailing opinion, or expressed objec-
tions to be, that it was not safe for any sailing vessel to venture into the mouth
of the Columbia river, he finally succeeded in chartering a bark—The Cutwater
— and the vessel came to Portland and was loaded by Robert C. Kinney, with
flour from the Kinney mills of McMinnville in 1867, making the first ship load
of flour to be shipped from Portland independent of San Francisco influences.
The next year, as we have already noticed, Mr. Joseph Watt of Amity char- tered a ship to load wheat for Liverpool, making the first cargo of wheat to be shipped direct from Portland to a foreign country.
The shipments of Kinney and Watt opened the way for other shipments of flour and wheat direct from Portland to foreign markets, and was the means of stimulating the production of wheat and the manufacture of flour throughout the Willamette valley. Previous to this reform in marketing Oregon wheat and flour, it had all been sent to California in the regular weekly steamships, and from San Francisco, shipped to foreign countries as California wheat. And in 1868 the total shipments of wheat from Oregon, and of flour, counted as wheat, did not exceed one million bushels. The past season of 1909 the total ship- ments counted the same way exceeded twenty-five million bushels.
THE CHINA FLOUR TRADE.
The efforts to introduce Oregon flour into the daily bill of fare of the Chi- nese would make quite a chapter in itself. For unknown centuries the four hundred millions of people in the Chinese empire have subsisted on rice, fish, and vegetables. The manufacturers of flour in California were the first to in- troduce American flour in China, and had all the business there was to them- selves down to 1888. In November, 1887, Mr. Wm. Dunbar, a flour and produce merchant on Front street, Portland, and who was part owner in, and agent for large flouring mills at Silverton, Marion and Jefl^erson, in Marion County, made a trip to China to see what could be done towards introducing Oregon flour, in that country. Not succeeding in gaining the desired end on this first visit to China, Mr. Dunbar made a second trip in 1889, taking along with him a large shipment of Oregon flour. Having now with him the flour to show for itself, and the means to show its superior quality over the California article, the Chinese merchants made their patronage depend on the price. Mr. Dunbar promptly made a price that commanded the market, and appointing Captain Musso, as agent in Hong Kong for his mills, Dunbar returned to Portland, and commenced shipping flour regularly to China; and thus earning for himself the honor of being the first man to successfully introduce Oregon flour into the trade of the Chinese empire.
Soon after this Mr. T. B. Wilcox, manager of the Portland Flouring Mills Company, went into the flour trade with China, and with ample capital and a greater supply of wheat to mills under his control in both Oregon and Wash- ington, pushed the business with his well known energy, and completely drove the Californians out of that market.
While China is an immense country with great natural resources, and with a greater population than the United States and all of Europe combined, it is still a poor market for the western nations. The Chinese can not buy much from any other people because they have not much to pay with. And their national currency of exclusively silver coin is a further handicap to their trade with the gold standard nations. For a long time silver has been going at a very low price, and is now very low, and this fact accounts for the falling off of the sales of Oregon flour to the Chinese. It was only the very rich people who could afford to have flour cakes in China, even in good times. And wheat flour to the poor was a great luxury, and was only sprinkled on the top of rice cakes as Ameri- cans sprinkle refined sugar on the top of dessert cakes, except at the season of
