In the matter of interior transportation there was not in 1848 much improvement over the Indian canoe or the fur company's barge and bateau. The maritime industries seem rather to have been neglected in early times on the north-west coast notwithstanding its natural features seemed to suggest the usefulness if not the necessity of seamanship and nautical science. Since the building of the little thirty-ton schooner Dolly at Astoria in 1811 for the Pacific Fur Company, few vessels of any description had been constructed in Oregon. Kelley related that he saw in 1834 a ship-yard at Vancouver where several vessels had been built, and where ships were repaired,[1] which is likely enough, but they were small and clumsy affairs,[2] and few probably ever went to sea. Some barges and a sloop or two are mentioned by the earliest settlers as on the rivers carrying wheat from Oregon City to Vancouver, which served also to convey families of settlers down the Columbia.[3] The Star of Oregon built in the Willamette in 1841, was the second vessel belonging to Americans constructed in these waters.
The first vessel constructed by an individual owner, or for colonial trade, was a sloop of twenty-five tons, built in 1845 by an Englishman named Cook, and called the Calapooya. I have also mentioned that she proved of great service to the immigrants of that year on the Columbia and Lower Willamette. The first keel-boats above the falls were owned by Robert Newell, and built in the winter of 1845–6, to ply between Ore-
- ↑ 25th Cong., 3d Sess., H. Sup. Rept. 101, 59.
- ↑ The schooner (not the bark) Vancouver was built at Vancouver in 1829. She was about 150 tons burden, and poorly constructed; and was lost on Rose Spit at the north end of the Queen Charlotte Island in 1834. Captain Duncan ran her aground in open day. The crew got ashore on the mainland, and reached Fort Simpson, Nass River, in June. Roberts' Recollections, MS., 43.
- ↑ Mack's Or., MS., 2; Ebberts' Trapper's Life, MS., 44; Or. Spectator, April 16, 1846. There is mention in the Spectator of June 25, 1846, of the launching at Vancouver of The Prince of Wales, a vessel of 70 feet keel, 18 feet beam, 14 feet below, with a tonnage register of 74. She was constructed by the company's ship-builder, Scarth, and christened by Miss Douglas, escorted by Captain Baillie of the Modeste, amidst a large concourse of people.
