From Portland to Emerick’s Landing — A Journey by Steamboat on the Tualatin River, Autumn 1869

Chapter 1

If you’ve a mind to, come along with me on my return trip home to Cornelius from Portland, in this wet autumn of 1869, when steamboats slowly ply the serpentine channel of the Tualatin River and a man’s got time enough to think. October’s been a soggy affair thus far, I’ll tell you that much, but the Lord’s seen fit to give us a fair break in the weather today and I’m right grateful for it, as I much prefer the view from the top deck of the steamer Onward to cowering below like a wet cat. The river’s running a touch higher than you’d expect for the season, not too muddy, mind you, which suits us tolerably well on both counts. Enough water to slip over the snags, enough clarity to spy the sinkers lurking below.

I set out from Portland’s Ash Street dock of a Wednesday evening aboard the Senator, bound for Oswego. Slept that night at Shade’s Hotel, which ain’t the Astoria but it’ll do, and come first light Thursday morning I boarded the steamer Minnehaha for a jaunt across Sucker Lake to the west side. From there a mule-powered portage railroad, the mules looking none too pleased about their situation, I might add, hauled passengers and cargo a couple miles along wooden rails to where the steamer Onward sat waiting at her dock on the Tualatin River at Colfax Landing. That’s a couple miles up from the mouth, the river below being too swift and rocky by half for any sensible steamboat captain to attempt.

Now, the Onward ain’t the grandest vessel you’ll ever lay eyes on, but at a hundred feet long and eighteen wide she’s right well suited to the Tualatin and her peculiarities. She’s a sternwheeler, and sternwheelers, as any riverman worth his salt will tell you, are the thing for shallow water, her wheel turned by twin steam engines, horizontally mounted and huffing along like a pair of determined old men. I read in the Oregon City Enterprise some time back that she was built just a couple years prior to replace the steam sidewheel scow Yamhill, which had itself replaced the Hoosier on the Tualatin before her. Progress, they call it. The Onward makes the sixty-mile run upriver to Emerick’s Landing every Thursday without fail, and starts back down Monday morning at six o’clock sharp, whether you’re aboard or not.

Chapter 2

I’ll tell you plain, we ain’t putting much water behind us. The river’s meanders are something fierce, and it takes a considerable amount of twisting and turning just to gain a few miles westward as the crow flies. Some of the bigger bends have earned themselves names over the years, Jackson’s Horseshoe, Goose Egg, Grecian Bend and the crew navigates them with the easy familiarity of a man finding his way to the outhouse in the dark. The slow pace does afford a man ample opportunity to study the riverbanks, and they are worth studying. Steep and densely wooded on both sides, lined thick with ash, oak, and maple, most still wearing their leaves but beginning to turn in earnest now. The underbrush is choked with snowberry and elderberry, and at times the channel closes in so tight around us it feels less like a river and more like pushing through a tunnel of green. I watch a ringtail picking his way along the river’s edge, sniffing this and poking at that, before he thrusts both arms clean into the shallows quick as a wink. He spins back to the bank with a fat crawdad in his grip, pleased as punch with himself. Lord, I could do with a few of those mudbugs right about now, they’d beat the hardtack, jerky, and boiled eggs I’m carrying by a country mile. Downriver a piece, a couple of otters are chasing one another up and down the muddy banks, sliding and tumbling and carrying on something shameful, putting me in mind of the clowns from the circus that came through Hillsboro last summer. Every now and then a ruffed grouse flushes from the brush and scares the living daylights out of half the passengers. I can’t help but think how that bird would look mighty fine on our family table. If only I’d had the good sense to bring my rifle. Every so often a holler from the crew sends us all ducking low beneath overhanging branches. My reverie is broken by the steam whistle as we ease up to the first landing at Taylor’s. Down comes the wooden ramp from the bow, supplies are offloaded, the lighter goods carried by hand, the heavier swung off by boom, and new cargo and passengers come aboard the same way. One fellow rides his horse right up the ramp and onto the main deck, bold as brass, the horse not batting an eye about it. Fine-looking animal. Fine-looking nerve, too.

Near the landing, grain is stacked high and sitting, waiting on higher water to move it downriver to market. As we shove off I spy a couple of brave boys bathing in the river. I suppose when you’re young the cold don’t bite so hard. I’m not old myself, but I’ll tell you, Lord Almighty, that particular variety of bravery has left me entirely.

The next stop on the manifest is Scholl’s Ferry, though I use the word “scheduled” loosely on this river, as we make frequent unscheduled stops whenever a would-be passenger or a farmer with something to ship flags us from the bank. One gentleman hollers out as we slide past and asks the captain if he might drop a dozen pencils by for his schoolchildren on the return trip. The captain, God bless him, says he’ll see what he can do. Now, speaking of the captain, his name is Edward Kellogg. The entire crew, as a matter of fact, are Kelloggs: Charles, Elijah, and Orrin. Edward is the brother of the old riverman Joseph Kellogg, and the rest are Joseph’s own sons. Captain Joseph Kellogg founded the Tualatin River Navigation and Transportation Company back in 1865 and is the rightful owner of the Onward herself. It’s a family affair on the Tualatin, and they run a tight boat.

Chapter 3

We float beneath the Scholls bridge and I hear the worn boards squeak and groan overhead, and the clip-clop of a team crossing above us at a brisk pace. We’ve passed under a fair number of bridges along this route, and for the low ones the stack gets hinged flat to the deck, a clever arrangement and one that’s earned its keep more than once. This one’s tall enough, praise be, and we pass through without incident.

At Scholls, a man I know boards the vessel, Christopher Hesse, a Prussian by birth, who came to the Tualatin Plains with dirt under his nails and determination in his eyes. He speaks with a heavy accent but I’ve spent considerable time in the company of Germans and I can follow him well enough. I offer him a chunk of jerky and we fall to talking. We chew on the subject of how devilish hard it was for farmers out here on the Tualatin Plains before the steamers got running, winters when the roads turned to soup and wagons sank clean to their axles, summers when the ruts and dust made things hardly better. Barns stuffed to the rafters with grain and no practical way to get it to market in Portland. Using the river as a road has changed things considerable, and on that point we are in full and hearty agreement.

At the Farmington dock, Mr. Hesse takes his leave and a new passenger comes aboard, an elderly man with a fine set of white whiskers and a sociable disposition. He introduces himself as George Robinson and explains, when I inquire, that he has business this afternoon with Colonel Cornelius, who keeps a large farm on the North Plains and presently serves as President of the Oregon Senate. I’ve met the Colonel only a time or two and, if I’m to speak plainly, politics don’t hold much water with me. I remark to old George that if somebody’d had the foresight to straighten this river a bit, we’d be there already. George gets a kick out of that and tells me that about ten years back the Territorial Legislature did in fact charter a company to dredge and straighten the Tualatin, but after one long, back-breaking summer of winching snags and sunken logs from the channel, the whole enterprise was thrown over and abandoned. Can’t say I blame ’em.

I share with George what I’ve been hearing around, that the folks of Centerville are raising money by subscription to clear out Dairy Creek and make it navigable for the Onward. Personally, I have my doubts. Too many obstacles and not enough water, if you want my honest opinion. Like most streams in these parts, they drive logs down the creeks when conditions allow, flash dams built to get ’em moving, and a stick or two of dynamite where they hang up and jam. I’ve got a friend who’s a river pig. He’s told me about more than a few men who went under and never come back up. Dancing on logs in a fast creek ain’t a game for a man with any great attachment to living. I’ll keep my feet planted on good solid terra firma as much as I possibly can, and that suits me just fine.

Chapter 4

This river doubles back on itself with such regularity that a man begins to suspect he’s being made a fool of. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, then by means of these everlasting loops and bends we may just have discovered the longest. At one wide meadow crossing, a few of us, myself included, step off the boat to stretch our legs and pick over the last of the wild strawberries still clinging to the grass. It ain’t hard to keep track of the Onward from shore; you simply follow the column of steam and smoke curling up above the treetops and reunite with her at the next bend, easy as you please.

Back aboard, I slap a hungry late-season mosquito off my forearm. The purser takes notice and, with the weary air of a man who has told this story before, mentions that last summer, before the water dropped, the mosquitoes were so thick they flat obscured the captain’s vision and set upon him so ferociously he was compelled to let go of the wheel entirely, making collisions with the bank a regular and undignified occurrence. I believe every word of it.

Jackson Landing is the stop nearest Hillsboro, and we linger here longer than most on account of taking on wood to stoke the boilers. The cordwood is stacked along the warehouse owned by the steamboat company, she burns through about thirty cords a day, the Onward does, which is a powerful lot of wood. The larger of the company’s two grain warehouses stands here, thirty-five by eighty feet by my figuring, while the other sits at the end of the line at Emerick’s Landing and runs somewhat smaller, thirty by sixty or thereabouts. I can hear the boat crew jawing with the shore crew to get a move on, they’ve got near a thousand sacks of grain to load before heading back downriver and daylight ain’t waiting on anybody.

A fair crowd is milling about the landing. One fellow is offering wagon rides into town for the inclined. I’ll admit the temptation crosses my mind, I could go bend an elbow with the boys, but the wife takes a dim view of drinking and cigars, and I set my sights back squarely on making it home in time for supper where I belong. A pair of half-grown boys, somewhere between hay and grass as the saying goes, are selling cornbread and syrup near the ramp, and after nothing but jerky and hardboiled eggs the whole livelong day it’s a temptation I cannot and do not resist. The whistle calls us back to the boat before I’ve quite finished licking the syrup from my fingers, and up the ramp I go.

Ahead of me on the ramp walks a man who moves with the purposeful air of a fellow who’s accustomed to getting things done. He waves and is greeted warmly by the captain and crew by name, and he carries himself like a man who’s not entirely displeased that everyone in the room knows who he is. I ask the granger leaning against the rail beside me who the feller is. He says that’s J.C. Trullinger, owner of the saw and flour mills in Oswego, and the steamer and portage railroad I made use of back at Sucker Lake earlier in the day. Word going around is he’s traveling to Centerville to talk turkey with J.B. Jackson about buying his mill at that place. Well now, I think to myself, if a man of Trullinger’s stripe is throwing his weight behind Centerville, perhaps that progressive little town is fixin’ to become the true center of commerce on the Tualatin Plains after all. I wouldn’t wager my last boiled egg on it, but a timely fellow with bigger aspirations than mine might do well to give it serious consideration.

A passel of young ones, cornbread salesmen included, hollering and waving from the bank as we shove off for Emerick’s Landing. Around the first bend the captain calls out “hard port rudder” and we swing sharp to the left to stay on the Tualatin. On the port side, Dairy Creek pours in, brown and swollen. The river is no straighter here, less so, if anything, like a length of twine balled up in a fist and pitched to the ground, the path of it impossible to predict. As the view astern closes behind the firs, a new one opens before the bow, and the captain calls out the names of the bends as we pass through them one by one, Panther, Tulip, Kellogg’s, Foster’s, Bowlby’s, like old friends he’s greeted a thousand times.

And then, rounding one last long curve, the landing and warehouse at Sol Emerick’s place comes into view, and I tell you, it is about the finest sight these weary eyes have seen all day. The whistle sounds, and it’s as good as a hymn. From the deck I can see that one of Sol’s boys, Bill, is down at the landing with a wagon, offering passage to Free Orchards for those with the fare. After a day like this one, that proposition suits me right down to the ground. Mr. Trullinger brushes past me on his way down the ramp, near sends me into the river, waving and nodding over his shoulder as he hustles on his way, already onto the next thing. Home for supper after all. I reckon that’ll do.

Epilogue

I have endeavored, through careful research, to offer an account of the journey from Portland to Emerick’s Landing as a traveler of 1869 might have experienced it. The narrative itself is fictional, but it is grounded in facts as they were recorded at the time. There may be room for debate on a point or two, but short of traveling back through time, we are left to work with what the era put to paper. Every person introduced along the way was a real soul who walked this valley, and I hope you have enjoyed learning about the steamboats of the Tualatin River as much as I have enjoyed uncovering their story.

Historical Note

Freight and passenger service by steamer continued off and on to Emerick’s Landing for as long as twenty years, until improved roads and the coming of the railroad changed the calculus entirely. By the early 1870s, railroads were beginning to push into the valley. Though they could move more passengers and heavier cargo more swiftly than the old steamboats, their freight rates ran high, and so boat traffic on the Tualatin hung on stubbornly for a time. In 1895, government engineers surveyed the Tualatin River and declared it unsuitable for navigation, a verdict that was not entirely accurate, though by then steamboat traffic had effectively ended of its own accord some years before.

On the Location of Emerick’s Landing

The site of the warehouse at Emerick’s Landing was pointed out in 1978 by Reynold Geiger, whose grandmother still lived on the donation land claim adjacent to that of Solomon Emerick when he was a boy. The location was further confirmed by Walter Beerman, an even older resident of Golf Course Road who knew the ground well.

Washington County Sheriff J.E. Reeves, a descendant of local pioneer stock, clearly remembered his boyhood impressions of loading grain aboard one of the little vessels from a wharf south of what is now Cornelius, around 1870. And Lester Mooberry stated plainly that small river boats used to ascend the Tualatin as far up as the Solomon Emerick place, near where the first school once stood.

Vessel Specifications — Steamer Onward (1867)

The following official specifications are drawn from the United States merchant vessel registry and other historical records:

Length: 98 ft (30 m), exclusive of the fantail extension over the stern on which the sternwheel was mounted

Beam (width): 18 ft 4 in (5.59 m)

Depth of hold: 4.5 ft (1.4 m) extraordinarily shallow, ideally suited to the Tualatin’s notoriously low water

Gross tonnage: 155 gross tons / 81 registered tons (a measure of volume, not weight)

US Merchant Vessel Registry No.: 19274

Note: The narrator’s description of the Onward as “about a hundred feet long and eighteen feet wide” proves remarkably accurate against the official record, a testament to the observant eye of a Tualatin Plains farmer who knew his vessel well. Joseph Kellogg estimated the tonnage at 180–200 tons; the registered figure of 155 gross tons suggests he may have been recalling a loaded figure or estimating from memory in later years.

A Notable Passenger — Abigail Scott Duniway, 1874

Among the Onward’s more remarkable passengers was Abigail Scott Duniway (1834–1915), Oregon’s most prominent suffragist and publisher of the Portland newspaper The New Northwest. Duniway travelled aboard the Onward in August 1874, by which time the vessel had moved on from the Tualatin run to the Lewis and Cowlitz rivers as the railroad pushed into the valley, and described the experience in her newspaper with characteristic literary flair. Her account offers the most vivid contemporaneous description of the Onward’s character and navigation that has survived:

“The little steamer is one of those which Dr. Haskell calls a ‘kick up behind,’ being long and narrow, and consequently well suited to the navigation of the far-famed Slough of the Willamette and Columbia, and more especially to the narrow channels of the Lewis and Cowlitz rivers, where the captain draws a ‘bead’ on the current, and makes a hair trigger of the helm, and is, by dint of long practice, enabled to graze and barely pass the peeping and sunken snags which lie in wait to deceive the unwary on all our western water courses.”

— Abigail Scott Duniway, The New Northwest, August 1874

Duniway’s phrase “a kick up behind” , Dr. Haskell’s colorful nickname for sternwheelers, captures perfectly the vessel’s distinctive profile: long, narrow, and propelled from the rear. Her description of the captain drawing “a bead on the current” and making “a hair trigger of the helm” to graze past peeping snags is the finest literary account of Tualatin River navigation that exists. The snags and sunken logs she describes on the Lewis and Cowlitz were the same obstacles Captain Kellogg battled on the Tualatin for years, the occupational hazard of every western river steamboat man.

The Later Life and End of the Onward

The Onward’s Tualatin years were her finest, but her story did not end at Emerick’s Landing. As the railroad pushed into the valley and river traffic declined, the little sternwheeler’s fate took a dramatic and ultimately tragic turn.

The Forest Grove Run, 1868–1869

In the week before December 19, 1868, the Onward made a remarkable run from Colfax all the way up the Tualatin to Forest Grove and back, even with the water running very low and navigation extremely difficult. Another run was planned for December 26. A large amount of grain had accumulated at points along the river, waiting on higher water before it could be shipped, the same familiar story of the Tualatin Plains farmer held hostage by the season.

In January 1869, the very month our narrator made his journey, the people of Centerville were already raising money by subscription to clear out Dairy Creek and make it navigable for the Onward. As the narrator himself remarked aboard the vessel, he had his doubts. History proved him right.

By December 1872, the Onward was reported to be “slowly working her way up the Tualatin river,” with a large wheat harvest stored at Hillsboro waiting on the rains to raise the water level enough for steamer navigation. The rhythm of the river, wait for rain, wait for water, wait for the Onward, continued to govern life on the Tualatin Plains.

Sale and Departure, 1874

In 1873, after a canal was completed between the Tualatin River and the eastern end of Sucker Lake, the Onward operated on both bodies of water. But the end was coming. On March 18, 1874, James D. Miller and C.P. Church purchased the Onward, then lying in the Tualatin River about four miles upriver from the diversion dam built for Moore’s Mill. She sold for $2,000, reported at the time to be “not the value of her machinery.” After years of faithful service on the Tualatin Plains, she went for less than she was worth.

Getting her out of the Tualatin proved no simple matter. Three young men hired by Captain Sebastian “Bas” Miller to help bring the Onward out nearly lost their lives when their skiff encountered a line stretched across the river, which caught their boat and capsized it. The men clung to a log through the night, and were not rescued until nine o’clock the following morning. The Tualatin did not give up its most famous vessel without a fight.

On April 18, 1874, the Onward was transferred from the Tualatin River to the Willamette, brought out through the unnavigable rapids at the mouth of the Tualatin by the extraordinary method of a coffer dam, which temporarily held back the river long enough to float her through. It was a feat of improvised river engineering worthy of the vessel herself.

Life on Other Rivers, 1874–1877

By August 1874 the Onward was running a route between Portland and the Lewis River, the very run on which Abigail Scott Duniway rode her and wrote her celebrated account for The New Northwest. Miller had intended to use her on the Columbia run to the Cascades, but she proved not to have enough power for that demanding route. She also ran from Portland to Cathlamet, Washington Territory. In 1875 the Onward passed into the control of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which as was their habit with vessels they acquired, subsequently wore her out.

The End, December 1877

On the Sunday before December 14, 1877, while returning from the Cowlitz River laden with groceries, hay, and other cargo, the Onward struck a snag at the mouth of Blind Slough and sank in twelve feet of water. The snags she had dodged on the Tualatin for years, the peeping sinkers, the sunken logs, the hidden obstacles Captain Kellogg had navigated with such skill, finally claimed her on a distant river far from the Tualatin Plains.

But even in death, the Onward gave something back. On January 26, 1879, it was reported that her engines had been sold to be installed in a new steamer to be built for traffic between The Dalles and the head of the Cascades Rapids on the Columbia River. The twin horizontal steam engines that had turned the sternwheel on the Tualatin, huffing along, in our narrator’s words, “like a pair of determined old men”, kept right on working on a new river, in a new boat, long after the Onward herself was gone. The heart of the vessel outlasted the vessel itself. It was a fitting end for a boat that had carried the heart of the Tualatin Plains to market for the better part of a decade.

In Their Own Words

Joseph Kellogg: “We carried grain and produce of the farmers in such quantities that we built a warehouse 35×80 feet to hold the grain at Hillsboro, and at Emerick’s we had a warehouse 30×60 feet. Our boat carried full loads most of the time, the same as any other river.”

Orrin Kellogg: “I was master of the Onward while she ran there the last two seasons. Prior to that I was there on another steamboat called the Old Yamhill, she was on before the Onward was built. I was engineer on the Old Yamhill. The Onward ran there during high water, the same as on the Willamette. I was on her in the seasons of 1871 and 1872 and the spring of 1873. I think she made regular trips, as regular as on any stream where you depend on high water. Probably some of the time she was detained by drifts. The first season we ran from what is called Colfax, a point on the river from where the canal opens from the lake into the river, to Hillsboro and to Emerick’s Landing, by the river probably forty miles to Emerick’s. That is a point near Hillsboro where there was a warehouse.”

Joseph Kellogg: “I have been piloting and steamboating since 1849. I have made several trips on the steamboat Onward, from the canal to within sight of Forest Grove. The Onward was a sternwheel boat, we have had a hundred tons of freight on her. I think her tonnage was about 180 or 200 tons, though I will not be certain about that. I examined the river as one of a committee with Captain Pease for the company, and pronounced it plenty of water for a steamboat, and navigable most of the year.”

T.S. Wilkes: “It must have been some time around 1865 when Joseph Kellogg started the Tualatin river boat line, and one of the red letter days of my boyhood was when I stood on the bank at the Jackson warehouse and watched the column of steam and smoke curling up among the treetops as the Onward wound in and out of the bends between the Minter and the Jackson bridges.”

“My grandfather, Hyer Jackson, owned the Jackson Bottom south of Hillsboro in those days, and I can well remember the time when the Kelloggs ran the Yamhill, a side-wheeler, on the river. It ran up as far as the Sol Emerick place south of where Cornelius now is, and it was intended to run up Dairy Creek to the old Centerville bridge, but I am not sure that it ever did.”

“John Trullinger, who bought my great uncle John B. Jackson’s mill at Centerville, built a warehouse there beside the bridge just north of the old Centerville or Marsh schoolhouse, and I saw a crew of men at work clearing out the drifts in Dairy Creek, but as I remember it there was no draw in the old bridge west of Hillsboro, so it is doubtful the boat ever ran up to Centerville.”

“Grandfather had taken my brother Ellsworth down to the Minter bridge and boarded the boat there. Joseph Kellogg was captain and his brother, whose name I have forgotten, was engineer. A son, Orrin, was purser, and I think the mate’s name was Loftus. Charles Kellogg served in some capacity. All these were employed on the Cowlitz run in the later years on the Joseph Kellogg, which ran on the Willamette Slough route.”

“I was a frequent passenger on the boat and had a few talks with Captain Kellogg about the old times. He said that if he could have had the Tualatin River declared a public waterway and a little help in the way of dredging and locks, he could have made it a success, and that as it was he didn’t lose money, but could not hold on after the railroad was built. The shoal at the point where the Willamette Meridian crosses the Tualatin was his worst obstacle and should have been dredged, but he never could get a government dredge and snagboat on the river and was not able to build one himself.”