The average tonnage of vessels entering Coos Bay has been 300 tons. During the year ending June 30, 1890, the arrivals were 354; the net tonnage of which was 89,188, and the gross tonnage 117,726. The river and bay steamers are twelve in number, and their gross tonnage 740. Five tugs are employed, with a tonnage of 620, gross. The total exports of Coos Bay for the year ending June 30 amounted to 221,329.1 tons, value $1,992,903; and the imports to 18,000 tons, value $1,175,600; leaving a balance in favor of the port of $817,303.
Coos Bay has hitherto been reached only by small sea-going vessels, or by mountain roads, with which the storms of winter dealt severely, leaving them unfit for travel the greater part of the year. The Scottsburg road from Drain's was the one usually taken. At the former place the stage was abandoned for a small steamer to Gardiner, or to the mouth of the river (I took the mail-carrier's small boat from Gardiner to the coast), whence a beach-wagon conveyed passengers twenty miles to the north side of Coos Bay, where they were met by a steamer and taken across to Empire City. The beach ride is wearisome, with the perpetual roll of the broad-tire wheels over the unelastic wet sand, and the constant view of a restless waste of water on one hand, with dry, drifting sand between us and the mountains on the other, varied only with patches of marsh and groups of scraggy pines at intervals.
All this is soon to be changed. Coos Bay is to be reached by rail from Drain's; and as lovely and genial a spot of earth as one could desire is to be made easily accessible. The prodigality with which nature has adorned the hill-sides hereabouts with the elegant rhododendron, the blue spirea, nutmeg, myrtle, and other trees and shrubs famed in the poetry of the Adriatic, was a constant joy to me while I remained here. The pleasure derived from it was like that of coming upon a volume of the odes of Callimachus or a painting by a master in an out-of-the-way place.
One of the immediate results of the changed prospects of Coos Bay is the founding of the town of Glasgow, on a fine site commanding a view of the bay and of the bar at its mouth. A wharf two thousand feet long has been constructed, and extends over a bed of Eastern oysters which were planted there
