from their present sterility; but in the interim, keeping one's eyes on Pasco is a painful experience.
Merely as a location for a city, Pasco, or Ainsworth, which is a couple of miles beyond, at the crossing of Snake River, either, or both together, are fine town-sites. Mr. Yillard, it is said, has remarked that a large city must some day be built up at the junction of the Snake and Columbia Rivers. It is more than probable, and I hope is true, and that it will be called Ainsworth, to perpetuate the memory of the man, than whom no single individual has done so much to develop the Inland Empire.
Captain J. C. Ainsworth was a very young man for the place when he took command of a steamboat, as part owner, on the upper Mississippi River; but, meeting with a painful bereavement, this, with the reports arriving at that time of the riches of the California gold placers, gave him a distaste for his manner of life, and he was just in the mood to break away from it when his friend William C. Ralston, also a steamboat man in his youth, returned from the golden shore with such representations as put to flight all hesitation, and young Ainsworth became, as so many others have become, a "man of destiny." He spent a few months in California, in 1850, as deputy clerk of the court at Sacramento, being while there solicited to go to Oregon to take command of the first steamboat built on the Wallamet,—the " Lot Whitcomb,"—in which he bought an interest.
This was the beginning of a career which lasted from 1851 to 1879 of continued progress in the development of transportation by steamboat on the Oregon rivers, in which Captain Ainsworth bore an active part. In 1859 he succeeded in forming—what he had long been aiming to do—a company which he could control in a manner to help the country and benefit himself. This was the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, composed at first of the combined interests of several heretofore antagonistic companies or individuals, who were gradually bought off until the company consisted of a few men who could work together harmoniously, and of this company Captain Ainsworth was president for twenty years.
Chief officer though he was, he attended to every detail of the business. He exacted good service, and rewarded generously. The company made money, but it was put back into transporta
