THE DALLES-CELILO CANAL 157
and the food and drink necessary for them to consume (and the average miner was not a total abstainer by any means) did go in by that route, and the business done at the cities of Port- land, The Dalles, Walla Walla and Lewiston was entirely out of proportion to their populations and fabulously remunerative. At Portland in the spring of 1862 drays with goods for ship- ment by up-river steamers are said to have, remained in line nearly twenty-four hours in order to get a chance to unload. All this freight had to be carried over the Dalles-Celilo portage, and the physical ability of the equipment to handle it was taxed to the uttermost. Those were lively times on the old immi- grant road of 1843 an d at the terminals at The Dalles and Celilo, not mentioning the bar rooms of the steamboats plying on the River. The result was the building of the rail portage fourteen miles in length between The Dalles and Celilo, legally known as The Dalles and Celilo Railroad Company, but really a part of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which was in the spring of 1862 just perfecting its strangle hold upon river traffic.
The rails for the construction of the Dalles-Celilo Portage railroad were purchased by President J. C. Ainsworth, of the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, early in 1862. By some happy circumstance Wm. T. Coleman & Co. of San Francisco happened to have on their hands railroad iron to build twenty miles of road which they were glad to sell, all or none. This was more iron than was needed at the time for the Oregon Steam Navigation Company had not yet acquired the control of the portage at The Cascades, but ownership of it all also happened to become a happy circumstance.
The following item appears in the Oregonian of April 2ist, 1863, "We learn from the Dalles Journal that the passenger cars of the Dalles & Celilo railroad were to leave the depot of the O. S. N. Co. yesterday morning at nine o'clock, for Celilo, there to connect with the steamer Tenino for Wallula, Lewiston and all intermediate points FOR THE FIRST TIME." This depot at The Dalles stood very near the Uma-
