turn to the east for the rising sun of our progress and prosperity.
Messrs, Ruckel and Olmstead deserve high credit for their forecast, energy and perseverance in pushing this portage railroad to its present stage of completion. By autumn they expect to have it finished for the passage of the locomotive train from end to end. Next season they intend to erect the road on higher and better ground above all floods and to lay it with heavy iron rails, dispensing altogether with the present temporary one. Even under the existing disadvantages they transport over a hundred tons per day from the lower to the upper landing and unless interrupted by floods they will soon be able to convey goods forward as fast as needed.
A short time after the editor of the Advocate made his over-Sunday trip to The Dalles, some one who hid his identity under the nom-de-plume of "Observer," traveled from Portland to the Salmon river mines in western Idaho, and, as he journeyed, prepared descriptive accounts of the country for the Oregonian newspaper. By this time the early rush of prospectors and goods to the mines was over.[1] Leaving the city in early morning on the steamboat Julia he early in the afternoon was at the Cascade portage, and taking writing material in hand he wrote:
At the lower Cascades and on the Washington side is a military post but without features worth mentioning. There is here a break in the Columbia, or a "portage" as it is termed, of about four miles, and a railroad of Col. Ruckel's on the Oregon side for the transportation of freight and passengers. The cars are drawn by horses about half the distance and the iron horse takes his stately step o'er the other half of the way. Who expected two short years ago to hear the whistle of the locomotive, that harbinger of civilization, in these wilds? About fifty yards of the upper end of the track is washed away, which will be repaired [as] soon as the waters will permit. The O. S. N . Co. are engaged in building a railroad on the Washington side which is said to be much the better track
- ↑ Portland Daily Oregonian, June 7, 1862.
