then undiscovered mouth of the Klamath River for a distributing point for the Oregon mail! Thurston with characteristic energy soon procured the promise of the secretary that the notice should be immediately given, and that after June 1850 mail steamers should go "not only to Nisqually, but to Astoria."[1] The postmaster-general also recommended the reduction of the postage to California and Oregon to take effect by the end of June 1851.[2]
At length in June 1850 the steamship Carolina, Captain R. L. Whiting, made her first trip to Portland with mails and passengers.[3] She was withdrawn in August and placed on the Panamá route in order to complete the semi-monthly communication called for between that port and San Francisco. On the 1st of September the California arrived at Astoria and departed the same day, having lost three days in a heavy fog off the bar. On the 27th the Panamá arrived at Astoria, and two days later the Seagull,[4] a steam propeller. On the 24th of October the Oregon brought up the mail for the first time, and was an object of much interest on account of her name.[5] There was no regularity in arrivals or departures until the coming from New York of the Columbia,
- ↑ This quotation refers to an effort on the part of certain persons to make Nisqually the point of distribution of the mails. The proposition was sustained by Wilkes and Sir George Simpson. 'If they get ahead of me,' said Thurston in his letter, 'they will rise early and work late.'
- ↑ 31st Cong., 2d Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, 408, 410. This favor also was chiefly the result of the representations of the Oregon delegate. A single letter from Oregon to the States cost 40 cents; from California 12½ cents, before the reduction which made the postage uniform for the Pacific coast and fixed it at six cents a single sheet, or double the rate in the Atlantic states. Or. Statesman, May 9, 1851.
- ↑ McCracken's Early Steamboating, MS., 7; Salem Directory, 1874, 95; Portland Oregonian, Jan. 13, 1872. There was an incongruity in the law establishing the mail service, which provided for a semi-monthly mail to the river Chagre, but only a monthly mail from Panamá up the coast. Rept. of P. M. Gen., in 31st Cong., 2d Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, 410; Or. Spectator, Aug. 8, 1850.
- ↑ The Seagull was wrecked on the Humboldt bar on her passage to Oregon, Feb. 26, 1852. Or. Statesman, March 2, 1852.
- ↑ Or. Spectator, Oct. 31, 1850. The Oregon was transformed into a sailing vessel after many years of service, and was finally sunk in the strait of Juan de Fuca by collision with the bark Germania in 1880. Her commander when she first came to Oregon was Lieut. Charles P. Patterson of the navy.
