PRELUDES OF SAIL AND STEAM
Tue first vessel of record to enter the Willamette River was the Owyhee, a Boston trading ship that in 1829 ascended the river to within a mile of the falls. After her, in 1836, the Hudson’s Bay Company supply boat Beaver, first steam vessel in Pacific waters, made brief excursions into the lower “Wallamut.” Other trading vessels, now lost to record, cruising cautiously under reduced sail, may have ascended the river by one or the other of its two mouths. In 1840 the brig Maryland ventured the full distance to Willamette Falls. She was in command of the doughty Yankee, Captain John H. Couch, who made a return voyage two years later in the Chenamus. The Chenamus went as far as Clackamas Rapids; thence her cargo was transferred by flatboat to the “falls settlements.” Thereafter other sail-driven craft were on the Willamette, a few from the Sandwich Islands; but most, like those of Couch, from the trade ports of the north Atlantic Coast.
These all were foreign vessels trading off the new country. The first ocean-going vessel constructed on the Willamette was the Star of Oregon, built because of the desperate need of the settlers for livestock. The Hudson’s Bay Company, owning nearly all the domestic cattle in the country, refused, prior to 1843, to sell stock to incoming homeseekers. A band of Spanish cattle driven north from California in 1837 by Ewing Young, who put them to grazing in the Chehalem Hills, proved to be such untamable creatures that few ranchers cared to own them. Stock less wild than this could be obtained for a price in California. With such a purchase in view, Joseph Gale was engaged by a group of valley settlers to build a ship that could be sailed to the port of Yerba Buena (San Francisco), there to be traded for the much needed cattle.
The keel of the Star of Oregon was laid in the fall of 1840 on the wooded east shore of Swan Island. Beneath the yellowing cottonwoods of the dying year and the rains of one long gray winter, Gale and eight or ten assistants fashioned the small sailing craft, using tools borrowed from Lee’s Mission. Cordage and other articles indispensable in ship
