Docks and Locks in 19th Century Oregon City

In my novels, starting with Now I’m Found, which was set in 1848-50, I show steamboats traveling the Willamette River. Steamboats began plying the waters of the lower Willamette in 1850. However, the boats had to stop at the Willamette Falls in Oregon City, which were too high for boats to navigate.

As a result, river traffic was divided between travel below the falls (from Portland and the Columbia River to Oregon City) and above the falls (from Oregon City to Salem, and later to Eugene). Steamboats navigated some of the larger tributaries of the Willamette as well. For a good discussion of early river traffic on the Willamette, see E. Burslem Thomson, The Rise and Fall of Traffic on the Willamette River: Above Portland, Oregon, The Military Engineer , September-October, 1921, Vol. 13, No. 71, pp. 406-408.

Travel above the falls actually didn’t reach in Oregon City. Another town called Canemah was the terminus of steamboat travel. Canemah (a Calapooya tribe word for “the canoe place) was the furthest point down-river on which Native Americans could take their canoes and flatboats before reaching the Willamette Falls.

All boats—whether owned by indigenous peoples or whites—had to portage around the falls. Steamboats began traveling the lower Willamette between Portland and Oregon City in 1850. But all steamboat travel had to stop at the falls.

In 1844, a man named Absalom Hedges arrived in Oregon City, but found the good locations near that town already taken. He therefore filed a Donation Land Claim at Canemah. He named the site Falls City, but the Native American name Canemah prevailed.

In 1849, Hedges decided to operate a steamboat on the Willamette above Canemah. He returned to the East to buy equipment, and didn’t get the boat on the river until 1851. By that time, it was the fourth steamboat on the upper Willamette.

After steamboats began navigating the waters of the upper Willamette, passengers and cargo were transported the one-mile distance from Oregon City to Canemah via an ox-cart path (and later via a mule-drawn railway). Thus, both Oregon City and Canemah had docks and steamboat landings.

Canemah remained an important point on Willamette River throughout the 1850s. In 1861, a flood destroyed the town of Canemah and its docks. Although the docks were rebuilt, a portage railway and a canal lessened the length of transfers in Canemah.

Then in 1870 the Oregon Legislature began plans for locks around the Willamette Falls. The Willamette Falls Canal and Locks Company built the locks between 1870 and 1872, and the completed locks were operational in 1873. The formal opening of the locks was on January 1, 1873, and the first vessel to enter was a sternwheeler, the Maria Wilkins. Thereafter, Canemah’s importance to river traffic declined significantly.

In the books I’ve written so far, I haven’t shown any characters transferring from the docks at Oregon City to Canemah. In fact, for simplicity’s sake, I have ignored the existence of Canemah. My characters have either traveled between Oregon City and Portland (and Astoria) on the lower Willamette River or between Oregon City and Albany (or Eugene) on the upper Willamette.

Perhaps in a future novel, one of my characters will need to travel the entire distance from Portland to Eugene. If that travel takes place before 1873, he or she would have to change boats and portage around the falls. Of course, in 1873 and beyond, my characters could simply travel through the locks, which would also be an event worth writing about.

Have you ever been on a boat as it went through locks?