Development of Portland, Oregon, as a Commercial Center

I’ve written earlier posts about the development of Portland, Oregon, where my work-in-progress is set. Although Oregon City was the first commercial town to grow in Oregon, Portland soon surpassed it. Portland had only 800 residents in 1850, but by 1870 had over 8,000—far smaller than San Francisco, but far larger than Oregon City.

Portland’s commercial sector grew as the result of four interrelated activities:

• Distributing imported goods to local residents,
• Issuing credit to local farmers and purchasing local crops and other goods for resale to California and elsewhere,
• Speculating in land development in and around the city, and
• Investing in local enterprises such as mills and other manufacturing and in the extraction of natural resources such as timber.

Several men amassed enormous fortunes through one or more of these activities, including William Ladd, Henry Corbett, and Ben Holladay. William Ladd started as an importer of wine and liquor, expanded into offering local farm goods in his store, and later became a banker investing in many enterprises in the area. Henry Corbett began as the proprietor of a mercantile store, and later got into banking and commercial investments, including in transportation and downtown building construction. Ben Holladay started a stagecoach business in California before selling out to Wells Fargo. He then moved to Oregon, where he invested in railroads, before losing his fortune in the Panic of 1873.

In my novel, the McDougall family patriarch, Caleb (Mac) McDougall, has engaged in most of these activities, in partnership with his brother back in Boston. Mac originally made his fortune as a miner in California during the Gold Rush, but he soon left mining to transport the gold from the mines to Sacramento and then opened warehouses to supply goods to miners. After he returned to Oregon, he began providing credit to farmers around Oregon City, investing in steamboats and railroads, and also had a limited import-export business in Portland.

One of the aspects of writing historical novels I enjoy is figuring out where my fictional characters fit into an actual place and time. I try to take real people as models for some of my characters, and a few actual historical figures sometimes become friends, colleagues, and competitors of my fictional characters. In this novel, Abigail Scott Duniway and Ben Holladay are two such historical figures.

In my mind, Mac and his family had a very comfortable lifestyle, though not as ostentatious as some of the other commercial barons in Portland in the 1870s. Their home was located in a part of Portland where other tycoons were building mansions. When my novel (and the series) ends, the McDougalls are poised to expand their enterprises throughout the Northwest.

What do you like learning about when you read historical fiction?