Willamette Chief
Sternwheel steamboat built in 1874
Willamette Chief was a sternwheel steamboat built in 1874 for the Willamette River Navigation Company.
Design and construction
The builders of Willamette Chief intended her to run from Astoria, Oregon to the headwaters of the Willamette to break the monopoly on Willamette steam navigation traffic that had been achieved by the People's Transportation Company. Under the name of the Astoria Farmers' Wharf Company, some of stockholders of the Willamette River Transportation Company had built a wharf in Astoria to allow ready transfer of wheat and other farm products to ocean-going ships, and Willamette Chief was going to be the inland transportation link in this chain of commerce they had envisioned. She was considered to be strongly built and a good cargo hauler, with a shallow draft to allow her to work as far inland as possible.
Monopoly-breaker and wheat boat
After completion, Willamette Chief the largest boat of the company, was placed on the run up the Willamette River to Albany and Corvallis. When Willamette Chief first came downriver to Astoria she carried 200 tons of wheat and thirty farmers. More people, mostly farmers, 130 in all, boarded at Albany and Salem. Joseph Nathan Teal, known for some reason as "Colonel Teal", an early Oregon businessman and a staunch advocate of low steamer rates, was also aboard:
Teal had become an inveterate speech maker and hopeful breaker of monopolies and was always around when a new steamboat company tried to elbow its way into the business of the river. On the Willamette Chief he made a speech, envisioning things to come when all the valley wheat from all the valley farms would go direct to Astoria for only four dollars a ton, there to be shipped to a hungry world. Prosperity would follow, and the voice of the turtle would be heard in the land.
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This entry incorporates text from “Willamette Chief” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.