Canemah was an early
settlement in the U.S. state of Oregon
located near
Willamette
Falls
on the Willamette
River. It is now a district within Oregon
City
.
Location
Canemah was located on the east side of the Willamette River, about
a mile above Willamette Falls. At that time, Oregon City was a
separate settlement, and was located below the falls. The two towns
were connected by a path, later upgraded to an ox track.
Canoe landing for the First Nations
From the earliest times the place was inhabited by
Native Americans, and
was considered by the
Calapooya nation to
be part of their territory. All canoe traffic up and down the
Willamette had to cross the portage around the falls, of which
Canemah was the southern point. The name "Canemah" itself means
"the canoe place". There was said to have been a dispute among the
Native Americans as to which of their nations would control this
important place, resulting in the murder of the people, apparently
also called "Canemahs" who had occupied Canemah and claimed the
right to charge tolls for use of the portage.
Pioneer settlement
The first
European American
settler at Canemah was
Absalom F.
Hedges (1817 – 1890). He arrived
in Oregon City in 1844, and found all the good lots already taken.
He went south to Canemah, and staked out a
Donation Land Claim close to the
canoe landing place. At that time, water travel above the falls was
still almost exclusively conducted by the Native Americans using
canoes, although they also acted as paddlers for the flat boats,
sometimes known as
bateaux, that were
starting to appear on the river. A few settlers had already
established themselves in the
Willamette Valley, and the boats and
canoes brought their farm products to Canemah, where they were
loaded on ox-carts and carried around the falls to Oregon City. New
emigrants to the Willamette Valley, and all of their goods, were
then hauled back to Canemah up the track from Oregon City by the
same ox-teams.
Beginning of steamboat business
By 1849, Hedges had opened up a tannery and laid out a townsite at
Canemah, which he called "Falls City." With his brother-in-law
William Barrow, Hedges set up a sawmill and opened a store. The
name "Falls City" never caught on and the place continued to be
called "Canemah." As river traffic increased, Hedges and some
partners decided to put a steamboat on the Willamette above the
falls. Hedges gathered up several thousand dollars in gold, and
made a trip back east to buy the machinery for the vessel.
He bought
two engines which were shipped around Cape Horn
to Oregon. Hedges and his partners returned
overland.
Key transportation point for the Willamette Valley
By the time Hedges and his party returned to Oregon, there were
already three steamboats operating on the upper Willamette,
Hoosier,
Washington, and
Multnomah.
In June 1851, the
small Hoosier was making three trips a week from Canemah
up the Yamhill River, a tributary of
the Willamette, to Dayton
. The
much larger
Multnomah was assembled at Canemah in the
spring of 1851 from parts premanufactured in the east, and made her
first trial run in August 1851.
Facing this competition, Hedges and company began construction on
the new steamboat, named
Canemah, which
was launched near the end of September 1851 and entered service in
late 1851. About this time, a new ox road was blasted along the
river in the
basalt cliffs that separated
Canemah from Oregon City. Wagon traffic ran all day and night;
night traffic was lit by torches burning along the road.
Canemah was an important place in the 1850s, and many more stores
and residences were built, as well as nine or ten steamboats in
addition to
Multnomah and
Canemah. During this
period, on April 8, 1854, the spectacular and tragic explosion of
the new steamboat
Gazelle occurred. Other
steamboats built at Canemah in the 1850s included
Yamhill (1851),
Shoalwater
(1852) (later known by other names),
Wallamet (1853),
Enterprise (1855),
James Clinton (1856),
Elk,
Surprise (1857),
Onward and
Moose.
Reconstruction after flood of 1861

Boat basin above Willamette Falls,
1867, with sternwheeler under construction
Canemah, built almost at the river's level, was wiped out by the
flood of December 1861. Afterwards, the wharves and some buildings
were reconstructed, and prosperity seemed certain. More steamboats
were built and a
portage railway was
built along the east back to replace the lumbering ox carts. The
People's Transportation
Company was organized, and the company built an improved boat
basin above the falls. A canal was cleared below the falls which
lessened the portage distance. New steamboats were built above the
falls to serve customers upriver. These included a second
Yamhill (1860),
Unio/Union
(1861), a second
Enterprise (1863),
Reliance (1865),
Active (1865),
Fannie Patton
(1865),
Echo
(1865),
Albany
(1868),
Success, and
Dayton (1868).
Decline of importance
.jpeg/180px-Governor_Grover_(sternwheeler).jpeg)
The opening of the Willamette Locks in
1873 marked the beginning of the decline of Canemah's importance as
a separate city.
This is the Governor Grover, the first steamboat to
pass through the locks on March 21, 1873.
In 1870, the
Oregon State
Legislature allocated funds for the construction of locks on
the west side of the falls. By 1873 the locks were complete.
Steamers
could now move directly from Portland all the way to the Corvallis
, with no portage. Towns based on the
portage, like Canemah, started to fade in importance. During the
1870s, three or four more steamboats were built at Canemah, and
these were the last to be built above the falls: the
Shoo-Fly (Another steamboat
on the Columbia River built three years later was named
Don't Bother Me),
Alice, and
McMinnville (1877), and
the smaller
Carrie Norton
(1878). By 1892, the name
Canemah had been almost
forgotten and the area came to be known as simply another part of
Oregon City. Canemah is now a
National Historic District.
Further reading
- Timmen, Fritz, Blow for the Landing, Caxton Press,
Caldwell, ID 1973 ISBN 0-87004-221-1
Notes and references
- Corning, Howard McKinley, Willamette Landings - Ghost Towns
of the River, at 41, 45, 58-69, 214 Oregon Historical Society
(2nd Ed. 1977)
- Mills, Randall V., Sternwheelers up Columbia -- A Century
of Steamboating in the Oregon Country, at 21, 52-53, 54, 176,
University of Nebraska, Lincoln NE 1947 (1977 printing by Bison
Press) ISBN 0-8032-5874-7
- Mills, at 192. See Shoo Fly, Don't Bother
Me.
- Affleck, Edward L., A Century of Paddlewheelers in the
Pacific Northwest, the Yukon, and Alaska, at 7-28, Alexander
Nicholls Press, Vancouver, BC 2000 ISBN 0-920034-08-X