Graveyard of the Pacific by Randall Sullivan

Author:Randall Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

CHAPTER EIGHT

AMONG THE OUTCOMES OF THE IOWA WRECK was that the catastrophe and its aftermath focused attention on the control over the mouth of the West’s most significant watercourse by a small group of men: the Columbia River Bar Pilots.

It was a push from the bar pilots that had impelled Frank Sweet, among others, to demand that repairs and improvements to the jetties at the entrance to the Columbia be undertaken immediately, and it was the pilots’ insistence that the bar channels be dredged more or less annually that had pressured the state and federal governments into coming up with the money to pay for it.

At the same time, a realization of just how influential and exclusive “the club” of the bar pilots had become concerned certain Portland politicians. This concern grew into an outcry in January of 1939, when a bill was introduced in the Oregon state legislature to revamp the commission that oversaw the pilots, establishing that a maximum of eight be licensed at any one time, and ensuring that at least one “experienced river pilot” serve on the three-person commission that administered those licenses. Immediately there was criticism that the bill was intended to take control of the bar away from the public and give it to “the club.”

This wrangle over how much power over the Columbia Bar should be held by the pilots would go on for more than a decade, and is still not entirely done, nor will it be so long as the pilots have the authority to decide whether conditions are bad enough to close the bar to shipping—a choice that, each time it is made, or not made, can cost hundreds of businesses millions of dollars.

What the back-and-forth mainly generated in 1936, though, was much greater curiosity outside Astoria about who the bar pilots were and how they had become such a significant political and commercial force.

Part of what people would learn was that, in the centuries-long saga of the Columbia River Bar, the story of the bar pilots was, to a remarkable degree, a narrative created by the life and career of a single person.

CAPTAIN GEORGE FLAVEL HAD NOT BEEN FIRST, only foremost. For a half century before his arrival on the Columbia Bar circa 1850, other pilots had established themselves as indispensable to the establishment of commerce at the mouth of the great river.

The most legendary of these was Concomly, the Chinook chief who led the tribal group located on what was already known among Europeans and Americans at the dawn of the nineteenth century as Baker Bay. The first British fur trader to regularly work the mouth of the Columbia, Charles Bishop, described Concomly during the last years of the eighteenth century as a second-rank chief. Almost a decade later, the Lewis and Clark Expedition concurred in that opinion.

The elderly one-eyed headman was a unique combination of character traits, however, a “shrewd old savage,” as Washington Irving would describe him in his largely fanciful book Astoria, who was at the same time a warm personality.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.