A Metropolis Rises on Sacks of Grain, Cans of Salmon, and the Backs of Indentured Sailors

Coastwise and Transoceanic Trade in the 1870s and 1880s

In 1870 Portland entered an era of international grain trading that would bring such fortunes as would cause the "golden years" of shipping the treasures of the mines to recede into a faded memory. The farsighted merchants Corbett and McCleay took a bit of a gamble and exported a shipment of wheat and canned salmon to Liverpool, England, aboard the schooner Adeline Elwood. When this effort prospered, they chartered more vessels and sent them to Europe filled with wheat and salmon, returning with such necessary heavy industrial items as railroad iron. By 1871 there were five vessels devoted to this trade, and by 1872 the number had grown to ten. The increase in international trade necessitated that a Customs District of the Willamette be created and a customs house established. Overseas trade from Portland was mainly with England, British Columbia, the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, and Hong Kong, both in imports and in exports, while coastwise trade, of course, was mainly with San Francisco.

In 1873 a large part of downtown Portland burned to the ground. It was a disaster of gigantic proportions, which was reported in headlines around the world, incurring much sympathy and support for the battered frontier city. It would be expected that such a disaster could greatly impede the growth of such budding new businesses as Portland supported, even to the ruin of many, but in spite of these setbacks shipping continued far better than was expected and the city was soon back on its feet. The export of wheat for that year was valued at $1,055,000 and flour at $159,000.

By 1876 Oregon exports had grown to 193,778,700 pounds of wheat, valued at $3,138,294 (in 1876 dollars), as well as large amounts of canned salmon and wool. By the end of this decade there were 60 steam vessels registered in the Willamette District, whereas the export of wheat alone required the services of some 70 vessels. The export of flour required the use of an extra 19 vessels. Of course a city the size of Portland could not begin to import enough goods to equal the number of vessels required for its cereal exports, so it was during this period that ships coming to Portland brought with them ballasts of bricks and paving stones. Prior to this, the city's main method for paving what boulevards it didn't leave as a muddy quagmire was "Nicholson pavement" or short sawed logs set on end and placed side by side in the same manner as cobble stones. It worked to get the wagon wheels out of the muck, but it was a short lived solution in rain-soaked Portland.

Boneyard Mary and Other Bawdies

During most of the later part of the nineteenth century the O.S.N. Co. kept a salvage yard of partially wrecked and unused steamboats either at dock or resting on the river's edge northwest of downtown, opposite Albina. This area was called the "boneyard" and is referenced by many a newspaper article as being the abode of hobos, homeless families, and others who had fallen through the cracks of polite society. Several articles mention a notorious prostitute named "Boneyard Mary” as standing in court as a witness to murder and mayhem. Other madams with enough of this world's goods to appear somewhat more respectable kept houses of prostitution which were actually houseboats that could be moved from Portland across to East Portland, depending on which side of the river was more amiable to their profession at that moment. A proliferation of saloons and bawdy houses mixed with a steady and transient clientele of seafarers gave Portland the opportunity to rise in the annals of vice along with other such metropolises, such as, Gomorrah, San Francisco, and Sodom.

Shanghaiers, Crimp Gangs, and Bunko Kelly Establish the City's Maritime Reputation Worldwide

With the great increase in the movement of cargo from the Willamette wharves by the year 1870 Portland saw the beginning of an evil era of maritime slavery, known as “crimping.” This unbelievably cruel and unjust practice would continue unchecked for the next 45 or 50 years, leaving a blot on the reputations of both Portland and Astoria that would last until long past the death of the last poor shanghaied sailor. The shanghaiers called themselves “sailor's boardinghouse keepers” but everyone else called them “crimps.” Here is how the Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary published in 1879 defines the word, "crimp":

crimp, n. krimp (Dut. krimpe, a confined place in which fish are kept alive till wanted), one who unfairly decoys men into naval, military, or merchant seamen service --especially one who entraps sailors; one who ostensibly keeps a lodging house for sailors, but whose real occupation is to fleece the unwary of their wages: to decoy into naval service: crimp´ing, imp.: crimped, pp. krimpt.

The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution had outlawed slavery in 1865, but in a nation whose beginnings had been staffed by indentured servants from the home countries and captured slaves from Africa, the idea of slavery was not so abhorrent that the very lowest class of laborer, the seaman, could not be subjected to such abuses. Sailors were a pariah class conjuring in those days the same repugnance that in the present day is reserved for sex offenders. This gave rise to many opportunities to defraud and abuse them.

When tugs pushed a vessel up to one of the wharves along the Willamette, the crimps were there waiting. Sometimes they would use a hook and ropes to board the vessel from rowboats before it even came along dockside. The crimps would accost the inexperienced among the crew with spiked liquor and offers of better pay on a different vessel. If the crew was owed its pay, the captains were glad to see them go because oftentimes they could make money by keeping the wages owed (which desertion allowed them to do under maritime law) while obtaining fresh crewmen from the same crimps.

The crimps owned boarding houses where anyone wishing to avoid being jailed by the Portland Police for vagrancy could readily obtain a room “on credit,” the bill being paid at some date in the near future by a ship captain, their new boss. This trick was played year in and year out on many a wandering fortune seeker, would be gold miner, fun seeking cowboy, plow boy, logger, fisherman--anyone without any particular place to go wandering the streets of Portland, or looking for a good time in any number of establishments near the waterfront. If there was a large number of vessels in port needing fresh crews, the crimps were not above slipping someone a Mickey Finn, or going down to the “shape up,” where longshoremen were being hired, with a sap (blackjack) in one hand and a canvas tarp in the other to pick off some unwilling seamen from among the no-hires for that day. Ship captains were accustomed to having new crew members delivered wrapped in a canvas tarp.

The legend has it that one of Portland's cruelest and most infamous crimps, James “Bunko” Kelly, was given the moniker “Bunko” after he stole the cigar store Indian from in front of Wildmans Cigar Store, wrapped it in a tarp and sold it to a ship captain as a drunk sailor. Though this and many other legends of Bunko Kelly were repeated often enough to acquire the legitimacy of fact, the memoir Bunko penned while serving part of a “frame up” life sentence at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem repeats none of these tales, but mentions only how he was “a good man who never did harm to anyone.”

The lawlessness, corruption of local officials, and the colorful characters involved in the crimping business gave rise to many hair raising, and jaw dropping tales. During the latter part of the 19th century up into the early 1920s, just the names of the cities of Portland or Astoria carried with them a worldwide infamy. Much like Chicago in the gangster era of prohibition was known for its machine gun murders, bombings, and bribery, Portland or Astoria was synonymous with shanghaiing.

It took Portland a long time to overcome the bad name, and many of these tales died out with their eye witnesses, simply because the bad reputation was one that was not wanted by Portlanders, whether they were newspaper editors or anyone else. It was a long, terrible period of unholy cruelty and injustice, and one that was tolerated for over half a century by civil society. Add to this the fact that the city government of Portland was so notoriously corrupt for so many years that finally in the 1950s the U.S. House of Representatives in Congress opened up an investigation into city affairs, and one begins to see why the squeamishness exists, and the old stories are relegated to the dust bin.

For awhile, after some excavating in the 1970s, the papers carried some stories about Portland's “shanghai tunnels.” The excavating had turned up a system of tunnels leading to the Willamette with much evidence of them being frequented by humans. There was even a cage found, large enough for a grown man. Tours of these places are now offered to tourists, although it has become fashionable in Portland nowadays, that whenever the “shanghai tunnels” are mentioned in the press, to include a disclaimer that the whole “shanghai tunnels” thing is just a legend and these were actually never used to shanghai anyone. This in spite of numerous eyewitness reports and many an old timer's tale from yesteryear.

The practice of crimping had be used for centuries by the British Navy to obtain men for its large fleets of ships covering the entire world. By the early 19th century it had become fairly common practice on east coast cities and in New Orleans. In San Francisco the practice had become a necessity during the gold rush days with entire crews jumping ship to run off to the gold fields. By the 1870s in Portland it had become such a intrinsic practice in the port that the more successful crimps became men of substance who kept the police and the judges paid off. The new boom town port needed the practice just to keep booming, so as far as most people were concerned there was a “hands off” policy as far as crimps were concerned.

Some of the more respectable, and morally minded city fathers may have understood the necessity for such practices to keep their goods and cargoes flowing uninterrupted, but they did not just stand idly by. In1877 the Portland Seaman's Friend Society was formed, a society which, using their own words, was formed:

"to promote the temporal, moral and spiritual welfare of the Seamen, Steamboatmen and Longshoremen, visiting or belonging to this port. The means employed are a Mariner's Church, boarding house, library, reading room, visitation of ships including religious services on board, and the distribution of suitable literature."

On the board of directors of this new society were most of the prominent merchants and bankers of the time, H.W. Corbett, Geo. H. Chance. W.S. Ladd, E.B. Babbitt, etc.—the list read like a who's who of who was making money off of the shipping industry in Portland. That being said, they were good and upright citizens who were appalled by the injustice and cruelty they observed on the waterfront. In spite of their good intentions to provide an alternative to the so-called “boarding houses” of the crimps, with the Harbor Master, police and politicians on the side of the crimps, their efforts were fairly minimal. At one time the big time crimp, Larry Sullivan, was able to enlist the use of a new law to deny the Seaman's Friend Society continuation of its permit to operate a boarding house, insuring the legal monopoly held by the crimps. This monopoly held sway in both Portland and Astoria, with each city vying for the title of Most Dangerous Seaport in the World.

From the conservative point of view, it was a busy port with far more important things to attend to than the discomfort of the lowlifes being taken out of vagrancy and put to work on ships. By end of 1883 the Portland waterfront saw more vessels at one time than ever before in its history with up to 40 vessels at dock at one time. Keeping this commerce in motion was an enormous effort. That year the city had to start using its own dredges just to maintain the river channel for shipping. And that was the year that Portland was said to have displaced San Francisco as the main export center for inland commodities, due to its new railroad linkages.

Railroads and Celestials

As anyone knows who has glanced at the history of the American west, a railroad coming to town was anticipated only slightly less than the Second Coming of the Savior. Many would-be-metropolises and boom towns up and down the coast and scattered around the Puget Sound were turned into ghost towns overnight by decisions made in board rooms on the other side of the continent. In the case of Portland, once the city was established as the principle inland port between Victoria and San Francisco (in 1880 Seattle's population was a mere 3,533), there was no question that Portland would become the terminal for multiple railroad systems.

During the 1870s a system of railroads had developed along the Columbia basin and down the Willamette valley for bringing the grain harvest to the warehouses and mills of Portland. A railroad ferry near the location of the present day Steel Bridge began its service in 1870 creating a vital link between the opposite shores. In 1880 the Oregon Steamship Navigation Company (O.S.N.) reincorporated under the name Oregon Railway & Navigation Company monopolizing the traffic in the Columbia basin and eastward. With railroads being built everywhere at once across the American West, there was an enormous need for hard working laborers.

Not only did this labor shortage assure the necessity of such carrion as the shanghaiers, but it also brought shiploads of Chinese to these shores. The Chinese were referred to at that time in a derogatory manner as “Celestials” due, it is said, to the fact that they were subjects of the Chinese Emperor, called the “Son of Heaven.” The story of this influx and migration is an epic unto itself, and one in which the average, white American of the day comes out looking pretty bad. The blatant intolerance and racial hatred of the time led to entire cities banning Chinese who were driven from place to place, and sometimes forcibly returned to China. It is a period we can look back upon with great shame, especially in light of the century or more of richness and vitality the infusion of Chinese (and other Asian) people have brought to the City of Portland, and the nation.

During the 1880s as the movement of cargo (mostly wheat by this time) increased, bank and railroad corporations merged and went bust, and reorganized, and finally on August 22, 1883, Northern Pacific drove a golden spike at Gold Creek, Montana which, in conjunction with Oregon Railway & Navigation Co., formed a transcontinental link. Two years later the Union Pacific would reach Portland, followed the year after that by the Southern Pacific. Portland was hooked up and plugged in to the commerce of the nation and destined to take its place with New York and San Francisco as a major American seaport.

This was a period of constant construction activity with the approval of street railway routes, new railway stations, and with new wharves and warehouses being built along the wharfline and Front Street in the old downtown, the northern “Couch Addition,” as well as across the Willamette in Albina and East Portland. In the two decades between 1864 and 1884 the Portland City Council approved ordinances allowing the construction of 24 new wharves and warehouses on the west side of the river, and this figure does not include the wharves, warehouses, and coal docks being erected in Albina, and East Portland on the eastern bank of the Willamette. As an example, in 1887 in Albina, the Victoria dock (just north of the railway ferry) was enlarged from four to seven warehouses, making it the largest warehouse dock in Portland at the time.

Merging and Emerging Metropolis, Portland, East Portland, and Albina in the 1890s

The decade of the 1890s began with a great flood of the Willamette river in early February. The waters spilled up into First and Front streets causing business owners and inhabitants to navigate to and from the drier regions in skiffs and canoes. On February 4th as the waters grew higher, straining against the structures of the wharves and bridges, the Morrison bridge was closed to traffic and the business of the city came to a halt. This was not the first time the city was flooded by its own life's blood, the Willamette, nor would it be the last.

H.W. Scott, the editor of the Oregonian describes the 1890 flood:

The main trouble came from logs and great drift shooting by, endangering bridges, ferries and their cables, and causing steamers to skip hither and yonder. But it was not a flooding river that caused Portland city fathers the biggest headache, but rather a shallow one. The river would naturally lose volume in the drier months of late summer and early fall. Much to the surprise of the non-resident, western Oregon can go for weeks, even months without rain in this season. It was for that reason, as well as the normal collection of silt in the river channel that in 1891 the Oregon Legislature declared the Port of Portland Oregon’s first formal public port authority, with the express mandate to keep the shipping channel deep and clear all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

A Union of Three Cities

The year 1891 was an important one for the east side of the river, being the year that the diverse cities—East Portland, Albina, and Portland—voted to combine into one metropolis, making it the largest city north of San Francisco. The vote was 10,126 for and 1,714 against.

The Morning Oregonian cheered:

Now, on July 1, 1891, We face a new future as the largest western city north of San Francisco. The old corrupt city administration has been usurped, and a new breath of responsible city government has been installed. The citizens of the city of Portland can look forward to the future with pride and a sense of accomplishment.

(It was a nice sentiment, but corruption in Portland politics was systemic. It would be the early 1960s before the entire mess was exposed in U.S. Congressional hearings.)

The addition of the city of Albina to Portland brought with it a lovely cliff top residential neighborhood adorned with elegant homes. But even more vital to the city the merger brought some very major waterfront industry. There was the Albina Engine and Machine Works, an advanced, large-scale shipbuilder who would come to supply Naval vessels and merchants for the upcoming world wars, when Portland's reputation as a shipyard city would overshadow its importance as an exporter of agricultural commodities. Stretching out over dozens of acres and marked at a distance by a 130-foot chimney there was the O. R. and N. Company, with its machine shops, round house, and rail yards. And lined up, looming along the rivers edge was a total of eight large grain docks and warehouses (including the gigantic Pacific Coast Elevator's Oceanic Dock, a multi-storied wooden structure that would go up in a spectacular blaze in 1914). This would bring to twelve the total number of Portland grain docks operating simultaneously, not including the four dockside cereal mills of varying sizes.