The River That Was Salem's Highway
Near Salem, Oregon
For the first fifty years of Salem's existence, the Willamette River was its highway. There were no reliable roads connecting Salem to Portland. The Willamette Valley's winter mud made overland travel by wagon nearly impossible for months at a time. Everything came and went by water: passengers, mail, grain, manufactured goods, livestock. Steamboats were the lifeblood of the city.
By the early eighteen fifties, steamboats were running the length of the navigable Willamette. Salem's river landing was a constant scene of activity: wheat, bran, and other farm products loaded into holds for the trip downstream to Portland, where they would be transferred to oceangoing ships bound for California, the East Coast, or even Europe. The flour from local mills moved the same way. During harvest season, the dock was never quiet.
Between eighteen fifty and nineteen sixteen, dozens of steamboats worked the Willamette. The opening of the Willamette Falls locks at Oregon City in eighteen seventy-three was a turning point, allowing vessels to travel between Portland and Eugene without the portage around the forty-foot-high falls. Salem's commerce expanded with it.
The steamboat era ended gradually as rail and road took over in the early twentieth century. River freight faded away in the decades that followed as trucks took over. The river still runs north past the city today, but it runs quietly now. The docks are gone, the sternwheelers are gone, and the Willamette moves through Salem mostly unnoticed by the people whose city it once made possible.
