The Steamer Gazelle Explosion

About six hundred yards south of here, on the morning of April eighth, eighteen fifty-four, the steamboat Gazelle blew apart at the landing in Canemah, just above Willamette Falls. Both of her boilers exploded at once. Of roughly sixty people aboard, twenty-four were killed and about thirty more were injured, many of them scalded or left with broken bones. The captain himself was badly hurt.

It was the worst steamboat explosion ever recorded in the Pacific Northwest, and it came less than a month after the vessel's first trial voyage. A coroner's jury blamed the chief engineer, Moses Toner, for knowingly carrying more steam than was safe and letting the water in the boilers run low. Witnesses said he fled the boat moments before the blast, then left Oregon Territory altogether and was never prosecuted.