Portage Railroad near Cape Horn

In 1863, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company (OSNC) built a fourteen-mile-long portage railroad eastward from The Dalles around Celilo Falls, a series of several long rapids and eddies with dramatic drops in elevation of forty feet. The Dalles-Celilo portage railroad, one of the first railways in the region, was located on the south bank of the Columbia below rocky cliffs on the sandy edges of river. It passed by the village of Celilo, where Indians had lived and traded with distant people for more than 10,000 years. Native people had valued the rich salmon fishery at Celilo Falls for thousands of years, but Euro American settlers viewed the falls as an obstacle to transportation between Portland and developing markets. Steamboats were used on the Columbia River in the early 1850s, but river travel was uncommon until gold was discovered in eastern Oregon and Idaho in the 1860s. In the 1870s, mining traffic was replaced by shipments of wheat that went through Portland to distant markets, including Europe and Asia.