Operation
Oneonta ran on the stretch of the Columbia River between the Cascade Rapids eastward to The Dalles, where another longer stretch of whitewater. The rapids east of The Dalles were generally known as Celilo Falls. There were portages around both sets of rapids. Originally these just tracks, but they were gradually replace first railways, first drawn by mules and then by steam engines. Oregon Steam Navigation Company built Oneonta in an effort to control both the portages and the middle river route connecting them as the only feasible transport line to the gold rushes that were going on in Eastern Oregon and Idaho in the 1860s. When this business tampered off, in 1870, the president of O.S.N., John C. Ainsworth took Oneonta down through the Cascade Rapids at high water to run on the lower Columbia.
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Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
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—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)