Early Steamboat Operations
The next two steamboats owned by the company after the Manzanilla were the Sarah Dixon (named after the mother of company founder James W. Shaver) and G.W. Shaver, named after George Washington Shaver, the father of James W. Shaver. The Sarah Dixon had a reputation as a luxury boat, and in the early 1890s, she was placed on the profitable run on the lower Columbia River from Portland to Astoria, Oregon. On that run she competed with the T. J. Potter, another luxury boat owned by the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company (ORNC). This competition was resolved in about 1896, when Shaver Transportation took its boats off the Portland/Astoria run in return for a monthly subsidy from ORNC.
In 1897, Shaver Transportation bought their fourth boat, the No Wonder, which had been built in 1877 by another founder of Portland, by George Washington Weidler, for log-towing purposes, and named the Wonder. (Weidler rebuilt Wonder in 1889 and named her No Wonder, hence her name.) Shaver Transportation used No Wonder for log-towing and as a training school for pilots until 1933, when No Wonder was dismantled. 56 years of use was an exceptional length of time for a wooden-hulled boat.
In 1908, the company built the sternwheelers Shaver and a new Dixon as replacements for the old G.W. Shaver and Sarah Dixon. Typical for steamboats built in those days, the Shaver included previously-used mechanical components from other steamboats. In the Shaver's case, these included steam valves that had served in at least two prior steamboats going back to 1857. Once built, Shaver was used as a tow and work boat.
Another long-lived Shaver boat was the Henderson, which was launched in 1901, sunk and rebuilt in 1912, rebuilt and re-engined in 1929, and sunk and raised again in 1950. Henderson was used in important towing work such as when for example, in the 1940s she was dispatched with four other towing vessels to pull the Standard Oil tanker "F.S. Follis" off from where the tanker had grounded near the mouth of the Willamette River. The end only came for the wooden-hulled Henderson in 1956 near Astoria, when she was damaged beyond her economic value in a collision with her tow.
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