It is upon this command of the two waterways, with her superior port, that the permanent commercial supremacy of Portland rests. The most conspicuous name in connection with this development of Portland's shipping interests is that of John H. Couch. In 1840 Captain Couch brought into the Columbia the first American trader which had crossed the bar since the Wyeth expedition. This was the brig _Maryland_, from Newburyport, Mass. After subsequent voyages he brought his family from Newburyport and settled in Portland, in 1849. In partnership with his brother-in-law, Captain Flanders, he built wharfs and warehouses and established the first regular shipping business in the city. The first brig sailing from Portland to China, _Emma Preston_, was dispatched by Couch & Co. Such has been the development of Portland shipping that it is now well up among the great ports of the country. Last year (1900), according to the annual review by the _Oregonian_, it was ahead of Philadelphia and Baltimore. Its wheat shipments (15,858,387 bushels) exceeded those of San Francisco, and more than equalled the combined shipments of Tacoma and Seattle. [Illustration THE PORT OF PORTLAND.] [Illustration JUDGE MATTHEW P. DEADY.] Henry Villard's great genius suffered no aberration when he selected Portland as the centre of Pacific coast transportation. For not only does this city command the waterways, but it is also the great railway centre. Four transcontinental systems, beside local lines, make the Union Station their actual terminus. The Hotel Portland, one of Villard's many projects, should be to Portlanders a memorial of Villard's brilliance and public spirit, as to the tourist it offers, with its elegance and comforts, a suggestive contrast to the camp of the early traveller. [Illustration VIEW OF PORTLAND, 1900.] To conclude from Portland's rapid growth and commercial supremacy that it is a typical "western" town, would be to strike wide of the mark. One must go east from Portland to find the typical characteristics, good and bad, of a western town. Portland's character was largely formed before the railway came, for it had a population of nearly twenty thousand before there was connection by rail with the United States. This population was made up of the influx from the Willamette Valley, whose civilization had been deeply impressed by the religious and educational establishment at its foundation, and of a good class of immigrants coming directly from the eastern States. A characterization of Portland by Judge Deady, in 1868, is illuminating: "Theatrical amusements never ranked high. There is no theatre house in the town fit to be called such. On the other hand, church-going is comparatively common." [Illustration A CORNER IN CHINATOWN.]