In the August _Overland_ of the same year, Captain Coe narrates the first steamboat trip up Snake River. This was in June, 1860, just at the time of the beginning of the gold excitement. The _Colonel Wright_ was loaded with picks, rockers, and other mining implements, as well as provisions and passengers. Most of the freight and passengers were put off at Wallula, to go thence overland. Part continued on to test the experiment of making way against the wicked-looking current of Snake River. After three days and a half from the starting point a few miles above Celilo, the _Colonel Wright_ halted at a place which was called Slaterville, thirty-seven miles up the Clearwater from its junction with the Snake. There the remainder of the cargo was discharged, to be hauled in waggons to the Oro Fino mines. The steamer _Okanogan_ followed the _Colonel Wright_ within a few weeks, and navigation on the Snake may be said to have fairly begun. During that same time the city of Lewiston, named in honour of Meriwether Lewis, the explorer, was founded at the junction of the Snake and Clearwater rivers. While parts of the Columbia and it chief tributary, the Snake, were thus opened to navigation by 1860, no "fire-canoe" had yet appeared on that magnificent stretch of navigable water from Colville into the Arrow Lakes. From contemporary files of the _Daily Mountaineer_ of The Dalles, we learn that Captain Lew White launched the _Forty-nine_ in November, 1865, at Colville. In December the _Forty-nine_ ascended the Columbia one hundred and sixty miles, nearly to the head of lower Arrow Lake, whence, meeting floating ice, she returned. From the _Mountaineer_ we learn also that in the early months of 1866 a steamer was constructed at the mouth of Boise River for navigation of the far upper Snake. At the same time also the steamer _Mary Moody_ was constructed by Z. F. Moody, on Pend Oreille Lake, the first steamer on any of the lakes except the Arrow Lakes of the Columbia. With the close of the decade of the sixties, it may be said that the Columbia and its tributaries had fairly entered upon the steamboat era. While many steamers were added within the succeeding years, the steamboat business was never so active on the upper River as during that early age. After the building of the railroads along the River and into interior valleys and eastward, it became apparent that the heavy handicap of rehandling freight at two portages would forbid the steamers from competing with the railroads. In 1879 the Oregon Steam Navigation Company sold out to the Villard interests for $5,000,000, and the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company was the result.