Shaver Transportation Company

The company was founded in 1880 and played a major role in the development of freight transport in the Portland area and along the Columbia.

This was before the extensive construction of railroads in Oregon and what was then the Washington Territory, so the only way that goods could be shipped to market was by way of the rivers.

Their first vessel was the steamboat Manzanillo, which they put on the route down the Willamette and Columbia rivers from Portland to Clatskanie, Oregon.

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).

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.

One notable tow job was of the USS Constitution when that vessel was taken on tour to the West Coast, including Portland, in 1934.

Another important tow job engaged in by Shaver and four other vessels was pulling the Standard Oil Tanker F.S.

To promote this film, Henderson re-enacted a steamboat race on January 24, 1952, with one of the few remaining steamers left on the Columbia River, the steel-hulled sternwheeler Portland, built in 1947.