❖ The 1870s with STERNWHEELERS ❖

100' sternwheel steamer ZEPHYR (R)
28074
Built in 1871 by J.F.T. Mitchell & M.M. Robbins.
First master, Capt. Thomas A. Wright, until 1875.
Charles H. Low, the first mate.
The next master was Capt. N.L. Rogers.
Out of service in 1907. 
Photo from the archives of the Saltwater People Hist. Society©

During the Seventies on Puget Sound, the era of sternwheelers had its beginning. This was the decade in which settlers staked their claim on some of the most remote reaches of the  Sound. The islands capable of supporting the population became populated. A new type of steamer was needed to enter the rivers, bays, and inlets, where deeper draft vessels of the outer Sound could not go.
      In 1871, the flat-bottomed sternwheeler ZEPHYR was built at Seattle for Captain Tom Wright and his father-in-law, Capt. James R. Robbins. The ZEPHYR was comparable to the old sternwheeler ENTERPRISE that Capt. Wright had operated successfully on the Fraser River, during the memorable days of the 1858 gold rush. Some scoffers predicted that the ZEPHYR would never pay her way on Puget Sound, but she immediately proved to be a profitable investment.
      Commanded by Capt. Wright, the ZEPHYR made two trips a week between Seattle, Mukilteo, Tulalip, and Snohomish City. Since the CHEHALIS ran to the Snohomish River on weekends, both trips of the ZEPHYR were scheduled for the other five days.
      The pioneer spirit was strong in Capt. Tom Wright, however, and he seldom was satisfied on any route after it was well established. On 22 March 1873, he and James Robbins joined James S. Lawson, R. G. O'Brien, S.W. Percival, B.B. Tuttle, C.H. Rothchild, T.S. Russell, and John Lathan, to form the Merchants' Transportation Co. The organization had a capitalization of $100,000 divided into 1,000 shares, and the steamer ZEPHYR became an asset of the company, their first steamboat. For years, thereafter, she ran between Seattle, Tacoma, Steilacoom, and Olympia, and way-stops en route, but continued to make weekly trips to Snohomish, as well.
      During the early years of settlement on Vashon Island, the people relied upon oars and sails for transportation. The ZEPHYR and the MESSENGER, on their regular trips through the East Pass, rounded Point Robinson every day, however, some settlers on Maury Island cut a trail to the point. Capt. W. R. Ballard of the ZEPHYR, and Capt. Parker, of the MESSENGER, then agreed to pick up passengers from a rowboat. They would stop,  provided that a flag had been raised on the beach, as a signal. This system required the cooperation of several persons. The passenger had to have someone accompany him out, to row the boat back, and take the flag down. Before a passenger could get off the steamer, moreover, someone had to be there with a boat to meet him. On foggy mornings, there were a few problems involved in this arrangement.
Above notes from The Steamboat Landing on Elliott Bay and The Sound and the Mountain. Carey,  Roland.Seattle, WA. Alderbrook Publishing Co. 1970

Below:
Steamer ZEPHYR was a Sound Pioneer
A few years later in the life of this sternwheeler...
Unidentified, undated newspaper clipping from the scrapbook of the well-known 
Wm. C. Thornily,
103 G. T. P. Dock, Seattle.

"Tied up at the Tacoma Mill Co. dock, beginning in 1887, or puffing laboriously on the bay with a tow of rafts of logs or scows of lumber the sternwheel steam tug ZEPHYR may be seen every day. She is not a pretty craft to look upon. Her sides and upper works are painted a barn-red color, and here and there on her hull are scratches or gouges, the result of numerous jams into logs. Her task is a homely one, yet she does it well, and there is but little question but that she has towed more logs than any steamer on all this inland sea.
      But there are those who remember the ZEPHYR in her palmy days, when, painted a pure white, her decks filled with gaily dressed people, a silken flag waving from her foremast, a band of music waking the echoes of the dense forests that fringed either side of Puget Sound, her sharp bows cutting the blue waters and ending up a feather pillow on either side, and the wake from her wheel leaving a fluted ribbon of rainbow color, who was plying as a packet between Seattle and Olympia by way of Tacoma. That was before the days of the railroads. It was during the days when steamboating on the Sound was like steamboating on the Mississippi before the war. To be exact, it was the early seventies. In those years the steamboat was the only method of communication between the different settlements and towns.
      The ZEPHYR used to leave Seattle one day and return the next. She was called a fast boat and she must have been, but it took her just twice the time to make the trip that it takes the ordinary steamer of today. But there were plenty of excuses. At Al-Ki Point, at Des Moines, at Stone's Landing, in fact at any and every place where there was a cabin and where there was a floating landing, no matter how crude, the old boat poked her nose in and stopped. After reaching Tacoma she must stop at Steilacoom and at McNeils, at Anderson and other islands and if when dark settled down she was pulling in at the wharf in the capital city, she had done a good day's run.
      Capt. Parker, who is now master of one of the fine boats of the Sound, and a man of wide experience, was then a boy in his teens and it was on the ZEPHYR that he was first commissioned, mate. The master of the steamer was Capt. Ballard, has since had fortune thrust upon him by being the owner of the site of the present prosperous city of Ballard. It is said that the captain did not want the land but in some settlement, the outcome of legal proceedings was forced upon him.
      Captain Ballard was very proud of his position as master for 9 years and the sole owner beginning in 1883;  if he knew little of seamanship, he at least allowed no one to tell him of it. His orders were a mixture of land and sea lingo––enough so to be still quoted in many steamer cabins. For instance in pulling into the wharf at what is now Tacoma, and was then called New Tacoma, one day, he yelled to a deckhand:
       "Hey, you, haul in that hind line, tight."
      Another time when the ZEPHYR had stopped in at Steilacoom to pick up a consignment and was about to depart the captain called to the wharf master;
      "Throw that rope off the post, will you!" and the boat crew laughed.
      Once he was making a landing at Al-Ki Point and the mate was steering. The captain was standing on the lower deck near the engine room door. He thought the ZEPHYR was going to hit a rock and yelled at the engineer;
      "Run her backward, hard and fast."
      The engineer reversed his engine all right, but he committed the unpardonable sin of laughing, and there was a vacancy in his department.
      Nothing cut the captain quite so much as to have people call his boat slow, but when from 12 to 16 hours were occupied in the trip from Seattle to Olympia passengers certainly had some cause for making remarks, and according to the best records at hand, they did so at times.
      Shaffer, the brewery man, had an order from a certain customer at Tacoma, for some aged beer. When he put the keg aboard the ZEPHYR, he said to the captain;
      "Captain, Mr. Blank's order reads for aged beer, if you will you may explain to him that beer sent by the ZEPHYR is always thoroughly aged before it reaches Tacoma."
      One of the first state school superintendents elected was on his way to Olympia one day when the boat was particularly slow. Calling the captain to one side he gravely remarked: "Captain I shall, upon my arrival at Olympia, ask that a law be passed forbidding any person under the age of 21 going on the ZEPHYR."
      "Why, why?" asked the surprised captain.
      "Because, here an individual may grow from infancy to manhood in one trip, and yet with the utmost indifference you have provided no school advantages whatever."
      And, yet, after all, the ZEPHYR was not a slow boat. There was no other way of getting freight into the various settlements except by boat, and she had to stop wherever there was freight. Watch her now, as unhampered by a tow, she steams across the bay, and you will see she is making time that would be a credit to many of the passenger boats of today."

E. W. Wright in Lewis & Dryden's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, claims the ZEPHYR was the first sternwheeler in the Pacific Northwest.
      The highly regarded popular Seattle sailmaker and rigger, George Broom (1870-1935), born in Norfolk, England, came across the Atlantic from Antwerp to New York on the Red Star Liner ZEELANDIER. Across the USA he rode the Northern Pacific Railroad to Tacoma. On 24 October 1886, he arrived in Seattle in class, on the sternwheel steamer ZEPHYR and lived happily for forty-nine years.