❖ STEAMERS OPENED PUGET SOUND TRAVEL

Northwest Washington State
with Puget Sound.
Click image to enlarge. 
Map published by C.P. Johnson Co., Seattle.

"Residents of western Washington, ever since the early days of civilization here, have faced the crossing of Puget Sound.
      The only change is man’s struggle to cross the Sound. And man struggles with man, as well as with the Sound, for there still are those who curse and those who bless Peter Puget’s waterway.
      This is the story of that struggle.

Port Blakeley, Puget Sound, Washington Territory.
Verso dated 1882.
Ships await loading with steam rising from the sawmill
in background. Lumber shipping was one of
the first industries in the Sound.
Click image to enlarge.
Original photograph by Huff, from the archives
of the Saltwater People Log©

Port Ludlow
Photo by Torka Studio, Pt. Townsend, WA.

Port Ludlow, WA.
47°55'25" N   122°40'32" W
Listed on the map above.

      In the beginning, there was timber. They were all sawmill towns... Port Ludlow, now just a yachtsman’s pleasant harbor dozing in the memory of her great mill; Port Gamble, her historic mill; Port Madison, a maritime suburbia; Port Blakely, her modern homes not quite erasing all the remnants of what once was the world’s largest sawmill, and Seattle, a metropolis whose historians still remember Yesler’s Mill.

Port Gamble, WA.
Click image to enlarge.

Port Blakely
Milling & Shipping Lumber on Puget Sound, WA.
Edward H. Mitchell, Publisher, San Francisco.

      So it was that the first organized crossings of Puget Sound were steamers, augmented by company tugs, which obligingly carried passengers, were the first. This was enough. Near the turn of the century, there were no highways; the dirt roads were no highways; the dirt roads did not wander too far from the milltown shores.
      If you wanted to travel, you did so by boat... by the mosquito fleet of passenger vessels. Darting here and there, they served more than 200 communities.
      Fares varied. There were no regulatory bodies. The fare was determined mostly by what it cost a man to operate his vessel, by the competition and by the traffic. In 1872, it cost $1, each way, between Port Blakely and Seattle on the Success, or on the Augusta, linking Port Madison and Seattle. But in 1887, in Poulsbo, you paid .50 cents to reach Seattle by steamer.

Poulsbo, Liberty Bay, Keyport, WA.
Photo by Pacific Aerial Surverys, Inc., Seattle, WA.
From the archives of the Saltwater People Log©

      That's about the way it was until the days of WW 1. By this time, the automobile revolution had forced the building of highways. Man was on the move. He wanted to see the other side of Puget Sound, not just as a foot passenger, but in a shiny, new, black Ford. Larger passenger boats were constructed, with hoisting devices for loading a few cars aboard.

HYAK, RELIABLE, VASHON II
Early Mosquitoes of Puget Sound.

       But this was cumbersome and costly. Thus the era of the ferry, a vessel with at least one end open to permit a person to drive a car aboard.
      In 1919, there were only three ferry runs on Puget Sound: from Seattle to its water separated peninsula, West Seattle; between Des Moines and Portage on Vashon Island, and across the Narrows, between Tacoma and Gig Harbor, technically, the very first “cross-sound ferry run.”
      But in 1920, the Puget Sound Navigation Co, the 'Black Ball Line,' converted the old steamer Bailey Gatzert, into an automobile ferry and put her on the Bremerton-Seattle route, thus creating the first real ferry run to the Olympic Peninsula.
      A similar conversion gave Bainbridge Island its first vehicle-carrying vessel three years later when the Liberty went on the Port Blakely run toting a maximum of 32 Model Ts.

M. V. LIBERTY 
Low res scan from an original from the archives
of the Saltwater People Log©

Steamer PUGET
Dated 8 July 1923
Built originally as a steamboat, here she is being pressed 
into service as a ferry for the Seattle-Port Ludlow route.
Photo from the archives of the
Saltwater People Log©

      Right there, perhaps, was where the man-to-man struggle began over what kind of crossing should be made of Puget Sound. For the car ferry apparently spelled the doom of the passenger-only vessel although whether this should be put down as a permanent 'death' remains to be seen; even now [1964], there is talk of a return to fast passenger-only vessels, perhaps of the hydrofoil design.
      But in the 1920s, the brave “mosquito fleet” began to die.
      The runs serving the western side of Bainbridge Island and their adjacent mainland ports of call were the first to go. In 1924, a tiny, six-car ferry, the Hiyu, began to shuttle between Fletcher Bay and Brownsville. A bus ran between the ferry landings at Port Blakely and Fletcher Bay for the benefit of those who didn’t come by car.
      Mixed up in the struggle of man-with-man was a business rivalry between Black Ball Line and the Kitsap County Navigation Co, also known as the white-collar line. White-collar passenger steamers still served Eagle Harbor, Yeomalt, Ferncliff, Rolling Bay, and around the end of Bainbridge Island to Port Madison. Ferries running from Ballard to Indianola and Suquamish and to Port Ludlow had replaced passenger-vessel service to those and other nearby North Kitsap ports."
Words by Walt Woodward. Kitsap County Herald, 1 April 1964.