Famous captain’s heroic action saved lives in fire

By Finn J.D. John
March 23, 2025

YOU MIGHT NOT think, at first, that a fire on a riverboat would be such a big deal. After all, it’s only a river; and, of course, there is water everywhere.

But back in the 1800s, a fire on a riverboat was a very serious matter, and not as rare as you might think. Riverboats were made of wood and powered by steam boilers, so there was always a fire on board. If powered by coal, there was coal dust to worry about; if, in later times, by oil, the engine room was often soaked with flammable liquids.

The stories of paddlewheel riverboats on American rivers are peppered with tales of fires breaking out on them and quickly surging out of control, and nearly all such anecdotes come with a body count.

Oregon’s most famous riverboat fire has a body count, too. It’s 1. But it unquestionably would have been a lot higher than that, if not for the quick thinking and clear decisionmaking of its legendary skipper — and, probably more importantly, his instant unwillingness to gamble his passengers’ lives to try and save his boat.

THE BOAT THAT burned was a legend in its own time, and that  legend has only grown since. Launched in 1884, it was named the Telephone, after an amazing invention that had revolutionized communications a few years earlier.

A voice on the telephone line moved at close to the speed of light, so the Telephone certainly was not as fast as her namesake. But she came closer to it than any other riverboat has, before or since. She had been designed and constructed by a man who was almost certainly the most gifted boat-hull designer in Oregon history, possibly in American history: Uriah B. Scott.

You may recognize Scott’s name as the almost-penniless skipper who came to Oregon City from Ohio, built a clunky, ugly riverboat on the cheap, and used it to destroy the competition on the upper Willamette because of its astonishingly shallow draft.

Scott turned out to be just as good at designing fast deep-draft boats as he was at crafting shallow-draft freighters. And with the Telephone, he absolutely outdid himself. With full steam up, this rakish and palatial riverboat could do well over 22 miles per hour.

The Telephone was the boat Scott had intended to place on the Portland-Astoria run, to complement his also-very-fast passenger-only riverboat, the Fleetwood, which he’d intended for the upriver run to the Cascade Rapids, en route to The Dalles. That plan got disrupted a bit when his main competitor, the would-be monopoly Oregon Railway & Navigation Co., bought out the connecting boat on the upriver side of the Cascade Rapids, which the Fleetwood was supposed to be bringing passengers to.

The Fleetwood wasn’t doing any good bringing people to the boat landing at the Cascades (the spot where the town of Cascade Locks is today, but back then there was nothing there). So Scott had moved the Fleetwood to the Portland-Astoria run, figuring he might as well have it doing something useful while the Telephone was being finished.

When the Telephone was launched, it proved to be even faster than the Fleetwood. Even better, it could carry freight as well as passengers. So Scott moved the Fleetwood up to Puget Sound and used it to establish service on the Seattle-Tacoma run, and the reign of the Telephone on the lower Columbia began in earnest.

The Telephone was long and lean, with a pair of 500-horsepower engines and a 25-foot paddlewheel mounted astern. And she was so fast that she could leave Portland at 7 a.m., race 105 miles down the river to Astoria (hitting nearly every town along the way to pick up and deliver passengers and freight), and be back in her slip in Portland by 9 p.m., ready to do it all again the next day.

And that speed would turn out to be a very important part of the story of the Telephone’s last day on the river (well, her last day floating in it, anyway) on Nov. 20, 1887.

On that day, the Telephone was steaming toward Astoria as usual. She was almost there, and had gotten into the broad, lake-like portion of the river just inland from its mouth, when Scott — who was captaining his flagship riverboat personally — got a terse message over the speaking tube from the engine room.

“Engine room’s afire,” the engineer reported. “It’s driving us away from the engines.”

SCOTT HAD A choice to make, and he had to make it in the next few seconds. He could muster the crew and try to put the fire out; or he could turn and make for shore at top speed, looking to beach the boat.

If he ordered the crew to fight, they might be able to save the Telephone, which was of course the most valuable bit of naval architecture in the Northwest. If all went well, they’d be on their way again in a few hours to deliver the passengers and freight.

But to do this, he would have to stop the engines. Otherwise, the speed with which the boat was hurtling through the water would fan the flames. That meant that if the firefighting efforts didn’t go well, they would end up stuck in the middle of the river, sitting in the lifeboats, watching the boat burn to the waterline and sink.

And, speaking of lifeboats — sure, they could try to get the passengers into them, and they’d save most of them — but some of them would die. People always did. They panicked and leaped overboard, or dawdled belowdecks until too late, or crowded into lifeboats and caused them to capsize. There were 140 passengers on the ship; some of them would die.

Plus, if the crew lost the fight with the fire, the end would come very fast. Riverboats like the Telephone were made of wood, and all the wood above the waterline was kept carefully dry and pickled in varnishes and paints. These coatings would make the smoke thicker and deadlier.

And, well, Captain Scott was an old riverboat man. He knew what happened when a riverboat caught fire and immediate action wasn’t taken. He was probably thinking of the worst-case scenario, which was something like what had happened to the riverboat Eliza Battle, which caught fire in 1858 on the Tombigbee River in Alabama. Efforts to fight the fire failed, and by the time the skipper realized he needed to make for shore, the rudder ropes had been burned through and the boat could not be steered. Eighty people died on the Eliza Battle, and another 100 were badly hurt, while the boat blindly thrashed down the river.

So Scott knew the stakes, and he knew if he rolled the dice, he might just save the boat ... or he might end up presiding over another Eliza Battle disaster.

The alternative was to just point the bow at one side or the other and make for the beach under full steam. This would involve sacrificing any possibility of saving the boat. The wind created by the Telephone’s legendary speed would fan the flames to an inferno, and by the time the boat hit the beach, there would be nothing to do but watch it burn.

Then, too, it was not clear that even a boat as fast as the Telephone could make it to the shore in time. The boat could not have caught fire in a worse place. The river was almost five miles wide, and Scott had been driving her almost directly up the middle. The boat had a good two miles of open water to cross. The Telephone would make that distance in about seven minutes at maximum warp; but a fire on a riverboat could get a lot of progress made in seven minutes. Could he get to the beach before the fire spread enough to start killing people? Maybe not.

Heave to and try to save the boat, or run for shore and try to save the passengers? This does not seem to have been a hard decision for Scott. He didn’t hesitate. “Put her full speed ahead!” he barked back into the speaking tube, and threw the helm hard over to the port side.

The Telephone heeled over hard as the paddlewheel’s thrashing intensified, and Scott strained to hold the rudder over. The slim vessel came around, slower than Scott would have liked but she was built for speed, not agility. But before long her nose was pointed straight at the state of Oregon.

The engine room “black crew,” having opened the steam up as wide as it would go, hustled through the smoke and flames to the top deck, where the passengers were already starting to cluster around the least smoky end of the boat — the one closest to shore.

From the pilothouse, high above everything, Scott could look ahead at the patch of deck farthest from the flames, at the very bow of the boat, where the wind was sweeping the flames back and away. Soon everything behind and around his pilothouse was on fire. The rudder ropes had probably gone by now. In moments, the boat would be fully engulfed, and anyone still on deck at that time would start dying.

But he could see his gamble in making full speed for shore was going to pay off. The Telephone was going to make it in time.

Nobody was checking, of course, but it’s a safe bet that the Telephone was moving faster than it ever had before (or would again). In a few moments it would be connecting with the riverbank at probably 25 miles an hour. The passengers packed into the bow braced for impact as best they could.

Then the Telephone fetched up on the Oregon side of the river.

Luckily, the shore there was basically a mud flat, which buffered the impact. Still the Telephone dealt the state of Oregon a mighty blow, and passengers went flying to the rapidly-heating-up foredeck. There probably were some injuries; the record doesn’t say.

Whatever those injuries might have been, they weren’t enough to keep a single passenger on that by-now-dangerously-hot deck once the boat hit the shore. Over the gunwales they went, splashing into the water and mud and clambering up on shore to watch the Telephone burn.

AFTER WATCHING THE last of the passengers disembark, Scott turned to leave, but found to his consternation that the fire was surrounding the pilothouse and had burned away the steps. So he opened the pilothouse window and bailed out. Most sources say he executed a swan dive, but this seems unlikely given that the Telephone was stuck in mud and the pilothouse was pretty close to the front of the ship. More likely, it was something on the order of a belly flop or cannonball.

The Telephone burned to the waterline as the passengers watched and firefighters from Astoria did what they could. When all was done, they found one single body in the wreckage — that of an unfortunate fellow who had just picked a really bad time to get drunk, and had either passed out or been too befuddled to find his way upstairs.

Everyone else made it.

AFTER THIS DISASTER, the competing Oregon Railway & Navigation Co. reached out to Captain Scott with an offer that, in retrospect, seems irregular if not outright insulting. They offered to reimburse him for the loss of the Telephone if he would agree to go to work for them; they’d have him rebuild their riverboat Wide West and take command of her. Otherwise, they said, they’d take advantage of his misfortune to run him off the river.

Scott told them if they’d throw in an extra $120,000, he’d consider it. That was too much for them, though, so no deal was struck.

The Telephone was rebuilt — some sources say the hull was salvaged and a new superstructure put to it, but historian Jerry Canavit reports the new Telephone was a complete new build, slightly larger than the old one. Most likely this is the case, as the new Telephone, although still the fastest thing on the river, was never as fast as the old one.

But then, she never had to be.

Scott continued running the Telephone between Portland and Astoria till 1903, when he sold her to the Arrow Transportation Co. She enjoyed a reputation for blinding speed the whole time, right up until the end, and finished her days as a ferry on San Francisco Bay. She was finally scrapped in 1918.

(Sources: “Captain Uriah Bonzer Scott,” an undated article by Jerry Canavit accessed March 9, 2025, at steamboats.com;  Lewis & Dryden’s Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, a book by E.W. Wright published in 1895 by Lewis & Dryden; Pacific Steamboats, a book by Gordon Newell published in 1958 by Superior Publishing; Oregon Shipwrecks, a book by Don Marshall published in 1984 by Binford & Mort.)

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