Minor wording issue about steamboats
I'm doing some bits of minor copyediting and am stuck on this sentence, from the Navigation section: The use of steamboats along the river, beginning in 1850... There is a footnote, to this timeline page, which phrases it "1850: Steamboats Columbia and Lot Whitcomb begin regular service on the Columbia River." The thing is there were steamboats in regular service on the river before 1850, at least to Fort Vancouver. The first was the Beaver (steamship), which arrived at Ft Vancouver in 1836. I thought about rewording the sentence The regular use of steamboats along the river..., but that isn't quite right either because the Beaver was in "regular use", even if its operations were not limited to the river. Anyway, I can't come up with a way to reword this bit, especially given the existence of the footnote, which does not mention the Beaver. So I'm just mentioning it here. It is a minor point to be sure, but symptomatic of an unfortunate US bias present in many history books and web pages.