The Cordova daily times., 1916-08-25
FAMOUS VE ESSEL SOON bE ONLY
 \ MEMORY

Ht Bdtbct hull pt iHt ldHlOus olu gold ship Portland now lying on the beach at Katalla, is being torn to pieces for the brass bolts and fasten- CTS which E. E. Miller of Ketchikan is going to self for junk.
 The Portland earned her title of Gold Ship when she steamed into Sc attle with the first cargo of gold from the Klondike in 1897, but she began her long and sensational career in 1885 under the name of the Haytian Repub- lie. Almost from her first voyage she began to furnish the papers with start ling news items, as she was seized for carrying ammunition to the rebels in Hayti during the Hippolyte rebel 1 lion. When the United States govern ment forced her release, futile at tempt was made to sink her as she left the harbor at Port au Prince, and the marks of the collision with the gun boat selected to do the work were still visible when she came to the Pacific coast in 1889.
 After failing both as a cannery boat and a passenger steamer during the next few years, she was finally char tered by a Portland (Oregon) con cern, apparently for the purpose of car rying passengers and freight between l Vancouver. Puget Sound and the Co lumbia river. but in reality the prin- cipal and most lucrative part of her cargo consisted of cOntraband China ment and opium. As a smuggler she was nOtoriously successful and the ex- pose of the big smuggling ring on Puget Sound, after which she was seized and sold by the government at Portland.
 1 Her new owners remOdelled her and started her out again under the name 1 Portland. From this time on she had varied, but always respectable ca reer. running to all points between Panama and the far Aleutian islands 0f Alaska.
 As a passenger boat on the Alaska run no steamer was ever more popu- lar than the Gold ship. All over Alas ka today are people who like to recall the pleasant journeys made on the old Portland, and who still feel a twinge of regret when they tell of her fate, It was during a heavy snow squall one morning in November, 1910. that the Portland, westbound, in trying to come to anchor off Katalla, struck an uncharted rock and tore a large hole in her bottom. The captain, thinking only of the safety of his hardly awak ened passengers. ran the sinking yes. sel full speed distance Of two niles until she grounded on the bar in front of the town.
 Lighters and launches from Katalla were alongside almost immediately and the passengers, who scarcely had time to realize what had happened were quickly taken ashore The one hotel not being large enough to accom- modate then all, the sympathetic resi- of shelter of thei: cabins, Even the ships four eats and family of kittens found happy homes, when an old sail or produced them from the egg case into which he had placed them when the ship began to go to pieces.
 That night all the town was out on the beach watching through the mist while the old Portland made her last fight against the sea. and the creak- ing and grooming of rending timbers could be heard above the roar of the breakers. When morning came the beach in front of the town was filtered with piles of wreckage three feet high. Provisions of all kinds. turkeys, chick, } ems and meat alternated with bedding and furniture protruded here and there from splintered stacks of wood, and the beach combers. hurrying from pile ! to pile in the gray, drizzling dawn, reaped a harvest.
 Six years have gone by since then
 and piece by piece the old hull has washed ashore. but the engines. GOV
 cred with barnacles and sea weed ! and buffeted by breakers. sink deeper each year into the sand on the bar | and the launch men of Katalla use the \ rusty old mass of iron as a tide mark | for they know when the incoming tide
 covers the Gold ships engine. they
 may take their boats out with safety
 through the breakers on the bar. -: o:--