Valdez daily prospector., 1916-10-02
FAMOUS GOLD SHIP
 DIsMANTLED FOR JUNK

torn to pieces for the brass bolts and fasteners which E. E. Miller, of Ketchikan is going to sell for junk.
 Such is the prosaic end of the famous old ship that startled the world on a sunny July day, nineteen year ago, by bringing to Seattle a cargo of raw gold taken from the newly-discovered Eldorado on the Yukon river. The news of the Port lands arrival was flashed around the world, and in a few weeks adventur- CTS and gold hunters from every cor ner of the earth were headed for the scene of the new strike. From that date Seattle was placed definitely on the map as a city of commercial inn portance.
 The Portland is being broken up for junk! Miller says that junk has advanced 110 per cent in price since the beginning of the European war, and that the price offered for copper, lead, brass and babbitt is such that it is paying proposition to unearth the wrecked ships that are strewn along the coast for the metal that is in them, and that junk dealers in Se- attle pay fifteen cents a pound whole sale for the same. Occasionally it is necessary to obtain permission from the former owners of a hull before breaking it up. but for the most part wrecks three of four years old are handled without any such for mality.
 The Portland began her long and sensational career in 1885 under the name of the Haytian Republic. AL most from the first voyage she began to furnish the newspapers with start ling items of news, as she was seized for carrying ammunition to the reb- els in Hayti during the Hippolyte re- bellion. When the United States gov ernment forced her release, futile attempt was made to sink her as she left the harbor at Port au Prince, and the marks of the collision with the gunboat selected to do the work were still visible when she came to the Pacific coast in 1889.
 After failing both as canenry boat and a passenger steamer during the next few years, she was finally char tered by a Portland concern, for the purpose of carrying passengers and freight between Vancouver, Puget Sound and the Columbia river. How ever, later the principal and most lucrative part of her cargo consisted of contraband Chinese and opium, 1t was alleged. As smuggler she was notoriously successful until the ex- pose of the big smuggling ring on Puget sound, after which she was seized and sold by the government at Portland.
 Her new owners remodeled her and started her out again under the name of Portland" From this time on she had a varied, but always re- spectacle career, running to all points between Panama and the far Aleu- tian Islands of Alaska.
 As a passenger boat on the Alas kan run no steamer was ever more popular than the Gold Ship" All over Alaska today are people who like to recall the pleasant journeys made on the old Portland" and who still feel twinge of regret when they tell of her fate.
 It was during heavy snow squall one morning in November, 1910, that the Portland, westward bound, in trying to anchor off Katalla struck an unchartered rock and tore large Hole in her bottom. The captain, thinking only of the safety of his hardly awakened passengers. ran the sinking vessel full speed distance of two miles until she finally ground ed 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 ac- comodate them all, the sympathetic residents came forward and offered the shelter of their cabins. Even the ships four cats and a family of kit tens found happy homes. when an old sailor 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 creaking 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, chickens. and meat alternated with bedding. and furni- ture protuded here and there from stacks of splintered wood. The beach, combers, hurrying from pile to pile in the gray, drizzling dawn. reaped a harvaat