page_title: Steamboats of Yaquina Bay and Yaquina River
section_title: Sea route to San Francisco
hierarchical_section_title: Steamboats of Yaquina Bay and Yaquina River / Sea route to San Francisco
caption_attribution_description: English: Wreck of steamship Yaquina City, 4 December 1887.
context_page_description: Yaquina Bay, like Coos Bay, is a shallow coastal bay on the Oregon Coast in the Pacific Northwest of North America. The principal town on Yaquina Bay is Newport, Oregon. The Yaquina River flows into the bay. Until modern roads reached Newport in the late 1920s, the principal transportation method to and from Newport was by ship or boat.
context_section_description: When a survey by the United States Army Corps of Engineers showed the harbor at Yaquina Bay to be deeper than had been supposed, interest in development of the area boomed.  In April 1883, the beach front at Newport was enclosed by a bulkhead and filled to form Front Street, the first street in Newport, which effectively functioned as a long pier along the bay front.  By 1885, the Oregon Pacific Railroad had been built from the Willamette Valley all the way through to Yaquina City.
  Once the railroad reached Yaquina City, boats on Yaquina Bay made daily runs from there to Newport.  Normally it took three and a half-days to travel by steamship from Portland to San Francisco, California.  By taking the train from Portland to Yaquina City, and boarding a ship there, a traveler could save 40 hours off the trip to San Francisco.  While there had been four steamships on this route, one of them, Yaquina City, wrecked on the South Jetty in December 1887, and her replacement, Yaquina Bay, was also wrecked in 1888 on her first trip into the harbor.  These wrecks, and financial difficulties for the railroad, left the route unable to compete with the better transportation network centered on Portland.  Steamship service to San Francisco ended in the 1890s.
  At least one vessel was built at Oneatta, the steam tug Augusta, in 1888.
caption: Wreck of Yaquina City, December 4, 1887.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0", "Image DateTime": "2010:11:10 10:57:19", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "2445", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1404", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1024"}