Its location and form are the product of the government's best engineering talent after consideration of all possible, and some impossible, methods. Into the nearly nine miles of its length have been poured more than four and a half millions of government dollars to pay for construction.
Its use will extend water navigation and competition from the sea uninterruptedly into the great inland empire of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
And its existence is a monument to and an evidence of one of the finest exhibitions of persistent patriotism and untiring public spirit in the memory of the west.
The human history of the Celilo Canal is an epic of development and the romance of an undiscouraged faith.
The man whose influence is most intimately associated with the tedious and now successful effort for the Celilo Canal from the public viewpoint is Joseph N. Teal. He is a lawyer, but it is as a citizen and for the Columbia basin that he has held his greatest brief. The Portage railway and the Celilo Canal have bulked in his mind as means to the development of the broad interior. The, stamp of his leadership is upon much that has been done to this end. He has represented and spoken the faith of a little group both here and at Washington, when only the most exact information and the strongest arguments could defeat failure.
As you read into the minute books and records of the Open River Association, the Portage Railway, the Open River Transportation Association and the Portland Chamber of Commerce, the names of a few men recur time and again. They constitute the group always at the center of the fight for the open river. Without any reference whatever to notes, the names of Dr. N. G. Blalock, W. J. Mariner, Arthur H. Devers, the late Herman Wittenberg, L. A. Lewis, Joseph T. Peters, Henry Hahn and others come to me. Nor is it improper to say that the steadfast newspaper champion of the open river campaign has been The Journal.
