Colonial Despatches

Wilson G. Hunt was a steamer built in New York in 1849; its original purpose was to ferry passengers and wares to Coney Island.1 However, it made its way to San Francisco in 1850 and was put immediately into river trade, much to the delight of its owners, who cleared one million dollars in a single year.2

It moved North to Victoria in 1858, and ran the New Westminster route for a time, afterwards, it replaced the Constitution, which plied the Puget Sound.3 This 1869 despatch, for example, describes the Wilson G. Hunt as a a regular trader between Victoria and the Ports on Puget Sound.

From there, it was bought by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company and placed on the Columbia, or Cascade, route under Captain John Wolf, where it ran until 1869, lucrative all the while.4 In the Autumn of its exemplary service, it was purchased by Captain John Irving, who had it brought back up the coast to work the Fraser River region, in unabashed competition with the HBC's Enterprise, but in 1881, it was sold to J. Spratt, and then back to Irving in 1890, its final year.5 It was dismantled and its iron parts sold to Cohn & Co. in San Francisco, and its hull burned, which would have taken considerable time as it was 56 m long and nearly 8 m wide.6

• 1. E. W. Wright, ed., Lewis & Dryden's Marine History of the Pacific Northwest (Portland: The Lewis & Dryden Printing Company, 1895), 73. http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0222484
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. Ibid.
• 4. Ibid., 74.
• 5. Ibid.
• 6. Ibid.