Most rivers in the Oregon Country had ferry crossings by the mid-1850s. That includes the Columbia River near Vancouver.
In 1846, John Switzler, a Hayden Island landowner, ran a ferryboat across the Columbia River between the island and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading post, Fort Vancouver. Switzler and sons transported people and animals across the Columbia River until the company withdrew to Canada in 1860.
Switzler reportedly made a decent profit after paying $10 a year for a license. Passengers paid 50 cents (nearly $41 today) to cross. A horse and rider paid $1, a wagon with team cost $2, and every extra animal was 25 cents. In 1855, Switzler’s son, John Jr., took over the ferry business, providing a more predictable service.
Profits bred competition. About 1850, Forbes Barclay, a Hudson’s Bay physician, applied for a government license to run a ferry service upriver from Fort Vancouver to a landing near a Native American village. The following year, William Goodwin received a ferry license to run from Lady Island (located near Camas, the island holds a sewage pond today) to the mouth of the Washougal River. Shortly, others grabbed licenses, including David Parker (1854) at Parker’s Landing, James Carty (1855) for the Lake River slough (Vancouver Lake Regional Park today) and O.W. Bozorth (1855) at Cathlapotle, by the Lewis River.
After the Switzler ferry folded, Wesley Van Schuyver started a ferry from Vancouver to the Oregon shore. He increased prices to $1 a person or $3 for a horse and rider. Passengers paid $2 for an additional horse, mule or cow, $3 for a horse and wagon and $6 for a wagon team. Other livestock — hogs and sheep — crossed for 24 cents each. Despite his higher prices, Van Schuyver’s ferry business wilted.
The Vancouver Independent reported in 1875 ferry trips between Vancouver and Portland were available every hour between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Still, other crossings popped up. On May 7, 1879, William H. Foster and Edwin A. Willis were granted an operating franchise for a steam ferry on the Columbia River from the foot of “B Street” in Vancouver to Switzler’s Landing “upon paying an annual license fee of $5.” Their service lasted only a few months.
If ferrying was shaky financially, the weather didn’t help. On Sept. 13, 1878, the newspaper reported “The ferry boat at Vancouver, tied to the bank, was sunk by alternation of the tides.” Ice stopped crossings during Christmas season in 1884, when not even steamboats could reach Vancouver. When 18 inches of snow fell by a winter evening in 1892, then overnight shifted to sleet and rain, it crusted over trees, homes and businesses. The ferry tried two trips but was forced to tie up on the Portland shore. The following winter created an ice blockade suspending river traffic. In the spring of 1894, floods stopped ferry traffic when the river rose four feet above its 1876 high-water mark.
Ferry service from downtown Vancouver to Portland ended after the opening of the new Interstate Bridge on Feb. 14, 1917. That bridge remains in service today.