Issue Date: August 22, 1996
City: Orlando, FL
Quantity: 23,025,000
Printed By: Avery Dennison
Printing Method: Photogravure
Perforations: 11 x11.1
Color: Multicolored

 

Climactic conditions in the Pacific Northwest required steamboats with structural features different from boats navigating elsewhere. Here, single smokestacks, enclosed superstructures, and covered sternwheels were favored. 

 

When the Bailey Gatzert was launched in Seattle in 1890, the young city was teeming with new settlers and prospectors heading for gold fields in Alaska. John Leary of the Seattle Steam Navigation and Transportation Company had a luxurious steamboat built in Ballard, Washington to provide transportation between Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, Washington, naming it the Bailey Gatzert after one of Seattle’s pioneer citizens and former mayors. 

 

Besides running scheduled passenger service in the Puget Sound, the Bailey Gatzert ran the Columbia River, the major transportation artery to the interior. To do this, she had to cross the Juan De Fuca Strait to the Pacific, then sail south to the river. She raced all comers with a broom lashed to her mast, symbol of her power to sweep the river clear of competition. When the Bailey Gatzert finally lost a race in 1918, Leary sold her. Before being dismantled eight years later, the grand old steamboat ferried automobiles between Seattle and Bremerton.