Rare American West Coast Painting of Steamship S.S. Umatilla. Oil on Board. Remnants of antique San Francisco newspaper attached to back of frame. 

Overall: 20 3/4 X 26 3/4 in. 

Sight size: 17 1/2 X 23 1/2 in. 

#2685 . 

The S.S. Umatilla was a 310 foot long, two-masted, iron-hulled, 2000 ton commercial passenger cargo steamer built in 1881 in Chester, Pennsylvania, initially for the Oregon Improvement Company. It was named after the Umatilla tribe, a group of Native Americans who lived in the Columbia River Plateau in northeastern Oregon. Under the command of Captain Frank Worth it struck a reef on February 9th, 1884 near Vancouver, Washington, and was towed to Esquimalt Bay, where it sank. Today the reef is named Umatilla in honor of the mishap. The sunken vessel was raised, repaired, and significantly updated by the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, an important early shipping company that operated all along the West Coast of North and Central America. The new and improved Umatilla first went into service in 1897, carrying Chinese immigrants and prospectors bound for Alaska in the Klondike Gold Rush. By the early 1910s it was primarily serving as a short range transport vessel for Santa Cruz Island, after several more (less disastrous) strandings. In 1916 the company was sold to the Admiral Oriental Lines, and the Umatilla made an arduous journey across the Pacific to be put to use in Japan. However, on March 5th, 1918, she was stranded off the coast of Inubōsaki, a small village in Chiba Prefecture in the Kantō region of Honshu. Although all 55 passengers escaped, the vessel was deemed a total loss. After six months the position of the vessel created a new sandbar that allowed access to the ship, and the inhabitants of the village dismantled it, plate by plate. As Japan and the United States were on the same side during World War I, they were able to obtain the original plans for the ship and rebuilt it as it once looked, operating it as a steamship along the Chiba coastline for at least two more decades. The ultimate fate of the vessel is unclear, although countless merchant ships were sunk on both sides during World War II.