About the Steamboaters

The Steamboaters is a member organization that works tirelessly to protect the fragile North Umpqua River in Oregon.

Needless to say, resources such as this are scarce, and, unfortunately, there always seem to be forces at work to deplete and exploit them.

Board Info

A Brief History of the Steamboaters

Established in 1966, a group of anglers and their families formed the core of The Steamboaters to preserve the natural resources of the North Umpqua. They chose the name The Steamboaters because of its association with the inn where many of its members stayed and because of the significance of Steamboat Creek, which enters the North Umpqua at the Station Pool.

Unfortunately, threats to the North Umpqua's summer steelhead were building. With the completion of a network of modern roadways into the surrounding forests, logging of the old growth Douglas firs had begun on an unprecedented scale after World War II. Many of the North Umpqua 's tributaries, including the crucial Steamboat Creek drainage, exhibited higher water temperatures in summer and disastrous flooding in winter, when they were scoured of spawning gravel.

In 1968, not long after the Steamboaters organization was formed, two young filmmakers, Hal Riney and Dick Snider, were on their way to make a sport fishing movie in British Columbia when they stopped at the Steamboat Inn. They fell in love with the North Umpqua River and when Frank Moore took them on a tour of the carnage being wrought by careless logging operations in nearby tributary streams, they decided to change the focus of their film. The result was "Pass Creek," the story of the destruction of a steelhead spawning stream.

The movie was given national distribution by conservation and angling groups, touching a nerve in the emerging ecology movement. It resulted in intense scrutiny of clear-cut logging practices in the National Forests and was a factor in the passage of the Oregon Forest Practices Act. Government agencies have committed increased resources in recent years to efforts to survey and rehabilitate threatened steelhead spawning streams, including the North Umpqua drainage.

Another well-known angler who frequented the North Umpqua during this period was Jack Hemingway, son of the famous author Ernest Hemingway. Himself a member of the game commission in Idaho for many years, Hemingway wrote several impassioned articles about the North Umpqua for national sporting magazines, detailing the abuses on spawning streams.