Gilbert, Frank T.  "Historic Sketches of Walla Walla, Whitman, Columbia and
Garfield Counties, Washington Territory; and Umatilla County, Oregon."
Portland, OR: Print & Lithographing House of A. G. Walling, 1882. p. a2.
 
DR. DORSEY S. BAKER

     The history of communities and of nations is made up mainly of the acts of
men who contribute towards directing to a result the efforts of the people by
whom they are surrounded. This is equally true whether the actor be a Grant
marshaling the legions of a grand army, a Vanderbilt, dictating to a nation's
commerce,or the obscure farmer whose harvest is gathered to feed those dependent
upon him. The acts of each that have an influence upon any portion of the human
family are historic events and are important in proportion to the result. Every
community has its leading men whose operations exert an influence upon others.
Their plans include the capital and the labor of many to execute, and if that
labor is benefited or that capital augmented, the ones who planned are public
benefactors, great in proportion to the results achieved.  Even though it be
claimed that the object of such operations was to benefit the designers only,
still, if in its detail or results benefits accrue to the public, those who
designed and executed are public benefactors nevertheless.
     There are persons of this class living between the Rocky and Cascade
mountains, who have done much for the country where they live, but among them
all there is not one who is the peer of Dr. D. S. Baker in these respects.
Fertile in invention, comprehensive in judgment, with a tenacity of purpose
inherited from his Puritan ancestors, he could not have fallen short of becoming
a leader in whatever sphere circumstances may have placed him. Away back in
1635, his ancestors were driven from their native land by persecution, because
they resisted the doctrinal dictations by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and
chose the wilds of America in preference to a surrender of conscience. A little
farther down the line, we find another of his ancestors, General Ethan Allen,
demanding the surrender of the English fort of Ticonderoga in the name of "the
Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." Such being the result of a glimpse
into the past, leads one to expect that the descendants of such men should
achieve success in life, and only their failure to do so would excite surprise
because the opposite is expected. The early training of the Doctor peculiarly
fitted him for operations in the field that in later years became the scene of
his numerous achievements. Born in Wabash county, Illinois, October 18, 1823, he
lived in that country at a time when scholastic education was one of the most
difficult things for a youth to obtain; but his mother being a woman of rare
attainments, added to a fund of comprehensive and practical sense, he gained his
knowledge of books from her. To that mother's early teachings, moulding of
life's aims and character, the Doctor owes much of the favorable results
crowning the efforts of his after life. His father was extensively engaged in
operating mills and in general merchandising, and at nineteen years of age, the
Doctor was entrusted with the conducting of a large proportion of the business,
at one time taking nine boat loads of produce to New Orleans to convert it into
money or goods suitable for their frontier stores. While conducting this
business in its complicated forms of traffic, he learned the many branches of
trade, and its various phases that, as before stated, fitted him for the work of
after years.
     In 1845, he graduated in the medical department of the Jefferson College in
Philadelphia, and in 1847, started from home to operate for himself. His outfit
consisted of one dozen medical books, a medicine case, horse and buggy. He went
to near Des Moines in Iowa, and commenced to practice his profession. In 1848,
he determined to seek the shores of the Great Ocean to the west to try his
fortune, and setting out with his horse and buggy crossed the plains to Oregon
that year, arriving at Portland (then a mere hamlet) on the nineteenth of
September, where he commenced the practice of his profession on this Coast.
	The discovery of gold, the previous June by Marshall at Coloma in
California, had nearly depopulated Portland, the male portion of its inhabitants
having gone to the scene of the discovery. There were but fourteen men in this
embryo-metropolis on Christmas 1848, the Doctor being one of that number, and
they decided to have a frolic. In all frontier localities, whisky is considered
an important factor among the essentials necessary in preparing for a festive
occasion, and it was found necessary, at this time, to visit Oregon City to get
six quarts of it, to enable the fourteen Portlanders to express their
appreciation of the fact that Christ was born on that day.
     With the early spring, the Doctor started for the gold fields, and January
of 1850, saw him back again in Portland with $1,800 worth of general
merchandise, as the result of his California mining venture. A partnership was
then formed between him and L. B. Hastings. Together they ran a hotel and a
store, and the Doctor practiced his profession. They purchased one-ninth of the
town site of Portland, but the transaction was never made a matter of record,
and they abandoned their rights with a loss, having always considered themselves
fortunate in getting out of that title muddle that has sunk fortunes in
litigation since.  In the early spring of 1851, the Doctor again left Portland,
this time, with three ox teams loaded with miners' supplies, bound for Yreka,
California. At the rate of five miles per day, he finally reached the summit of
the Calapooia mountains, but, in going down on the other side, made much faster
time some of the way. On one occasion the wagon tipped over endways onto the
cattle, and all rolled in a mixed condition to a more level country. After
sorting the oxen and wagon from the bacon and other valuables that had been
distributed among the rocks, bushes, grass, sand, etc., he continued his journey
to Yreka, and built, immediately after his arrival, the first house erected in
that place. In May of the same year, he returned to the Umpqua valley, and met
with an adventure on the way. While camped on Rogue river opposite to where
Jacksonville now stands, news was received of the Indian outbreak, and the
massacre of Captain Stewart and his command. The next night his riding mule
strayed off, and he went in search of it in the morning, and while doing so, the
train moved on. After finding his animal, he gained the road, and dropping his
reins upon the mule's neck, took out a novel to read, but was interrupted in his
literary pursuit by one of the loose animals of the train that come back along
the road on the run. He headed it off, turned it in the right direction, and on
they went. Directly, he came to a creek, and just as he was riding out on the
opposite side, an Indian, dressed in a uniform stripped from a dead soldier,
sprung from the bushes into the road in front of him, with a musket in his hand.
The Doctor was not armed, but he still carried the novel rolled up in his hand;
and without an instant's hesitation, he took aim with it, and spurred his mule
at the red-skin, shouting at the same time, " Klat-a-wa, God damn you,
klat-a-wa! " This was too much even for a savage. Not that he was shocked at the
Doctor's evident disregard for the third commandment, nor that he was afraid of
a mule; but to be brought in range of a yellow-covered novel, loaded with light
literature, at the imminent peril of having its contents shot into him, was
enough to stampede a whole tribe, and in an instant he had taken to the brush.
Dr. Baker, without waiting for further development, put spurs to his mule, and
dashed away at full speed to overtake the train, which he reached without
further adventure.
     For the succeeding seven years, he resided at Oakland in the Umpqua valley,
devoting his time to the varied pursuits of farming, stock-raising, milling, and
merchandising. In 1858, he again returned to Portland, engaged in the hardware
business, and in 1860, started a store in Walla Walla under the management of
William Stevens, In May, 1861, the Doctor took personal charge of his Washington
Territory business, and in 1862, his brother-in-law, J. F. Boyer, coming from
California, took the laboring oar as a partner in the mercantile branch of the
Doctor's Walla Walla establishment.
     The presence of Mr. Boyer in the mercantile branch of his business enabled
the Doctor to give more attention to outside operations, and in 1862, he
associated himself with Capt. A. P. Ankeny, H. W. Corbett, William Gates, and
Captain Baughman, for the purpose of running a line of boats between the month
of the De Chutes river, and Lewiston, in opposition to the Oregon Steam
Navigation Company. They built the steamer Spray, which made fourteen trips in
1862, but in the meantime, a third transportation company, known as the "Peoples
Transportation Line," had entered into the carrying trade, and having other
boats to run above the Cascades, put a steamer, named the E. D. Baker, on the
lower Columbia. In the spring of 1863, the Spray owners sold their boat to the
O. S. N. Co., which left two competing lines on the river; but no sooner were
Dr. Baker and his associates out of the way than the two remaining lines
compromised their rivalry by agreeing to quit competition, the People's line to
have all the freight on the Willamette, anti the O. S. N. Co. to be left alone
on the Columbia. This left the upper country at -the mercy of one freight and
passenger line, the very state of things which had caused the building of the
steamer Spray, and no sooner was this fact known, than Dr. Baker again
associated himself with gentlemen for the purpose of removing the main
obstruction to competition on the Columbia river. There are two rapids in that
stream between Portland and Lewiston, through which steamers cannot pass. At
these points, all freights must be unloaded and transported a number of miles by
land. To make a successful opposition, required a connected line that included
at least three steamers and two land transportation trains, making a complicated
business that called for considerable capital.
     It was the purpose of Dr. Baker and his associates to build railways at the
two points on the Columbia, where transportation was necessary by land, that
should carry freight for all alike, thus removing much of the freight
complication, making it easier than heretofore for parties with limited capital
to compete for the carrying trade upon that great artery from the interior.
They commenced at the Cascades, had completed their road, and, in a few weeks,
it would have been in active operation, when news was received that Congress had
given to the O. S. N. Co. the exclusive right of way over the ground they had
used in laying the track, which was the only practical route. This was a death
blow to their enterprise, and under advice of their attorney, the road was sold
at a heavy loss, in the spring of 1864, to their opponents. This defeat of Dr.
Baker and his associates was one of vast moment to the coming tens of thousands
who were to live between the Rocky and Cascade mountains, for it meant monopoly
as a fixture for, at least, one generation to which the country was to pay
untold millions, and it was to ward off such a financial drain upon the people's
industries, that they had invested their money, and Congress had made it a
calamity to them.
     In 1865, the mines began to fail, and farmers, in localities nearer to them
than Walla Walla; furnished what was wanted in the mountain market. Freights
were so high that no produce could be shipped towards the sea, and the great
valley and country west of the Blue mountains was without a market. The great
necessity of the country was to develope a means by which cereals that could be
grown in her soil might be placed upon navigable waters, at an expense that
would leave the farmer something for his labor. A railroad to the Columbia from
Walla Walla was that means; but how could it be obtained?  For years, the people
agitated that project, until, eventually, the Doctor took hold of it, furnished
the means, built the road, in spite of a strange, formidable opposition, and
inaugurated an era of prosperity in the country, that has benefited thousands of
people, enriched hundreds, himself among the number. For the history of that
transaction, and what followed, we refer the reader to the chapter in this work
upon Railroads and Transportation.
     Dr. Baker is now an old man with locks white as the snows that fell upon
his native hills, and standing near the silent river, he looks back upon a life
actively spent in the prosecution of enterprises that have all inured to the
benefit of others more than to himself. The time will come in the near future,
when the people of the country, where he now lives, listening to the solemn
notes of the slow-tongued bells, will, with one voice, join in sorrowful regrets
at the loss of him whom they will then acknowledge to have been their truest and
ablest champion.

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Submitted to the WA. Bios Project in February 2007 by Diana Smith.

Notice: These biographies were transcribed for the Washington Biographies
Project. Unless otherwise stated, no further information is available on the
individual featured in the biographies.