If he ordered the crew to fight, they might be able to save the Telephone, which was of course the most valuable bit of naval architecture in the Northwest. If all went well, they’d be on their way again in a few hours to deliver the passengers and freight. But to do this, he would have to stop the engines. Otherwise, the speed with which the boat was hurtling through the water would fan the flames. That meant that if the firefighting efforts didn’t go well, they would end up stuck in the middle of the river, sitting in the lifeboats, watching the boat burn to the waterline and sink. 
The sternwheeler Telephone under way in San Francisco Bay, long after the vessel caught fire on the Columbia; the entire superstructureshown in this photo was built after the fire. The once-proud riverboat ended up in San Francisco Bay as a railway ferry for a time before being scrapped in 1918. (Photo: Superior Publishing)And, speaking of lifeboats — sure, they could try to get the passengers into them, and they’d save most of them — but some of them would die. People always did. They panicked and leaped overboard, or dawdled belowdecks until too late, or crowded into lifeboats and caused them to capsize. There were 140 passengers on the ship; some of them would die. Plus, if the crew lost the fight with the fire, the end would come very fast. Riverboats like the Telephone were made of wood, and all the wood above the waterline was kept carefully dry and pickled in varnishes and paints. These coatings would make the smoke thicker and deadlier. And, well, Captain Scott was an old riverboat man. He knew what happened when a riverboat caught fire and immediate action wasn’t taken. He was probably thinking of the worst-case scenario, which was something like what had happened to the riverboat Eliza Battle, which caught fire in 1858 on the Tombigbee River in Alabama. Efforts to fight the fire failed, and by the time the skipper realized he needed to make for shore, the rudder ropes had been burned through and the boat could not be steered. Eighty people died on the Eliza Battle, and another 100 were badly hurt, while the boat blindly thrashed down the river. So Scott knew the stakes, and he knew if he rolled the dice, he might just save the boat ... or he might end up presiding over another Eliza Battle disaster. The alternative was to just point the bow at one side or the other and make for the beach under full steam. This would involve sacrificing any possibility of saving the boat. The wind created by the Telephone’s legendary speed would fan the flames to an inferno, and by the time the boat hit the beach, there would be nothing to do but watch it burn. Then, too, it was not clear that even a boat as fast as the Telephone could make it to the shore in time. The boat could not have caught fire in a worse place. The river was almost five miles wide, and Scott had been driving her almost directly up the middle. The boat had a good two miles of open water to cross. The Telephone would make that distance in about seven minutes at maximum warp; but a fire on a riverboat could get a lot of progress made in seven minutes. Could he get to the beach before the fire spread enough to start killing people? Maybe not. Heave to and try to save the boat, or run for shore and try to save the passengers? This does not seem to have been a hard decision for Scott. He didn’t hesitate. “Put her full speed ahead!” he barked back into the speaking tube, and threw the helm hard over to the port side. The Telephone heeled over hard as the paddlewheel’s thrashing intensified, and Scott strained to hold the rudder over. The slim vessel came around, slower than Scott would have liked but she was built for speed, not agility. But before long her nose was pointed straight at the state of Oregon. The engine room “black crew,” having opened the steam up as wide as it would go, hustled through the smoke and flames to the top deck, where the passengers were already starting to cluster around the least smoky end of the boat — the one closest to shore.
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But he could see his gamble in making full speed for shore was going to pay off. The Telephone was going to make it in time. Nobody was checking, of course, but it’s a safe bet that the Telephone was moving faster than it ever had before (or would again). In a few moments it would be connecting with the riverbank at probably 25 miles an hour. The passengers packed into the bow braced for impact as best they could. Then the Telephone fetched up on the Oregon side of the river. Luckily, the shore there was basically a mud flat, which buffered the impact. Still the Telephone dealt the state of Oregon a mighty blow, and passengers went flying to the rapidly-heating-up foredeck. There probably were some injuries; the record doesn’t say. Whatever those injuries might have been, they weren’t enough to keep a single passenger on that by-now-dangerously-hot deck once the boat hit the shore. Over the gunwales they went, splashing into the water and mud and clambering up on shore to watch the Telephone burn.
AFTER WATCHING THE last of the passengers disembark, Scott turned to leave, but found to his consternation that the fire was surrounding the pilothouse and had burned away the steps. So he opened the pilothouse window and bailed out. Most sources say he executed a swan dive, but this seems unlikely given that the Telephone was stuck in mud and the pilothouse was pretty close to the front of the ship. More likely, it was something on the order of a belly flop or cannonball. The Telephone burned to the waterline as the passengers watched and firefighters from Astoria did what they could. When all was done, they found one single body in the wreckage — that of an unfortunate fellow who had just picked a really bad time to get drunk, and had either passed out or been too befuddled to find his way upstairs. Everyone else made it.
AFTER THIS DISASTER, the competing Oregon Railway & Navigation Co. reached out to Captain Scott with an offer that, in retrospect, seems irregular if not outright insulting. They offered to reimburse him for the loss of the Telephone if he would agree to go to work for them; they’d have him rebuild their riverboat Wide West and take command of her. Otherwise, they said, they’d take advantage of his misfortune to run him off the river. Scott told them if they’d throw in an extra $120,000, he’d consider it. That was too much for them, though, so no deal was struck. The Telephone was rebuilt — some sources say the hull was salvaged and a new superstructure put to it, but historian Jerry Canavit reports the new Telephone was a complete new build, slightly larger than the old one. Most likely this is the case, as the new Telephone, although still the fastest thing on the river, was never as fast as the old one. But then, she never had to be. Scott continued running the Telephone between Portland and Astoria till 1903, when he sold her to the Arrow Transportation Co. She enjoyed a reputation for blinding speed the whole time, right up until the end, and finished her days as a ferry on San Francisco Bay. She was finally scrapped in 1918.
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