Sredneuralskiy (1734) and Seversky (1735). Before construction of the railway across the Urals, the river served as an important route for transporting metals and fur from the Urals to the western Russia. The first port for this purpose was built in the mouth of the Utka tributary in 1703 by the orders of Peter the Great. Every spring, with the start of the flood, heavily loaded barges were sent from the wharf in the upper Chusovaya to Perm. It was rather difficult to navigate heavy wooden ships through the fast and winding river and many were crashing to the coastal cliffs. About 50 barges had major accidents between 1857 and 1861 on the Chusovaya. In the spring of 1877 alone, 47 barges sank drowning more than 100 men, 23 of those barges crashed at one and the same cliff Brigand (). Massive efforts were spent from the 17th through 19th centuries to improve the navigation conditions on Chusovaya. The most dangerous shore cliffs were blown up with dynamite, including the Brigand (this was one of the world's first controlled underwater explosions.) Smaller boulders protruding at the river center were removed, and hundreds mooring poles had been installed. Logs were set up in the places where the currents tended to wash up boats on the rocks in order to soften the impact. These measures drastically reduced the number of accidents (from 10% to 4% of the total number of shipments in 1890) and the traffic on the river grew from 49,500 tonnes in 1862 to 128,800 tonnes in 1873. It then dropped to 107,200 tonnes and remained at this level through the 1890s. The barges used on Chusovaya were sturdy wooden boats long and wide that could carry up to 200 tonnes. Some barges were reinforced inside with metal stripes and could sustain up to 10 navigation seasons. Barges were equipped with roped weights, which were thrown overboard to increase the drag thereby reducing the barge speed when needed. The first steamship appeared on Chusovaya in 1841, it was a metal vessel named Nikita Demidov. For the first three years, the ship was bringing barges loaded with the production of the Staroutkinsky plant between Suksun and Levshino. In 1844, there was an attempt to run the ship in the middle reaches. After a 24-day trip, she managed to pass only and then crashed, once again illustrating the difficulty of navigating the