The Basin Record Newsletter Vol.2 Issue 1

Membership T he Columbia Basin Institute of Regional History is growing and maturing. Our latest project has just gone into production – three public interpretation signs. These are destined for City Hall, the old Masonic Temple and the Gyro Pool site. They will start to make Cranbrook’s early history available to all. We intend to offer them as templates for more historic signage in Cranbrook and in the Columbia Basin as a whole. Our next project is to begin to make our research available to our members. To accomplish this we are building a web site with a public front end for news, stories and events, and a research back end for members looking to access Columbia Basin facts, photos, interviews and history. Membership also allows you to lend your support to our efforts. We have an ambitious vision to work with others throughout the Columbia Basin, celebrating both our human and natural history. There are tens of thousands of stories out there to be told, and the Columbia Basin Institute wants to help in recording them before they are lost. So membership is an opportunity to move the discovery of our regional past forward, while at the same time gaining access to information and continuing to receive The Basin Record. The Columbia Basin Institute of Regional History intends to help with making this a special place to live and do business. 2006 memberships are now available. Simply clip (or photocopy if you are saving The Basin Record) the form on the back page and send it to us with the appropriate fee. Your investment will go toward making history accessible throughout the Columbia Basin region. Basin Biography Paddlewheeler “Ruth” CAPTAIN FRANCIS PATRICK ARMSTRONG Capt. Armstrong, the brother of early gold commissioner and government agent J.F. Armstrong, was born in Sorel, Quebec, in 1861. He was an early immigrant to East Kootenay, moving toWinnipeg in 1881 and then west with F.W. Aylmer to survey a western route for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Quoted in the 1913 Cranbrook Courier he stated “I saw Fort Steele, or as it was then named Galbraith’s Ferry, on the 4 th of February, 1883. Another kid, Jimmy Macauly, and myself had come from Canal Flat. It was extremely cold, and though we had horses, we were forced to walk to keep ourselves warm.” Capt. Armstrong didn’t walk for long. He homesteaded a tract of 320 acres on the eastern side of Upper Columbia Lake in 1882, soon packed seed potatoes in from Montana and planted a cash crop. Transportation was a problem so he whipsawed lumber and built two rough flat-bottomed rowboats. Loading the potatoes, he navigated the Columbia River to Golden where he sold the spuds for seven cents a pound. The demand was high as the Canadian Pacific Railway was building through Golden at that time. Captain Armstrong’s solution to the difficulty of getting rowboats back up the river was to build The Duchess in 1886. The Duchess was flat-bottomed and slab-sided, with a large superstructure and projecting decks and “had very much the appearance of an exaggerated parlour match box.” It was a sternwheeler and made five or six miles an hour travelling upriver, and double that going down. The saving grace of The Duchess was that it carried almost unlimited freight. From the profits of The Duchess Capt. Armstrong built a transportation empire. The first boat sank, was rebuilt, and was joined by the Marion , Pert , Ruth, Gwendoline , and the North Star . In 1891 the Upper Columbia Navigation and Tramway Company was incorporated, with Capt. Armstrong as manager. To add to his long list of amazing feats, in 1894 Armstrong piloted the 64-foot long Gwendoline through the sixty-seven hundred foot Grohman Canal from the Upper Columbia into the Kootenay River. Then, in 1902, he squeezed the 130-foot long North Star from the Kootenay River into the Columbia system, blowing the canal’s locks as he went through. Not all was sunshine and roses for CaptainArmstrong, however. OnMay 5 th , 1896, the Ruth and the Gwendoline steamers were both lost on the rocks in Jennings Canyon on the Kootenay River. Not to be stopped by natural obstacles or human error, Armstrong soon had boats again navigating the Kootenay and worked both the Kootenay and Columbia river systems until put out of business by the spreading grid of railway lines and roads.