Professor Dawson, the eminent Canadian geologist, made a study of this section of the River some years before his death, and as a result expressed the opinion that the section of the Columbia above the mouth of Blue River, some thirty miles below Golden, formerly united with the Kootenai. But owing to some convulsion of nature, the surface was tilted just sufficiently to turn the section of the stream from Columbia Lake toward the north instead of the south, with the result that we have this slack-water system of lagoons and lakes constituting this marvellously picturesque division of the River. Now in confirmation of this theory of Professor Dawson we have in the relations of the Columbia and Kootenai the singular geographical phenomenon already referred to in an earlier chapter. The Kootenai runs through “Canal Flats,” in which the upper Columbia Lake is situated, and comes within a mile of that lake. It is nine feet higher than the lake, but there is no high land there, and at one time a canal joined the Kootenai with the lake. This canal was wrecked in the great flood of 1894, but steamboats had run through it from the Kootenai to the Columbia, and it would be entirely feasible to reconstruct it. After having thus passed within a mile of each other and evidently having once been actually connected, the two rivers part company. The Columbia flows north and the Kootenai south. Each makes a vast bend. Again they reverse directions, the Columbia flowing south and the Kootenai north, and then come together many miles from their point of separation.
Aside from the unique beauty of the lagoons and the grassy shores, the eye of the traveller is delighted with the two mountain chains which confront each other across those glassy channels throughout the entire stretch from Golden to Windermere. On the east side is the main chain of the Rockies, and on the west are the Selkirks.
As we proceed on the deep, still stream, gliding from channel to channel, we may find ourselves mightily entertained by the conversation of such a navigator as Captain Armstrong or Captain Blakeney. For each can command a fund of historical and descriptive matter of rare interest.
Captain Armstrong was one of the earliest pilots on the Kootenai. In 1894 he built the North Star at Jennings, Montana, ran her up the wild stream to Canal Flats, thence through the canal to the Columbia lakes, and into the River itself. A more exquisite stretch of river navigation than that through Columbia Lake, Lake Adela, and Lake Windermere, and from them into the lagoons of the River, can scarcely be found or even imagined, and it was the lot of the North Star to ply upon that route until her unhappy destruction by fire in 1900.
There is little danger of accident on the placid water of the uppermost Columbia, but it is far different on the Kootenai. We heard many a tale of steamboating adventure from these pilots.
One of these so well illustrates those old-time conditions that we repeat here its chief points. Captain Armstrong owned two steamers, the Ruth and the Gwendoline. Both were engaged in transporting freight by way of Jennings to Fort Steele and the various mining camps in that district. The business was enormously profitable, for the boats received two and one half cents a pound. At that particular time there were twenty-six cars on the Great Northern Railway awaiting shipments.
From his two steamers Captain Armstrong sometimes made two thousand dollars a day in gross receipts. But though profitable, the business was also correspondingly risky. The Jennings Cañon, above Bonner’s Ferry, is, perhaps, the worst piece of water that has ever been navigated on the Columbia or its tributaries. A strip of water, foaming-white, down-hill almost as on a steep roof, hardly wider than the steamboat, savage-looking rocks waiting to catch hold of any unwary craft that might venture through,—so forbidding in fact was that route that Captain Armstrong found no insurance agent that felt disposed to insure his boats and cargo. At last he induced a San Francisco agent to make the trip with him and to offer a rate. After sitting in silence on the deck while the steamer whirled down the Jennings Cañon, the agent stated that his rate would be twenty-five per cent. of the cargo. The daring captain decided to take the risk himself. He had made a number of trips with entire success and immense profit. But just at the height of the season, when the twenty-six cars were on the track and a sack full of gold was waiting for him, the captain got into too much of a hurry. He was running the Gwendoline; one of his best pilots, the Ruth. The Ruth was ahead. Both were making their best possible time down the cañon to get a cargo. Captain Armstrong, at the wheel of the Gwendoline, was whizzing down the cañon at a rate which made stopping impossible, when to his dismay he saw the Ruth right ahead of him in a narrow turn, lying across the channel, wedged in the rocks. To stop was impossible. To select any comfortable landing-place was equally so. The Gwendoline piled right on top of the Ruth. Both were total wrecks, without a dollar of insurance. A two-thousand-dollar cargo gone in five minutes, to say nothing of boats and business that could not be replaced and a fortune within grasp that would never be so near again.
Lake Windermere, Upper Columbia, where David Thompson’s Fort was Built in 1810.
Photo. by W. D. Lyman.
But such were the risks of steamboating on the Kootenai.