End of An Era
After 1912 the Skeena River was no longer used for river navigation by sternwheelers. The GTP boats, Operator and Conveyor, were dismantled; their machinery would be used in new sternwheelers that were built at Tête Jaune Cache for east end construction. Their pilots, Captain Myers and Captain Shannon, would stay with them until 1914 when the line was finished.
The Distributor and the HBC Port Simpson were also dismantled and rebuilt and would later work together on the Mackenzie River. The HBC's Hazelton became the clubhouse for the Prince Rupert Yacht Club. The Skeena was purchased by Captain Seymour in 1914 and went on to work on the lower Fraser River. For eleven more years the devotion of her skipper-owner kept her plying the river past Surrey, Coquitlam, Maple Ridge, Langley and Mission. But when Captain Seymour died in 1925 she lost her only advocate. She was sold and converted to a floating barge for an oil company. Thus ended the last of the Skeena River sternwheelers.
Read more about this topic: Steamboats Of The Skeena River
Famous quotes containing the word era:
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)