Steamboats of The Arrow Lakes - Initial Steamboats Placed On The Route

Initial Steamboats Placed On The Route

The first steamboat on the route was the Forty-Nine, built to service a brief gold rush on the Big Bend of the Columbia River, attempting the run from Marcus, Washington Terr., just above Kettle Falls, to the La Porte, one of the main boomtowns of the rush, which was site at the foot of the infamous and also impassable Dalles des Morts or Death Rapids, which were at the head of river navigation but also just below the richest of the Big Bend's goldfields, on the Goldstream River which meets the Columbia just upstream. Another major goldfield, Downie Creek, joined the Columbia just below the rapids and was the site of the boomtown Downie Creek, British Columbia, another port-of-call on the run. When the gold rush ended, Forty-Nine was withdrawn for lack of clientele, and the captain gave free passage out of the Big Bend area for those who could not afford passage. After that, the small steam launch Alpha ran supplies up to Revelstoke (then called Farwell) where the Canadian Pacific Railway was building a crossing over the Columbia River for its transcontinental line. In 1885, a much larger vessel, the sternwheeler Kootenai, was built at the Little Dalles at Northport, Washington Terr., for the CPR, but grounded in September of that year, and was laid up for a number of years afterwards. After that, three businessmen formed the Columbia Transportation Company, and put the Dispatch on the Arrow Lakes route. The Dispatch (sometimes spelled "Despatch") was a clunky-looking catamaran, which first ran on August 9, 1888. Her owners made enough money from her operations to buy the Marion, which had been operating above the Big Bend. She was shipped over and launched at Revelstoke.

• Dispatch
• folk art model of Dispatch
• Dispatch at Sproat's Landing
• Marion at Goat River Slough, assisting with rail construction, circa 1898

The owners of the Columbia Transportation Company brought in some bigger businessmen, J.A. Mara, Frank S. Barnard, and Captain John Irving, who formed the Columbia River and Kootenay Steam Navigation Company on January 21, 1890, with a capital of $100,000. In 1889 through 1890, the new firm purchased the idle Kootenai for $10,000 and built and launched the Lytton at Revelstoke, which was ready for service in July, 1990. The first trip taken by the Lytton on July 2, 1890 was transporting rails and other track-building supplies south through the Arrow Lakes to Sproat's Landing, where the Kootenay River flowed into the Columbia, for a railroad that the CPR was building from the landing to Nelson on Kootenay Lake. The trip was 150 miles each way, and Lytton averaged 121⁄₃ miles an hour downstream and 11 miles an hour upstream, including stops for wooding up and minor repairs. By August 1890, American interests had completed a railroad, called the Spokane Falls and Northern, from Spokane Falls (later simply Spokane) to Little Dalles, Washington (Northport). Lytton, Kootenai and the Arrow Lakes route formed a link between the northern CPR railhead at Revelstoke the Arrow Lake to the southern railhead at Little Dalles.