Steamboats of The Peace River - End of An Era

End of An Era

For the years from 1915 to 1925 the Peace River artery became the easier route to the north and Peace River town became the shipping off point. The boats were transferred to the upper and lower Peace, and the Slave River. At this time the HBC ran all their boats down the Peace system to the Mackenzie River chain, boats like the Prospector and Distributor, which were useful in the war for the Norman Wells Canol project. The Hudson's Bay Company boats steamed until 1948.

The arrival of the Model T Ford, and bulldozer, and gravelled roads, finished the river steamers in the Peace River Block. Also, the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia Railway worked its way to BC and arrived in Dawson Creek in 1930, completely doing in the steamboat era. Farther east the Northern Alberta Railway and the Alberta Northern Waterways railway bypassed the worst rapids on the Upper Athabasca River by rail and thus made Waterways, or modern Fort McMurray, the transport head for the Peace and Athabasca Rivers. Other Railways—the Central Canada and Pembina—tried to alleviate transport woes but became weakened by the Depression and were not completed.

Smaller boats of various kinds continued to work on the Peace for another 20 years, but the age of steamboats was gone. The final commercial freight run up the Peace River was made by the Watson Lake, a steel-hulled vessel, in September 1952. Her last trip completed, she was hauled out of the water and loaded on a flatcar and shipped by rail to Waterways to continue work up north.

The US Army built a diesel paddler for tug service on the Peace River in 1942. It worked on the raising of the Peace River Bridge (part of the Alaska Highway ), the re-located and exiled bad boy bridge of Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It promptly collapsed again in 1957.