The Importance of Striking
November 21st, 2024
Captain Francis Armstrong
Captain Armstrong, the brother of the early gold commissioner and government agent J.F. Armstrong, was born in Sorel, Quebec, in 1861. He was an immigrant to East Kootenay, moving to Winnipeg 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 February 4th, 1883. Another kid, Jimmy Macauly, and I had come from Canal Flats. It was freezing, and though we had horses, we had to walk to keep ourselves warm.”
Capt. Armstrong didn’t walk for long and, in 1882, claimed and homesteaded a tract of 320 acres on the eastern side of Upper Columbia Lake.
Soon after, he 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 and sold the spuds for seven cents a pound.
The demand was high as the Canadian Pacific Railway was building through Golden at that time. Capt. 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, slab-sided, with a large superstructure and projecting deck. According to the captain, it had the appearance of an exaggerated parlour matchbox. 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 were incorporated with capt. Armstrong as manager.
To add to his long list of amazing feats, in 1894, he 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 capt. Armstrong. On May 5th, 1896, the Ruth and the Gwendoline steamers crashed on the rocks in Jennings Canyon on the Kootenay River. The vessels were lost. Not to be stopped by natural obstacles or human error, he soon had boats navigating the waterways once more.
He worked both the Kootenay and Columbia river systems until the spreading grid of railway lines and roads decimated the industry.
