Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/348

280 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