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Steamboating arrived late on the Upper Peace River and was soon overtaken by the frenetic settlement and railway development which took place prior to and during World War I. The topography of the Peace River country militated against the development of a chain of neat little communities nestling on the riverside. In these days of magnificent industrial highways sweeping over the plateau in the Peace River country, providing a speedy link with Prince George and other British Columbia centres, the era of meandering steamboats seems as far removed as that of the York boat.
Ted Affleck is well-known for his extensive research on the steamers on the inland steamers on the inland waters of British Columbia. He is working on the publication of a book containing the names of about a thousand steamers, titled: A Century of Paddlewheelers in the Pacific Northwest, the Yukon and Alaska.
THE history of freshwater steamboating in British Columbia involves navigation on at least 20 different stretches of water. Many of these stretches have a similar history dating from the second half of the nineteenth century. Prospectors discovered gold on the banks of hitherto uncharted creeks and rivers and hordes of adventurers followed in on foot. Then the white man's inimitable invasion craft, the sternwheeler, steamed up the Pacific Coast to enter the mouth of major rivers and proceeded to work heavy cargo up white water to service the mushrooming mining camps on or near the river. This is true of watercourses which rise west of the continental divide and discharge into the waters of the Pacific Ocean such as the Stikine, the Skeena, the Fraser, and the Columbia. It is however, not true at all for the Peace River, which pierces the continental divide to join the vast Slave-Mackenzie drainage system to the Arctic.
Between 1794 and 1823 the Upper Peace River area was the scene of active fur trading and also of intense rivalry between the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company. The massacre of five HBC men by natives at St. Johns in 1823, combined with a depletion of fur and food resources in the area, ended the Upper Peace River trade for four and one- half decades. Fort Dunvegan became the western outpost...