Steamboats in the Timber

Ruby El Hult

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781787209442
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In the heyday of its water commerce, Lake Coeur d'Alene in northern Idaho was the scene of more steamboating than any other lake, salt or fresh, west of the Great Lakes. The old steamers brought gold, silver, and lead from the mines; lumber from the forests; mail to lonely homesteaders; and romance down the shadowy St. Joe River, whose silken waters flow into the Coeur d'Alene. The old steamboats are gone now from the lake—but here is their story, exciting, nostalgic and complete.
Across Lake Coeur d'Alene, in the early days, the big mining boom in the Coeur d'Alene Mountains was carried out, and the ore-hauling stammers came and went. Across the lake water went the timber seekers in their rush to grab the white pine riches of the St. Joe country; and a new fleet of stammers carried timber barons, homesteaders and lumberjacks up the twisting, cottonwood-shaded St. Joe.
On holidays the old stammers were transformed into excursion boats. The beauty of the mountain lake and its two rivers lured thousands of people from Spokane and the Palouse farmlands, who crowded into special trains and headed for the banner-draped boats. Gay crowds danced on deck, children had a hectic day, and amorous couples gazed languorously at the blue-and-silver waters as the excursion steamer trailed homeward in the moonlight.
Here you will visit the bustling waterfront boom towns of Coeur d'Alene, Harrison, St. Maries, Ferrell, and St. Joe, just as they were in the glory days of steamboating, and as they are today. Romantic and factual history skilfully merge as the old towns, the rivermen, and the boats glide by in easy, informed narrative.

HIGHEST NAVIGABLE RIVER

CHAPTER ONE—SHADOWY ST. JOE

THE SOURCE of the St. Joe River is in high glacial lakes in the Bitter Root Mountains, and the streams which feed it spread like a network of nerves into the mountains it passes. After a course of over one hundred and twenty-five miles it empties into a long finger of Coeur d’Alene Lake.

In its higher regions, “up in swiftwater,” it is a fast stream flashing over a pebbled bottom with the mountains coming down close on either side in rocky and timbered gorges. Below the hamlet of Ferrell, or St. Joe, its pace lags and the river becomes still and deep, green as old moss, mirroring the cottonwoods and willows which line it like an avenue of trees, giving it the lovely name of “shadowy St. Joe.” Here the valley widens out and between river and mountains the level meadows lie like moist green gardens. This slow, canal-like stream has no falls or rapids for thirty miles above the lake, and boats can ascend its course to an elevation of 2198 feet above sea level. This makes it the highest navigable river in the world.

For the last few miles of its course, the St. Joe is a river flowing through a part of Coeur d’Alene Lake. At the point where it enters the easternmost end of the lake, sediment has been deposited in the shallow water until two banks have been formed. These banks have grown up with cottonwoods, bushes, and slough grass; between them the river current flows entirely independent of the lake waters lying on either side. This feature is so unusual Ripley noted it in a “Believe It Or Not” cartoon.

Not long after the discovery of Lake Coeur d’Alene, inquisitive white men began exploring the St. Joe by canoe and rowboat. They had plenty of time to enjoy the beauty of the valley. It is said that the first settler was a young prospector who came up the river with his outfit in quest of gold but who fell so in love with the weird greenery of the place that he forgot his search and founded his home here.

Other people began to work their way up the river, like the tentative gropings of uncertain fingers. About fifteen miles above the lake, where the St. Maries River joins the St. Joe, Joseph Fisher took a piece of land and built a few board buildings, then set up a small sawmill. He was from Michigan, attracted by the vast acres of timber he saw on the surrounding mountain sides. At the place where he settled, the town of St. Maries was soon growing up. Overlooking the deep-green, tree-shaded river he built the Mountain View Hotel, which he ran until his death in 1913.

Just before the advent of Fisher, two other men arrived simultaneously. They were William Ferrell and A. J. L. Bredwold. Which of the two arrived first in the valley is still a matter of controversy, as Bredwold claimed he had made a trip upriver and was coming out, when he met Ferrell on his way in—whereas Ferrell claimed he was coming out and met Bredwold going in. Bredwold settled on the St. Maries River. Ferrell took squatter’s rights to a big piece of meadowland on the St. Joe River just below swift water. Later on, he carved up some of his land, sold lots, and started a settlement known as Ferrell. Around 1900 he built a many-roomed, spacious-porched house which became the Ferrell Hotel. For this building he transported every board, nail, window, all tools and furnishings, from Coeur d’Alene by boat. At the head of navigation, the Ferrell Hotel, clean, attractive, serving good food, gave a touch of civilization to the wilderness. It became filled with sportsmen, anglers, timbermen, businessmen who wanted to “get away from it all”; and homestead seekers on their way into the swift-water country in search of land and timber.

Soon after the coming of Ferrell, Fisher and Bredwold, other settlers arrived to take possession of all the rich bottomland along the rivers. This was still the day of the horse, and hay was as important as gasoline is now. Hay meadows were riches to be compared with today’s oil wells. All up and down the St. Joe Valley, such meadows stretched lush and opulent, and hay was piled in mountainous stacks. These early settlers—Ferrell, R. B. Dickenson, C. F. Montandon, Eugene Gay, Frank Scott, Paul Rochat—were known as “bonanza hay farmers.” William Ferrell soon had a boat and a barge and was hauling huge boatloads of hay down to the horses at Fort Sherman. The meadows were also excellent for dairy farming and livestock raising; and, although the growing season was short, gardens and berry patches grew with tropical abandon and produced abundantly, for the soil was black and rich, and a heavy dew watered the ground each night.

One of the “bonanza hay farmers,” Paul Rochat, was the first Swiss settler in the valley. He was so charmed by this mountain valley which reminded him of his native Switzerland that he wrote letters to the old country which brought friends and relatives to join him until there was a colony of Swiss on ranches a few miles down the river from Ferrell’s. They have remained an honorable, thrifty group of farmers in the St. Joe Valley, and their little “Valley Chapel” still stands under the pines on the riverbank. Nearly every year, members of this colony make trips to Switzerland, where they tell old world relatives about the new land and then bring back to the St. Joe Valley news of the fatherland.

At first all these early settlers used rowboats and rafts to take out of the valley what few things they had to sell, such as hay, shakes, shingles, garden produce. They drifted down the river and across the lake to Coeur d’Alene, a distance of fifty to sixty miles. They rowed back the same distance with supplies—an almost inconceivably laborious trip, the whole journey taking about a week. After the O.-W.R. & N. branch was built into the Wallace-Kellogg mining region, the Chatcolet stop on this railroad was a nearer connection with the outside world. In the summertime rowboat loads of supplies were brought from Chatcolet. There was a half-beaten path along the river; hardy souls without boats walked in, packs on back.

In the fall the settlers stocked up on supplies and for five or six months were cut off from the outside world. In an emergency, if the ice were strong enough, they could skate to town. Mail was brought on skates up the river from Chatcolet. Fresh supplies were sometimes brought to Chatcolet by train or by the ice-breaker Kootenai, but to get them upriver by sleigh was a perilous trip.

William Truman, of St. Maries, told the story of getting word in the middle of the winter that a boatload of perishable goods was iced-in at Chatcolet. “Another fellow and I took a sleigh and started out after it. We crossed the river down at Butler’s Point—I went ahead and tested the ice, then we led the team across, and last we pushed the sleigh across by hand. When we reached the boat—guess what the perishable goods was! A boatload of beer!”

For the summer months, the transportation problem was solved when the first boats from Coeur d’Alene—the Amelia Wheaton, the Corwine, the Volunteer—began doing business on the St. Joe. Then as word of St. Joe’s beauty spread, the boats brought up her shady course not only settlers and their necessities but also loads of sight-seers, vacationists and sportsmen.

The St. Joe country abounded in fish, ducks, birds, deer, bear—all kinds of game. It became known as the finest trout stream in America, and anglers came from all over the country to fish in it. Unfortunately, commercial fishermen soon followed, scooping out trout by the ton. Spokane markets paid ten cents a pound for a catch laid down at head of navigation. Before long the fishermen took to dynamiting the river, picking up loads of fish to sell in Spokane or in the mining country. But they did not gather up all they killed and for miles the river was strewn with dead fish. At last the legislature passed a law forbidding commercial fishing in streams of the state. This kept the river from being depleted, and the St. Joe is today a fine fishing stream. In the nineties it was common for fishing parties to go up the river for a couple of days and return with buckets, jars, and pails of trout salted down. Once on the upper St. Joe a man fished for one hour at sunset and caught a string of trout weighing thirty-five pounds when dressed.

The mountains bordering the St. Joe were thick with huckleberry brush—big patches standing horse-high. The Indians came up the river each summer on huckleberrying trips. Indians, incidentally, rode the boats free (since the reservation stretched for miles along the river), and it was not unusual for one of the big steamboats, chugging up the St. Joe, to stop and lower its gangplank to let an Indian ride his cayuse up onto the boat deck.

During the summer the banks of the river were dotted with the houseboats and tents of vacationists. Many of these were “Palousers”—farmers from the Palouse country attracted to this green valley during the hot months while their own wheatlands were dry and dusty.

The St. Joe country was thick with deer, and deer were often sighted from the boats. The captains had a special game signal—a staccato of short blasts—which would send the graceful animals bounding away into the brush. Sometimes a deer found swimming in the river was shot and pulled aboard and venison meals served. Once, when the Corwine was coming down the river, a deer was sighted swimming just ahead of the boat. The only “shooting irons” on board were a jackknife, a monkey wrench, and a rope. Captain Nesbit lassoed the animal, pulled it to the side of the boat, where Fred Wilson “shot” it with the jackknife. They had bagged a large buck.

Boating was an informal affair in those days, and quite often on the way up the river a boat would make a detour into Lake Chatcolet, where the steward would drop a line overboard and catch enough fish to feed the crew the rest of the trip.

Fred Wilson told of an early trip up the St. Joe in a little canopy-topped, canvas-side-curtained “jalopy” of a boat called the Idaho. This boat left Coeur d’Alene one morning late in May with a barge lashed alongside.

Our load was a mixed one—food and supplies for the settlers and prospectors, thirteen cows, five horses, and a passenger list of fifteen. Everything went fine until we entered the St. Joe River. The river was high, overflowing its banks, and the water covered the flatlands from hill to hill. The trees on both river banks were the only guides as to where the channel was, and the current was so swift the boat could make but about three miles an hour. About six o’clock we tied up at a ranch just below St. Maries, where we had supper. After supper we pulled out and went up the river about three miles to Eugene Gay’s place, unloaded his supplies and some live stock, and tied up for the night. Early next morning we started up the river, stopped at settlers’ places. We finally tied up to a tree at Ferrell’s, put out the gangplank into about three feet of water and started to unload the cows and horses. About half the stock went down the gangplank, but the rest jumped off the barge into the shallow water and started swimming for the nearest hillside. The passengers were loaded into long canoes and ferried to the Ferrell porch. We then started back down the river.{13}

Such were the adventures of the early boatmen. And once at Ferrell the crew of the General Sherman picked ripe strawberries in June—in a swirling snowstorm!

Floods have been a destructive force in the St. Joe Valley during the entire history of the river. Floods caused the early mission on its banks to be abandoned. Floods caused Captain Mullan to reroute that part of his road which crossed the St. Joe Valley. Every few years floods chase from their homes the residents who have built their houses on the meadowlands.

The trouble arises from the fact that the Spokane River is too narrow to carry off the rush of water that pours into the lake in springtime. When the snow melts in the mountains, the lake rises, both the St. Joe and Coeur d’Alene rivers rise, and finally water backs over the riverbanks, inundating the meadows from hillside to hillside.

Regarding this annual flooding, Captain Mullan wrote: “One of the largest bodies of good land is in the valleys of the St. Joseph’s and Coeur d’Alene, and if these valleys are once drained, a body of forty thousand acres of the finest soil in the world will be reclaimed—soil six and eight feet deep and as black as a coal. This overflow can be prevented by widening the natural outlet, and making an artificial one along side of it....Rock blasting is the only m...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACROSS LAKE COEUR D’ALENE
• HIGHEST NAVIGABLE RIVER
• STEAMBOAT DAYS
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER