272 Sport and Life. 



sawmill boiler, which alone weighed over 5ooolb. A short time 

 before an Indian rising had occurred in the Upper Kootenay 

 valley, caused by natives having murdered two prospectors near 

 Canal Flat. When the Upper Kootenay settlers arrested the 

 culprits, the latter's kinsmen, with cocked Winchesters released 

 them by force. This had caused the Government to send a 

 small detachment of some fifty or sixty mounted police into 

 Kootenay. Instead of sending them over the Crow's Nest Pass, 

 where a trail had been cut, they were sent in -via Golden, and this 

 unprecedented influx of travel had, of course, caused a boom in 

 all means of transportation from Golden up the river. 



A scatterbrained young Canadian had been bitten with the 

 idea of starting a rival steamer, and he invested a few hundred 

 dollars in buying up a square-ended barge that had been used 

 in the railway construction to drive piles. She was made of 

 four-inch planks, and was of the unwieldiest shape, i.e., about as- 

 broad as she was long. Somewhere else he had picked up cheap 

 an old upright boiler that had once formed part of a Manitoba 

 steam plough, and in another place he had obtained at "old iron" 

 prices the discarded machinery of a small river tug. These three 

 component parts of a steamer were awaiting the advent of a 

 deus ex machina, who could put them together, and make a steamer 

 of them. This the skilled mechanic I had, fortunately, brought out 

 from Ontario to superintend the erection of the sawmill proved 

 to be, and by using a few parts of my sawmill machinery, a 

 unique " steamship " was patched together. 



Nothing quite so odd as this pile-driver steam plough-sawmill 

 combination steamer has, I am very sure, ever navigated water, 

 and as we took twenty-three days to cover the hundred miles, our 

 rate of progression can be easily calculated, every minute of day- 

 light being, of course, made use of. Her little boiler, that had once 

 careered about Manitoba wheatfields, had a fire-box constructed to 

 take coal, but as this article was unobtainable, we had to cut up 

 sticks of wood to about the size of grown-up toothpicks and soak 

 them in coal oil or the fire simply refused to generate steam. The 



