Baillie-Grohman Canal

[1][2] Rail construction in Canada and the United States made steam navigation possible in the Rocky Mountain Trench.

At Golden, the transcontinental line of the Canadian Pacific Railway ("CPR"), which parallels the Columbia south from the bridge at Donald, turns east to follow the Kicking Horse River,[3] surmounting the Continental Divide at Kicking Horse Pass, then running past the resort at Banff then east to Calgary.

However, Baillie-Grohman was able to obtain ownership of large areas of land in the Kootenay region, provided he engaged in certain forms of economic development, including construction of a shipping canal and a lock.

Baillie-Grohman also had hired a complement of workers, including a skilled millwright, to build the sawmill and supervise construction of the canal.

But when the time came to transport the supplies and the people by water to Canal Flats, Duchess, then the only steamer available, was then sunk in the deepest part of the river up to her smokestack.

River transport was the only way Baillie-Grohman could move the heavy sawmill and construction equipment the 124 miles to Canal Flats.

These included an unpowered heavy-duty railroad construction barge, a vertical boiler from a Manitoba steam plow, and machinery salvaged from an old tugboat.

With the aid of another worker he did so, and thus became, as he later realized, the man who made the entire Selkirk and Purcell mountain range into an island.

Baillie-Grohman had raised funds for the venture in England, and was reputed to have sunk a major part of his own considerable personal wealth into the financing syndicate.

In 1893, Armstrong built Gwendoline at Hansen's Landing on the Kootenay River, and took the vessel through the canal north to the shipyard at Golden to complete her fitting out.

[14] In late May 1894 Armstrong returned the completed Gwendoline back to the Kootenay River, this time transiting normally the rehabilitated canal.

[1][12][15][16] From 1892 to 1898, steamboats transported ore from the mines in the southern part of the Rocky Mountain Trench down the Kootenay River to Jennings Montana.

Armstrong solved this problem by ripping out the lock gates, building cofferdams out of ore sacks filed with sand, then blowing out the lower coffer dam with dynamite.