Francis Patrick Armstrong (circa 1859–1923) was a steamboat captain in the East Kootenay region of British Columbia.

Steam navigation in the Rocky Mountain Trench which runs through the East Kootenay region was closely linked to Armstrong's personality and career.

In addition to being a steamboat captain, Armstrong was also a prospector, white-water boat pilot and guide in the Big Bend country of the Columbia River.

He moved to Winnipeg in 1881, and then came west working with a Canadian Pacific Railway surveying crew in the Columbia Valley from Cranbrook to Golden.

[4]In 1882 Armstrong homesteaded 320 acres (1.3 km2) on the east side of Columbia Lake and planted potatoes, with the plan of selling them to the workers building the CPR downriver at Golden.

Once the engines arrived, and a boiler could be located, Armstrong assembled a steamboat from miscellaneous planks and timbers that were lying around at an old sawmill.

Armstrong hired the veteran shipbuilder Alexander Watson, of Victoria, BC to build the new steamer, which although small, was well-designed and looked like a steamboat.

[5][8] 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.

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

The Great Northern Railway at Jennings, Montana was the nearest downriver railhead for upper Kootenay shipping.

Armstrong moved south from the Columbia to the Kootenay, and built the small sternwheeler Gwendoline at Hansen's Landing, about 12 miles (19 km) north of the present community of Wasa.

[12] Later, Armstrong and Miller associated with Wardner, and, when their competitors, DePuy and Jones suffered the misfortune of having their new vessel Rustler (125 tons) sunk after just six weeks of operation, the three men were able to dominate the river traffic.

Jennings Canyon was described by Professor Lyman as "a strip of water, foaming-white, downhill almost as on a steep roof, hardly wider than steamboat".

When the new steamer North Star was launched a few weeks later, Armstrong was able to make up for some of the losses with 21 completed round trips on the Kootenay between Fort Steele and Jennings before low water forced him to tie up on September 3, 1897.

In 1899, Harold E. Forster (d.1940)[20] a wealthy mountain climber, businessman, politician and occasional steamboat captain, brought Selkirk by rail from Shuswap Lake to Golden, where he launched her but used her as a yacht and not, at least initially, as commercial vessel.

Armstrong's apprentice, John Blakely (1889–1963), the son of his former competitor, enlisted and went to Europe, where he became one of only six survivors when his ship was torpedoed in the English Channel.

[5] The construction of railroads and the economic dislocations caused by the war had doomed steamboats as a method of transportation on the upper Columbia.