[3] In 1862, news of the gold strikes in the Cariboo Gold Rush brought 4,000 miners to the area and William Irving sold his boats to John Wright and had another sternwheeler built, the Reliance and later the Onward which were kept busy shipping miners and supplies to Yale where they could travel on the nearly completed Cariboo Wagon Road to the goldfields at Barkerville.

[4] In 1873, John Irving took command of the Onward and ordered a new sternwheeler, the Glenora which was launched in 1874 and taken up to the Stikine River to provide freight and passenger service for the miners during the Cassiar Gold Rush.

The two sternwheelers both worked on the Stikine until that June when the owner's agreed to share in the profits of Parson's Hope and Irving brought the Glenora back to the Fraser River.

In 1874, John Irving purchased the Royal City from Captain Parson, who would perish the following year with his wife and daughter during the sinking of the SS Pacific.

Moore ran the Gertrude against Irving's Royal City for a few weeks, creating a rate war that lowered fares to $1 between New Westminster and Yale.

[5] In 1876, John had another sternwheeler built, the Reliance, which he first intended to run on the Stikine, but after consultation with Moore, the two captains decided it was more profitable for them to stick to their respective rivers.

To compete with Moore's Western Slope, Irving built a new sternwheeler, the $80,000 Elizabeth J Irving which on its second trip to Yale, raced Moore's Western Slope and, midway through the race, caught on fire near Hope and was soon reduced to a charred wreck, resulting in the deaths of four First Nations crewmen, two horses and two cows.

The loss would be a tremendous financial blow to John Irving who had just allowed the vessel's insurance to expire a week earlier.

[5] In 1883 John, then 29, was made the general manager of the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company and the future looked bright, but the completion of the railway replaced Yale with Ashcroft as the gateway to the Cariboo and points further north and sternwheelers were demoted to working for local trade.

After becoming general manager, John Irving arranged for the company to purchase the sidewheel steamboat Yosemite which had been lying idle in Oakland, California from 1879 to 1883.