21.9 miles west of Kamloops
Smooth rivers and great lakes once were the highways of travel. On them plied stately paddlewheelers, helping exploration and settlement of the Interior. They speeded gold-seekers bound for the 'Big Bend' rush of 1864-65. They freighted grain from the Okanagan. They were vital in building the CPR – and doomed by the railway they helped to build.
The Marten, a Hudson's Bay Co. steamer, was launched on Kamloops Lake in 1866 to transport miners to Tranquille Creek, and marked the start of the great "Steamboat Saga" that was to flourish for the next 70 years.
In 1874 the Marten was purchased by J. A. Mara, a prominent Kamloops merchant, as part of a fleet he ran on the Thompson River system. Two years after the wreck of his first boat, Mara had the Spallumcheen built. A rival, the Lady Dufferin, appeared in the same year and in 1881 the Peerless was launched. This latter vessel, owned by Mara and said to have been the finest brought into service, outlived its rivals, but was destroyed by fire in 1907.
Following the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway the steamboat traffic on these waters declined and Mara switched his attention to the Columbia. The C.R. Lamb was the last of the steamers and was used to haul wood from Shuswap Lake to Kamloops in the 1930s.
