WHEN THE S.S. MOYIE WAS A BARELY maintained hulk in the early 1970s, I spent a few hours prowling about her innards. She was marooned on the beach at Kaslo, having served Kootenay travellers for 59 years. Two or three times that afternoon I watched as men reached out and touched a piece of the ship's woodwork or machinery. It occurred to me this was the sort of behaviour you normally see in cathedrals or art galleries. Now Bob Turner has captured some of that reverence in The S.S. Moyie: Memories of the Oldest Sternwheeler (Sono Nis $11.95), a tribute to the oldest intact vessel of her type in the world. For nearly 60 years the mountains of the West Kootenay region echoed to the deep, resonant whistle of a steamboat called the Moyie," Turner begins. So much of daily life in the Kootenay Lake region focused, in one way or another, on the Moyie." Even if this book did not include dozens of exceptional photographs (and no one will start reading before looking at the photos), we could easily sense that Turner is inclined to provide a close-up view of the Moyie's time and place in our history. Included are diagrams of the ship, sketches of her ornamental woodwork, memorabilia and chapters on Kootenay steamships, captains and crews (including Columbia River captain James W. Troup) and the construction of the Moyie in Nelson and Nakusp in 1898. The Moyie was built in B.C. for $41,285 and was named for the B.C. mining community on the Crowsnest Pass railway. When she was finally retired in 1957, she was the last passenger-carrying sternwheeler running in Canada and the western U.S. Romantics will be delighted to learn the Moyie's story has a happy ending. She's now a National Historic Site, operating as a 'Museum on the Beach' at Kaslo. "She carried generations of settlers, travellers, miners, tourist and excursion crowds," writes Turner, project historian for the Moyie since 1988, "Immigrants seeking new homes, internees tom from theirs and dispatched to unknown parts, soldiers going off to war, vice-regal visitors on tour and Kootenay residents of all ages going to the big city all crowded her decks and lounges." A Moyie visitors centre, based on the design of Kaslo's CPR station, opened for its first season in 1991. Turner's commemorative book is a project of the Kootenay Lake Historical Society. 1-55O39-013-9
--by Charles Lillard

[BCBW 1991] "History";