One of these so well illustrates those old-time conditions that we repeat here its chief points. Captain Armstrong owned two steamers, the _Ruth_ and the _Gwendoline_. Both were engaged in transporting freight by way of Jennings to Fort Steele and the various mining camps in that district. The business was enormously profitable, for the boats received two and one half cents a pound. At that particular time there were twenty-six cars on the Great Northern Railway awaiting shipments. From his two steamers Captain Armstrong sometimes made two thousand dollars a day in gross receipts. But though profitable, the business was also correspondingly risky. The Jennings Canyon, above Bonner's Ferry, is, perhaps, the worst piece of water that has ever been navigated on the Columbia or its tributaries. A strip of water, foaming-white, down-hill almost as on a steep roof, hardly wider than the steamboat, savage-looking rocks waiting to catch hold of any unwary craft that might venture through,--so forbidding in fact was that route that Captain Armstrong found no insurance agent that felt disposed to insure his boats and cargo. At last he induced a San Francisco agent to make the trip with him and to offer a rate. After sitting in silence on the deck while the steamer whirled down the Jennings Canyon, the agent stated that his rate would be twenty-five per cent. of the cargo. The daring captain decided to take the risk himself. He had made a number of trips with entire success and immense profit. But just at the height of the season, when the twenty-six cars were on the track and a sack full of gold was waiting for him, the captain got into too much of a hurry. He was running the _Gwendoline_; one of his best pilots, the _Ruth_. The _Ruth_ was ahead. Both were making their best possible time down the canyon to get a cargo. Captain Armstrong, at the wheel of the _Gwendoline_, was whizzing down the canyon at a rate which made stopping impossible, when to his dismay he saw the _Ruth_ right ahead of him in a narrow turn, lying across the channel, wedged in the rocks. To stop was impossible. To select any comfortable landing-place was equally so. The _Gwendoline_ piled right on top of the _Ruth_. Both were total wrecks, without a dollar of insurance. A two-thousand-dollar cargo gone in five minutes, to say nothing of boats and business that could not be replaced and a fortune within grasp that would never be so near again. [Illustration: Lake Windermere, Upper Columbia, where David Thompson's Fort was Built in 1810. Photo. by W. D. Lyman.] But such were the risks of steamboating on the Kootenai.