Heyburn Park cruise celebrates steamboats

Steamboats were once so popular in North Idaho that people around the region knew not only the names of the vessels and their routes, but tales of their captains.

The boats traveled around the chain lakes from Lake Coeur d’Alene, chugged down rivers and stopped along the way to drop off Spokane tourists seeking weekend getaways.

More than 70 years after the last of the fleet was sent to its watery grave, tourists at Heyburn State Park have the opportunity to learn about steamboats’ history Saturday evening during a two-hour cruise from Chatcolet Lake up the St. Joe River.

Heyburn State Park has the only state-owned cruise boat in Idaho. Yvonne Cornell, the park’s marina manager, said it has been fun the past four years floating people around the chain lakes of North Idaho to share the history of the lakes.

A park flier for this Saturday’s cruise tells of a trip on “the original ‘Idaho Steamboat’ that cruised up the beautiful St. Joe River from St. Maries, Idaho, up to Chatcolet Lake.” People around the park this week spoke of taking a ride on an old-time boat and taking photos.

Problem is, there are no steamboats in the area and haven’t been since about the 1930s, said Robert Singletary, president of Coeur d’Alene’s North Idaho Museum.

Misleading as the flier may be, there will be a water trip on the Idaho, a boat Cornell had the state purchase from the Coeur d’Alene Resort in 2002.

Singletary will be on hand during the cruise to transport people back to the days when steamboats were so popular that 20,000 to 30,000 people would flock to the area for day trips.

Cornell said Heyburn has had cruises on Chatcolet Lake since test trips in 2001, and themed cruises like the one to learn more about North Idaho steamboat history have been fairly popular.

“They don’t have to fight the waves. We do it for them,” she said.

Just like the old steamers of the past.

It’s all thanks to one man, Capt. Peter Sorensen, whose name now is associated with a Coeur d’Alene elementary school. The captain was commissioned by the military to build the first steamboat on Lake Coeur d’Alene, Singletary said.

In 1880, Sorensen finished the boat, naming it after the daughter of the commandant of Fort Coeur d’Alene, later Fort Sherman and now the site of North Idaho College.

“This was right after the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana,” Singletary said. “So there was somewhat of a fear that there would be an uprising.”

Steamboats were a way for troops to travel to other areas of the lake for immediate response, he said. They also became important to the mining of the Silver Valley.

“It was one of the first big industries in Coeur d’Alene,” Singletary said. “There were about a half-dozen steamboats here by 1890.”

At the turn of the century, the timber industry began to boom, making the ships even more integral to the operation of lake business. Tourism also began to flourish, Singletary said, and steam-powered cruise boats became the popular vehicle of the day.

The boats became so beloved, he said, that people far and wide knew the names of each ship, such as the immensely popular Flyer. People would take an electric train from Spokane and end up at the Coeur d’Alene docks.

The timber industry and cruise boats made the area so popular that within the first five to six years of the 1900s, the population of Coeur d’Alene ballooned from 500 to more than 8,000.

But popularity began to wane in the 1920s, Singletary said.

“What brought it to a close was the same thing that brought railroads to a close: the automobile,” he said.

In the late 1930s, the last steamboat, the Flyer, was burned and sunk at the steamboat graveyard, about where the Coeur d’Alene Resort Golf Course now sits on the lake.

It was the end of an era.

Heyburn State Park cruises are an attempt to fill the void on the south end of the lake, Cornell said. She brought the idea to her bosses because she didn’t believe people had enough access to trips on the water.

“There’s a lot of people that would say, ‘You know, I wish I had a boat,’ ” she said. “I was one of those people.”