This richly illustrated volume by acclaimed historian Robert D. Turner recounts the long journey of the sternwheeled steamer Moyie, which forged vital social and economic links in the Kootenay Lake region between its 1898 launch and its 1957 retirement as the last working vessel of its kind in Canada. The story continues as a small community carefully restores the Moyie back to its heyday of the early 1900s. A national treasure known as "the Sweetheart of Kootenay Lake," the former Canadian Pacific steamer S.S. Moyie is the oldest intact vessel of its kind in the world. From the mid-1800s onward, hundreds of similar sternwheeled steamers plied the waterways of western North America, travelling nearly every lake and river system. Needing little more than a willing crew and a foot of water beneath the hull, these intrepid craft were often the only reliable means of transportation into remote areas in the years before highway and air travel.

As renowned historian Robert D. Turner details in this fully illustrated volume, the passenger-carrying Moyie played just such a role in the Kootenay Lake communities it served for almost sixty years, establishing links between residents and their livelihoods, education, and medical care. Turner draws on decades of research, including interviews with travellers, officers, crew members, and shipyard workers whose memories stretch back more than a century, to tell the Moyie's captivating story, from its 1898 launch to its 1957 retirement as the last of its kind still operating in the country--and from there to the ongoing efforts of the small community of Kaslo to preserve and restore the vessel as a many times award-winning National Historic Site of Canada. The Steamer S.S. Moyie is not only an account of a remarkable historic vessel, but also a striking depiction of a pivotal time in Western Canadian history, and a compelling story of a community's multi-generational and heartfelt commitment to this exceptional heritage showpiece.