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Paddlewheelers of Western Canada and the USA
new book by John MacFarlane 2021
Nautical historian John MacFarlane shares a carefully curated and illustrated collection of more than 2,100 histories of the sternwheelers and sidewheelers that served in waters of the Pacific and Arctic watersheds of western North America. He has assembled detailed accounts in an easy–to–read, easy–to–access book that will please the casual reader as well as the most dedicated nautical historian.
These magnificent vessels are most often associated with the waters of the Mississippi River. But they were also an integral part of the development of the west, contributing to their own demise with the construction of railways and roads that made them obsolete. So quickly did they disappear that they have become largely forgotten. The romance associated with these vessels is a throwback to an era which is remembered with nostalgia. This encyclopedic work is both a reference and a glimpse into river and lake travel in the era of steam.
441 pages and 66 illustrations. Available through AMAZON.
To quote from this article please cite:
MacFarlane, John (2021) Paddlewheelers of Western Canada and the USA. Nauticapedia.ca 2021. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Book_Paddlewheelers.php
Site News: May 08, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,807 vessel histories (with 15,646 images and 13,442 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).
In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!
My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.