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Paddlewheelers of Western Canada and the USA

new book by John MacFarlane 2021

Book Cover

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

Nauticapedia

Site News: December 21, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,824 vessel histories (with 16,274 images and 13,929 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 45,000 processed so far this year (2024).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3996 images).

Thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of vessel histories in the database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he has contributed to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

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