J. D. Farrell
19th-century passenger steamship travelling the Kootenay River
J. D. Farrell was a sternwheel steamer that operated on the Kootenay River in western Montana and southeastern British Columbia from 1898 to 1902.
Design and construction
J. D. Farrell was designed and built by Captain M. L. McCormack, who had captained steamboats on the Mississippi, St. Croix and Red rivers. He formed the Kootenay River Navigation Company to build and operate the vessel, which he named after J. D. Farrell, a wealthy mining investor from Spokane, Washington. Farrell was equipped with electric lights and bathrooms, then considered innovations in river transport in the region. In contrast to some of the other vessels built in the region, she was competently designed and constructed by skilled shipbuilders brought out from Stillwater, Minnesota.
Operations
J. D. Farrell was launched in November 1897 at Jennings, Montana. At that time the only competitor on this route was the Upper Columbia Navigation & Tramway Company, under Captain Frank P. Armstrong. The construction of Farrell prompted Armstrong to hire veteran shipwright Louis Pacquet from Portland, Oregon to build a comparable vessel, the sternwheeler North Star.
Captain M. L. McCormack commanded Farrell on the vessel's first trip up the Kootenay River to Fort Steele in British Columbia.
“J. D. Farrell” enters the record as 19th-century passenger steamship travelling the Kootenay River. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Farrell, 19th-century and passenger can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11705968. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1898, 1902 and 1897.
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This entry incorporates text from “J. D. Farrell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.