Nechacco
sternwheeler
The Nechacco sternwheeler was built for service on the Soda Creek to Fort George route on the upper Fraser River in British Columbia. She was owned by the Fort George Lumber and Navigation Company. The partners in this company were Nick Clark and Russel Peden of South Fort George, who operated a sawmill there. Nick Clark also owned the lots in that townsite and was offering them up for sale. The new steamer was intended to bring prospective property buyers to Fort George and to furnish them with supplies.
1909
The Nechacco was built by Donald McPhee and was launched in Quesnel on May 25, 1909. In her first year of service she was piloted by Captain John Bonser, an experienced swift-water pilot from the Skeena and Yukon Rivers. Under his direction, the Nechacco completed several difficult and history making trips. She was the first sternwheeler to reach Fort George from Quesnel, arriving on May 30, barely nudging the Charlotte out of the honor, and the first to ever navigate through the fearsome Grand Canyon of the Fraser, 104 miles upriver from Fort George. She was also the only sternwheeler to follow in the footsteps of the pioneer ship Enterprise and make the trip to Takla Landing on Takla Lake, as well as the first steamer to take the Nechako River all the way to Stoney Creek.
“Nechacco” enters the record as sternwheeler. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nechacco and sternwheeler can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6985436. Authority coordinates are 53.132, -122.669. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1909.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nechacco” 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.