Beaver (steamship)
1836 paddle steamer, first steamship in the North Pacific
Beaver was a steamship originally owned and operated by the Hudson's Bay Company. She was the first steamship to operate in the Pacific Northwest of North America, and made remote parts of the west coast of Canada accessible for maritime fur trading. At one point she was chartered by the Royal Navy for surveying the coastline of British Columbia. She served off the coast from 1836 until 1888, when she was wrecked.
Service
Beaver served trading posts maintained by the Hudson's Bay Company between the Columbia River and Russian America (Alaska) and played an important role in helping maintain British control in British Columbia during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858–59. In 1862 the Royal Navy chartered her to survey and chart the coast of the Colony of British Columbia. She also provided assistance to the Royal Navy at Bute Inlet during the Chilcotin War.
Loss
A consortium that became the British Columbia Towing and Transportation Company in 1874 purchased her, and used her as a towboat until 25 July 1888. On that day an inebriated crew ran her aground on rocks in Burrard Inlet at Prospect Point in Vancouver's Stanley Park. The wreck finally sank in July 1892 when the wake of the passing steamer Yosemite struck it, but only after enterprising locals had stripped much of the wreck for souvenirs.
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This entry incorporates text from “Beaver (steamship)” 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.