SASKATCHEWAN - "Junk" May Be From 1908 Ship

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                                                   'Junk' may be from 1908 ship







Darren Bernhardt,
Saskatchewan News Network;
Canwest News Service
September 13, 2008

To the uninitiated, the items look like rusted junk found in a scrap yard or at the bottom of a river.

The tangled and encrusted objects on display in a Saskatoon board room Friday were in fact pulled from the South Saskatchewan's sandy riverbed, but they may be much more than clutter. They may be a century-old link to this city's greatest marine disaster.

The SS City of Medicine Hat sank on June 7, 1908, when it struck the newly-built Traffic Bridge and capsized. The 40-metre long, flat-bottomed sternwheeler had been destined for Winnipeg after having departed from its namesake city in late May.

Several steamships that previously plied those waterways also encountered difficulties, mostly becoming marooned on shifting sandbars. It was the Medicine Hat's fateful voyage, however, that put an exclamation point on the end of the steamship era in Saskatoon.

Labelled by the local press of the time as "The Greatest Marine Disaster in the History of Saskatoon," the incident eventually drifted into history. It resurfaced in August 2006 when members of the Saskatoon Fire and Protective Services (SFPS) dive team found a five-foot, 150-pound cast-iron anchor about 300 metres north of the Traffic Bridge.

The restored anchor, believed to be from the Medicine Hat, is now on display along the riverbank path under the Traffic Bridge.

The excitement over the find fuelled last week's excursion by an archeologist, Meewasin Valley Authority (MVA), and the SFPS to search for more artifacts.

From Sept. 8 to Sept. 12, the team scoured the river bottom with metal detectors. About 30 pieces in all were retrieved but it's too early to say whether any belong to the craft captained by Horatio Ross, a wealthy, eccentric man who abandoned the vessel, unconcerned with its salvage.

There are a pair of valve springs, links of chain, a section of pipe, a gasket, a chunk of brick from the firebox of a boiler, a padlock, and an ornate, blue enamel heating grate.

Ross was a wealthy man who went all out in building his cruise ship with 50 luxury berths and decorated the vessel in oak and brass, according to Butch Amundson, a senior archeologist with Stantec Consulting Ltd. who performed some recovery dives.

While research must be done to determine the origin of the items, there are plenty of signs pointing to the Medicine Hat. In addition to the elaborate design of some objects, the mechanical ones are far too big for any steam-powered engines of recent age.

As well, everything was found along a line between the bridge and the location of the anchor, said Amundson.

"That was the probable debris trail of the breakup of the ship," he said.

It also takes generations for fresh water to encrust metal the way these objects have been, which gives a clue to their age, Amundson noted.

"This is the item I'm most excited about," he said, gesturing to a long bar known as a marlinspike, a nautical tool for splicing rope and untying knots.

The items will be cleaned and examined by the curator for the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. Should any be worthy of public display, the MVA may well put them out, said CEO Susan Lamb.

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If Amundson has his way, he will be back in the water in the coming years to sift the sand for more treasures. Many times the metal detectors found something that could not be recovered, he said.

"If you were to take all of the water out of the river, it would look like the Sahara Desert, but instead of sand dunes, we have sand waves," Amundson said, describing some as 100 metres long and two metres thick.

Disturbing the sand too much creates a thick murk.


We have to wait for the sand waves to move and then we can access the thin part (of the riverbed cover)," he said. "The anchor may never have been found if those divers had gone down a week earlier."




© The Leader-Post (Regina) 2008

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The City of Medicine Hat, the last sternwheeler to ply
the Saskatchewan River at Saskatoon, capsized
June 7, 1908

(Courtesy of Saskatoon Public Library -
Local History Room
[LH 39])








The Temperance Colonization society (TCS) had hoped to use river steamers to connect the settlement with the outside world. It seemed to be a reasonable plan. In the heyday of river transport in the North-West, from the 1870s to the 1890s, the Hudson’s Bay Company alone had five steamboats in the Saskatchewan country, mostly plying the North Saskatchewan up as far as Edmonton. In July 1883 the S. S. Lily came up the river and Captain John B. Davis commented that the "whole population of 75 inhabitants came out to welcome the arrival of the first boat," and "the price of town lots advanced immediately."

The river proved to be too shallow for commercial navigation. In May 1884 captain E.S. Andrews brought the TCS launch May Queen downriver with great difficulty, carrying a few settlers and towing a raft of scarce lumber. She was beached at Saskatoon and never moved again. During the 1885 North West Rebellion, General Middleton, commander of the Canadian expeditionary force, used river steamers to transport militia men and wounded to the field hospital in Saskatoon. Louis Riel, leader of the Rebellion, was taken by steamer to Saskatoon on his way to stand trial in Regina. The last large sternwheeler to ply the South Saskatchewan, The S. S. City of Medicine Hat, crashed in to a pier of the Traffic Bridge and capsized in June of 1908.

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                                       Captain Horatio Hamilton Ross - Laird of the River






by R. J. Taylor

Manitoba Pageant,
January 1958,
Volume 3,
Number 2

Northern Manitoba's history is studded with the names of Scots who travelled from Hudson Bay on exploration trips to the prairies or built the fur trade for the Hudson's Bay Company, but none was more colorful nor represented such rollicking adventures as that of Captain Horatio Hamilton Ross.

He was the son of Sir Charles and Lady Ross of Rossie Castle, Scotland, and he lived as he dreamed living should be, lavishly and happily, on northern Manitoba's rivers with his fleet of stern-wheelers, tugs and barges.

His steamers were immaculate as they moved between forested banks to carry prospectors, trappers, traders and natives into isolation and hack. So was he, in white flannels, and as eager as a boy for each new sight from his bridge.

Even before 1909 when he became the founder of the Ross Navigation Company with headquarters at The Pas and mildly stepped into the affections of northerners, he had packed a lifetime of adventure into his forty years.

When little more than a boy he left his home to voyage "round the Horn" and landed at San Francisco. Then he trekked overland in a covered wagon into Alberta and built a palatial home in the Canadian Rockies which he referred to casually as the "lodge". He deserted it to become a cowpuncher on Mosquito Creek, later operated a ranch at nearby High River, staked placer prospectors along the South Saskatchewan River and then built a thirty thousand dollar hotel in the cow-town of Medicine Hat.

He was host to everyone and lived abundantly; he still craved the sea, but compromised with the waters of the Saskatchewan River. He constructed a seventy foot stern-wheeler, the S. S. Assiniboia, in 1905 and introduced excursions on the prairie waterways. The venture was a social triumph, although not an economic one.

Captain Ross and a party of friends decided one day to travel to Winnipeg. At Cedar Lake, down the Saskatchewan toward Lake Winnipeg, his craft grounded on a sandbar. Winter was coming. Captain Ross gave the neighbouring Indians food from the galley, blankets from the beds and appointed two of them as watchmen.

The party bought and chartered dog teams to reach the railway where Captain Ross bought a ticket for Cairo and spent the winter in Egypt. He returned in the spring to find floodwaters had carried away the Assiniboia. His two watchmen still stood guard over the sunken boilers. He was touched by their loyalty and paid them well.

Then he returned to Medicine Hat to sell his hotel and build the S.S. City of Medicine Hat, a packet one hundred and thirty feet long. It was launched ceremoniously with the Captain in white flannels as a jovial host.

Once again, in June 1908, the Captain decided to take a party of friends to Lake Winnipeg. The palatial stern-wheeler ran afoul of the piers of the traffic bridge in Saskatoon and the City of Medicine Hat rolled over - wrecked.

Captain Ross went to Ottawa to claim damages and there met states-men, wanderers from the Laurentians, and explorers. Just as suddenly as he had arrived in Canada's capital, he left - this time as fisheries inspector for the north.

He needed a new boat and had a tug built, on yachting lines, at Collingwood, Ontario, and named it the S.S. Sam Brisbin after a boat's engineer. He sailed for the Lakehead and shipped the Brisbin to Selkirk, Manitoba, negotiated Lake Winnipeg, then had the eighteen ton boat dragged over a four-mile portage at Grand Rapids at the mouth of the Saskatchewan River.

It was when he arrived in The Pas that he began the Ross Navigation Company Limited - truly a company of rovers and of good fellowship. It is probable that it also was unprofitable, but a new era of development was already introduced.

Mandy Mine, near the fabulous Flin Flon of today, was discovered, and boats were needed to bring the ore to the railway. The Ross Navigation Company stepped into the breach with "Cap" Ross, in his mild manner, ordering a whole fleet of river craft.

First the S.S. LePas was built in eastern Canada; then came the S.S. Minassin, the S.S. Notin; the S.S. O Hell; the S.S. Tobin, and the S.S. Nipawin. The Nipawin was flagship of the fleet, one hundred and ten feet long with twenty passenger cabins and deck space for a hundred.

Typical of the outlook of Horatio Hamilton Ross was the explanation for the naming of the O Hell. A craft was due to leave The Pas for prospecting camps when the Captain came along with a group of friends to whom he had promised an excursion trip. When he was advised that the schedule had been advertised and the regular passengers were on board, Captain Ross snorted, "O Hell, I'll get another boat." He knew of one down the Saskatchewan, and bought it on the spot, ran up the blue and white ensign of his company, and ordered it so named.

Whimsy seized him again when on a business trip to Saskatoon. He glanced at an advertisement for an excursion trip to the British Isles for the Christmas holidays - bought a ticket - missed the first train section, but caught the second made up of steerage passengers and enjoyed a hilarious trip to the coast. There he missed the boat but negotiated passage with the master of a tramp steamer. He landed in England too late for Yuletide celebrations, and later returned to Canada in the royal suite of the Mauretania.

During World War I he undertook special duties for the British Government. Later he visited China to investigate the possibilities of establishing a stern-wheeler fleet on the Yangtse River.

Yes, Horatio Hamilton Ross lived as he dreamed, actively and imaginatively; he foresaw opportunity, initiated action, then gave the cream of each venture to his friends while he launched yet another enterprise.

His impulsiveness would never be understood by stay-at-homes, and his extravagances would have prostrated economists, but his was the spirit of the Old West and the New North.

Tragically he died on February 11, 1925 at the age of fifty-five. He was cleaning a rifle in his office on the banks of the Pasquia River at The Pas when it discharged into his body.

His place in history is marked in historic Christ Church at The Pas with a stained glass window. It also marks his place in the hearts of northerners for it was placed there by public subscriptions, none of which could be more than five dollars, yet the memorial window was almost instantly oversubscribed.

The theme of this window is the "Light of the World" and is flanked by two smaller panels, a font and a chalice. Below is inscribed:




"To the Memory of

Captain Horatio Hamilton Ross

of Rossie Castle, Scotland.

Who Died in The Pas, February 11, 1925.

A Tribute from His Many Friends."




The Indian friends of Captain Ross also had their tribute, a grave high on the hill of their cemetery which looks over the Big Eddy in the Saskatchewan River.



http://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/pageant/03/captainross.shtml