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They called him the "Father of Navigation in the Kootenays" and they called him "the biggest little man on the Columbia." The Indians called him "Chief Strongarm."
He was Captain Francis Patrick Armstrong. He has not lacked tributes for his exploits, either in his day or since. Oldtimers in the Columbia Valley still recount tales of his enterprise, enthusiasm and determination. He started the saga of paddlewheels on the Upper Columbia and he had a hand in every note-worthy enterprise of his day in the valley.
Pioneer Robert Randolph Bruce is credited with saying: "He bumped a lot of scenery along the Columbia but he always got through."
No doubt it helped to have the blood of St. Lawrence River men in his veins. Born at Sorel, Quebec, in 1861, a member of a prominent United Loyalist family, he came of three generations of harbour masters. His father was the Honourable James Armstrong CMG, Chief Justice of St. Lucia and Tobago. His grandfather, Captain Charles Logie Armstrong, a St. Lawrence River pilot in the War of 1812, had fitted out privateers to fight the Americans. His great-grandfather was a harbour board commissioner a hundred years before Frank's death.
The adventuresome blood of those ancestors raced in his veins, urging his indomitable spirit to achieve what he wanted, though occasionally the law took a somewhat dim view of some of his exploits. He was much admired, respected and oft times loved throughout the Kootenays.
When Frank Armstrong joined the engineering staff of the CPR in 1881 as a young man of twenty, he had no idea of the adventures that lay before him in the west.
In 1882 he was one of an exploring party of engineers under Major Rogers and, with the Hon. Fred Aylmer, was blazing a trail through the Kicking Horse Pass to the summit of the Rockies. They were surveying the route known as Rogers Pass for a railway through the mountains.
He arrived at La Cache (later Golden) little knowing how that settlement was to colour his future. When he brought a string of horses to pasture in the Columbia Valley, he was so impressed with the area that on July 9, 1882, he preempted 320 acres of land on...