Baillie-Grohman Canal

The Baillie-Grohman Canal was a shipping canal between the headwaters of the Columbia River and the upper Kootenay River in the East Kootenay region of British Columbia at a place now known as Canal Flats, BC. The construction of the canal was required by the provincial government of British Columbia as a condition of the canal's promoter receiving substantial land concessions from the provincial government of British Columbia in the area of Creston, BC. The promoter, William Adolf Baillie-Grohman (1851–1921), was a wealthy adventurer, hunter author, and business promoter. He declared the canal to be complete in 1889. The canal was an expensive failure, being used only three times during its entire existence. In 1902, on the last use by a vessel, the sternwheeler North Star, the sternwheeler's captain, Frank P. Armstrong deliberately blew out the canal's lower lock gates with dynamite to allow the transit of his vessel.

The Baillie-Grohman Canal was suggested by the unusual geographic setting of the sources of the Columbia and the Kootenay Rivers. The Columbia River begins at Columbia Lake, flows north in the Rocky Mountain Trench through the Columbia Valley to Windermere Lake to Golden, BC. The Kootenay River flows south from the Rocky Mountains, then west into the Rocky Mountain Trench, coming within just over a mile from Columbia Lake, at a point called Canal Flats, where a shipping canal was built in 1889. The Kootenay then flows south down the Rocky Mountain Trench, crosses the international border and then turns north back into Canada and into Kootenay Lake near the town of Creston, BC.

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