Stand at the water at Black Bay on a quiet morning and you are looking at the end of a lake and the beginning of a river. Lake Coeur d'Alene gathers itself a few miles east of here and pours out through the Spokane River, past Black Bay and the falls at Post Falls. In 1880, that water highway just upstream received its first steamboat, and the man who built her left his mark not only on the lake but on the map itself, in the names of the bays that boaters still use today.
Peter C. Sorenson was born in 1833 in Kragero, Norway, where he learned boatbuilding. He immigrated to the United States in 1864 with his brother Lars, worked in Michigan building boats for the Great Lakes, and then built boats on the Columbia River near Portland. In November 1879, the quartermaster of the newly opened Fort Coeur d'Alene sent word to Fort Vancouver that the Army needed a competent boat builder. Sorenson arrived in the spring of 1880 and, using tools at the fort and a planer he had brought from Norway, built the 85-foot sternwheeler Amelia Wheaton, named after a daughter of the fort commander. When the boat was launched, the commander commissioned Sorenson as her captain.
The government formally purchased the Amelia Wheaton on August 24, 1880, for 8,000 dollars. Her early work was plain and necessary. She carried feed for the cavalry mules at Fort Sherman, hay from the old mission country, and grain from Farmington, and by July 1881 she was making monthly trips to the Old Mission on the St. Joe River. As Captain Sorenson ran her around the lake and its rivers, he began to map Lake Coeur d'Alene and gave names to many of its bays and prominent landmarks. Many of those names are still in use today, so the steamboat captain was writing the first draft of the shoreline geography that Black Bay residents still navigate by.
The boat's life soon widened beyond Army supply runs. After news of a gold strike on Prichard Creek reached Spokane in August 1883, the government allowed miners to ride the Amelia Wheaton from Coeur d'Alene City to the head of navigation on the Coeur d'Alene River, at the Old Mission in low water and Kingston in high water, before they struck out overland on the Jackass Trail. The Army sold the boat to private owners in 1888, and she finished her career in excursion and freight service, including Sunday trips in the summer of 1892 to Beauty Bay and to Echo and Mica Bays for a fare of fifty cents. In the spring of 1893 her engines were removed and placed in a new sternwheeler, the St. Joe, and her hull was converted to a barge.
Sorenson himself kept building. The Museum of North Idaho counts the names of 17 steamers that he built alone or with another builder, and he launched his last, the North Star, in 1907 at the age of 74. He died on January 16, 1918, and is buried in Forest Cemetery in Coeur d'Alene. The era he started lasted about fifty years, from the 1880s into the 1930s, with its peak from 1908 to 1913, when more steamboats worked Lake Coeur d'Alene than any other lake west of the Great Lakes, before railroad competition made the boats unprofitable. The steamers are gone, but every time a boater reads a bay name off a chart between the lake and Black Bay, a piece of his work is still on the water.
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