On a Sunday morning at the dock in Newport, the loudest sound in town was a steamboat whistle. The Pend Oreille County Historical Society remembers excursion days when the steamer Ione made ready for the 55-mile run up the Pend Oreille River to the town of Ione, her decks filling with visitors from Spokane who had just stepped off the Great Northern train. Their five-dollar fare covered both the train ride and the cruise, and it bought them a day of virgin forest, sparkling creeks, waterfalls, and wild animals along a river that still felt like wilderness.
The Ione herself had arrived in pieces. The Willamette Iron Works of Portland, Oregon, built her in 1908, and she was then taken apart and shipped to Newport, where boat-building crews of the Pend Oreille River Navigation Company spent two months putting her back together, erecting her upper works and installing her machinery. The finished stern-wheeler measured more than 130 feet long, burned coal in her two big engines, and carried a complete electrical system. She was licensed to carry several hundred passengers, along with mail and freight, and she had cost 50,000 dollars to build.
She earned her nickname, the Floating Palace, honestly. The historical society describes passenger and sightseeing decks, staterooms, a carpeted ladies parlor, and a gentlemen's smoking area. Her spacious dining room and full kitchen could feed several hundred people at a sitting, serving T-bone steak, mutton, pork chops, veal cutlets, and trout, followed by fresh strawberry or huckleberry shortcake and ice cream, with meals priced from fifty to seventy-five cents. The Newport City Band provided music on board, and as passengers stepped ashore at the end of the day, the purser handed each of them a tourist folder of Pend Oreille Valley views and invited them to return with friends.
For all her elegance, the Ione was also a workboat with an ironic assignment. Steamboats had run the Pend Oreille River since early 1897, and almost a dozen large boats carried the passengers and freight of a region that had few good roads. The Ione was built in part to transport several thousand workers and loads of freight for the construction of the Idaho and Washington Northern Railroad, the line promoted by Frederick Blackwell that was then pushing north from Newport along the river toward Metaline Falls, a line completed in 1911. Every crew and every load she delivered brought the railroad closer, and the railroad, once finished, took the very traffic the steamboats lived on.
The historical society dates the end of the river's steamboat era to the railroad's completion, closing a chapter that had lasted barely more than a decade. The trains never left, however. The old Idaho and Washington Northern line north of Newport survives today as the Pend Oreille Valley Railroad, still carrying freight along the same river the Ione once cruised. The next time you cross the Pend Oreille River at Newport, on the road west from Sandpoint and Priest River, it is worth pausing to imagine the scene: a 130-foot palace of white decks and coal smoke, a town band playing, and a whistle echoing off the water, calling everyone aboard.