Boat Encampment was the site at the big bend of the Columbia River, at mouth of the Canoe River and Wood River, where David Thompson [1770–1857] and his party camped in January 1811, after making the first recorded crossing of the Athabasca Pass. The North West Company establishment built here by Thompson was the rendezvous for fur-trade travel across the mountains through the pass for nearly 50 years, an important transfer point on the express route from the Pacific Coast to Montreal and York Factory. It lost importance with the growth of Fort Victoria, advances in ocean transportation, and changes in the trading activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which merged with the North West Company in 1821. The establishment there was maintained up to time of railway building [1].

Boat Encampment was designated a National Historic Site in 1943. The site was submerged by Kinbasket Lake, the reservoir of the Mica Dam, in 1973 [2]. “Boat Encampment,” previously an offical name, was cancelled in 1974.

Thus we continued day after day to march a few miles, as the Snow was too wet and too deep to allow the dogs to make any progress ; on the 26th we put up on the banks of the Columbia River, my Men had become so disheartened, sitting down every half mile, and perfectly lost at all they saw around them so utterly different from the east side of the Mountains, four of them deserted to return back ; and I was not sorry to be rid of them, as for more than a month. past they had been very useless, in short they became an incumbrance on me, and the other men were equally so to be rid of them; having now taken up my residence for the rest of the winter I may make my remarks on the countries and the climates we have passed.…

Our residence was near the junction of two Rivers from the Mountains with the Columbia: the upper Stream which forms the defile by which we came to the Columbia, I named the Flat Heart, from the Men being dispirited; it had nothing particular. The other was the Canoe River; which ran through a bold rude valley, of a steady descent, which gave to this River a very rapid descent without any falls.

— Thompson 1812 [3]

Thompson’s “Flat Heart River” is now Wood River. It is clear from his Narrative that both the Athabasca Pass and the Canoe River region had been visited earlier by his guide, Thomas the Iroquois, and by other Indigenous people.

On the 1859 Arrowsmith map it appears as “Canoe Encampment.”