Four generations of riverboat captains Binkley Family celebrates 100 years.

• Author: Pilkington, Steve

The thought of a sternwheeler chugging up a river in Interior Alaska usually evokes black and white images of Gold Rush history, or E.T. banks after his vessel stranded on the Tanana River in 1901.

For the Binkley family of Fairbanks, who own Riverboat Discovery, navigating sternwheelers through shifty river waters is as real today - and as fantastic - as it was for Mark Twain when he described life on the Mississippi River long ago. The constantly changing waters in rivers like the Tanana make it easy for even a shallow draft vessel to become stuck on a sandbar.

"These days there are the same navigating problems and the same boating problems," said Capt. Jim Binkley, 78, whose father traveled the Chilkoot Pass and began a freight-haling business on the Stikine River in 1898. "But running the business is very different. Now it's a bigger business. The clientele is different." Today's River boat Discovery caters to tourists and one of the state's top attractions.

Binkley, born in Wrangell in 1920, first crewed on riverboats in 1939 out of Southeast Alaska. He later moved to the Interior where he took classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and worked on a small fleet on the Yukon in the summer. He met his wife at the university in 1946, and they married the next year. Mary Hall Binkley, now 71, had come to Alaska from Oregon in 1944 to attend UAF.

Three years after they married, the couple took out a $4,000 loan and Jim converted an Episcopal missionary cruiser into a 25-passenger tour vessel named the Godspeed. In the early 1950s, Jim built the couple's first sternwheeler, Discovery, in their backyard.

"I hated to go to bed at night and I couldn't wait to get up in the morning," he said about those early years.

That passion for sternwheeling now spans four generations. The family has built and captained more than 35 boats in their 100 years in operation.

Their business, with operates out of Fairbanks, has...