The company was an outgrowth of the competition in the Northwest Territories and
Northern Alberta between the new
Northern Traders Company and the entrenched
Hudson's Bay Company. Colonel
James Cornwall, one of the principals of the Northern Traders Company, on the
Lesser Slave River in 1904. The company acted as a kind of subsidiary of the Northern Trading Company until its formal creation in 1930 as
Northern Waterways Limited, but its name was changed in 1934 to the Northern Transportation Company Limited. In the summer of 1934, the company's first season, it operated with small tugboats and
power barges. From
Waterways to
Fort Fitzgerald on the
Athabasca/
Slave River, it used the motor tugboat
Mabel with three barges; from
Fort Smith to
Aklavik on the Slave/
Mackenzie Rivers, it used a 90-foot twin diesel powered barge with two barges carrying 300-tons per trip; from Fort Smith to
Fort Rae (now Behchokǫ̀) on the north end of
Great Slave Lake it used a power barge with 100-ton capacity. On the
Bear River route into
Great Bear Lake, where significant silver and uranium mineral exploration was underway in 1934, the company used a series of boats and barges. The tugboat
Norman operated from
Fort Norman (now Tulita) to the head of the first rapids with a 50-ton barge. Freight was then transferred around the rapid
portage to the vessel
Sternwheeler with 20-ton capacity, operating up the Bear River to the next set of rapids. After that portage, freight was transferred to a tugboat pushing a 50-ton barge to
Fort Franklin (now Délı̨nę) on Great Bear Lake. Finally, freight was transferred onto a 90-foot power barge suitable for lake traffic pushing two 90-foot barges with carrying capacity of 350-tons, destined for
Port Radium and Cameron Bay mining camps. In 1936, NTCL was taken over by the
Eldorado Gold Mines Limited and
Arthur Berry was appointed manager in
Edmonton. In 1944, it became a
Crown corporation when its parent, then known as Eldorado Mining and Refining, was
nationalized by the
Government of Canada. Other vessels in this fleet included the
Radium Express,
Radium Yellowknife,
Radium Prince,
Radium Cruiser,
Radium Scout,
Radium Charles,
Radium Gilbert and
Radium Lad, earning the fleet the name
"The Radium Line". Port Radium on Great Bear Lake, a mine that supplied much of the
uranium used by the
Manhattan Project, and later the
uranium mines on
Lake Athabasca in northern
Saskatchewan, were key destinations for the fleet. All of the tugs had extremely shallow draft, and mounted their propellers in cavities under their hull. Five vessels in the fleet, the
George Askew, the
Watson Lake,
Horn River,
Sandy Jane and
Great Bear, did not include "Radium" in their name. In 1965 NTCL purchased Yellowknife Transportation Company and Arctic Transportation to become sole commercial marine freighter in the Northwest Territories and Arctic Ocean. In 1985, NTCL was purchased by the Inuvialuit Development Corporation and Nunasi Corporation, two
native-owned corporations. NTCL filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and its assets were acquired by the Government of the Northwest Territories later that year in order to ensure that the essential fuel transportation service continued for residents of the Northwest Territories. ==References==