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DOWN THE COLUMBIA
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
MT. SIR DONALD, WHICH DRAINS FROM ALL SIDES TO THE COLUMBIA]
DOWN THE COLUMBIA
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN
AUTHOR OF "IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES,"
"HELL'S HATCHES," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1921
COPYRIGHT 1921
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
The Quinn & Boden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY
TO
C. L. CHESTER
Hoping he will find in these pages some compensation for
the fun he missed in not being along.
INTRODUCTION
The day on which I first conceived the idea of a boat trip down the
Columbia hangs in a frame all its own in the corridors of my memory. It
was a number of years ago--more than a dozen, I should say. Just
previously I had contrived somehow to induce the Superintendent of the
Yellowstone National Park to grant me permission to attempt a winter
journey on ski around this most beautiful of America's great
playgrounds. He had even sent a Government scout along to keep, or help,
me out of trouble. We were a week out from the post at Mammoth Hot
Springs.
Putting the rainbow revel of the incomparable Canyon behind, we had
crossed Yellowstone Lake on the ice and fared onward and upward until we
came at last to the long climb where the road under its ten feet of snow
wound up to the crest of the Continental Divide. It was so dry and cold
that the powdery snow overlying the crust rustled under our ski like
autumn leaves. The air was diamond clear, so transparent that distant
mountain peaks, juggled in the wizardry of the lens of the light, seemed
fairly to float upon the eyeball.
At the summit, where we paused for breath, an old Sergeant of the Game
Patrol, letting down a tin can on a string, brought up drinks from an
air-hole which he claimed was teetering giddily upon the very ridge-pole
of North America.
"If I dip to the left," he said, suiting the action to the word, "it's
the Pacific I'll be robbing of a pint of Rocky Mountain dew; while if I
dip to the right it's the Atlantic that'll have to settle back a notch.
And if I had a string long enough, and a wing strong enough, to cast my
can over there beyond Jackson's Hole," he went on, pointing
southeasterly to the serrated peaks of the Wind River Mountains, "I
could dip from the fount of the Green River and keep it from feeding the
Colorado and the Gulf of California by so much."
That led me to raise the question of boating by river from the Great
Divide to the sea, and the Scout, who knew something of the Madison,
Jefferson and Gallatin to the east, and of the Salmon, Clearwater and
Snake to the west, said he reckoned the thing could be done in either
direction provided a man had lots of time and no dependent family to
think of and shake his nerve in the pinches.
The old Sergeant agreed heartily. River boating was good, he said,
because it was not opposed to Nature, like climbing mountains, for
instance, where you were bucking the law of gravity from start to
finish. With a river it was all easy and natural. You just got into your
boat and let it go. Sooner or later, without any especial effort on your
part, you reached your objective. You might not be in a condition to
appreciate the fact, of course, but just the same you got there, and
with a minimum of hard work. Some rivers were better for boating than
others for the reason that you got there quicker. The Snake and the
Missouri were all very well in their way, but for him, he'd take the
Columbia. There was a river that started in mountains and finished in
mountains. It ran in mountains all the way to the sea. No slack water in
all its course. It was going somewhere all the time. He had lived as a
kid on the lower Columbia and had trapped as a man on the upper
Columbia; so he ought to know. _There_ was a "he" river if there ever
was one. If a man really wanted to travel from snowflake to brine and
not be troubled with "on-wee" on the way, there was no stream that ran
one-two-three with the Columbia as a means of doing it.
That night, where we steamed in the black depths of a snow-submerged
Government "Emergency" cabin, the Sergeant's old Columbia memories
thawed with the hunk of frosted beef he was toasting over the sheet-iron
stove. He told of climbing for sheep and goat in the high Kootenay, of
trailing moose and caribou in the valleys of the Rockies, and finally of
his years of trapping on the creeks and in the canyons that run down to
the Big Bend of the Columbia; of how he used to go down to Kinbasket
Lake in the Fall, portaging or lining the three miles of tumbling
cascades at Surprise Rapids, trap all winter on Sullivan Creek or Middle
River, and then come out in the Spring to Revelstoke, playing
ducks-and-drakes with his life and his scarcely less valuable catch of
marten, mink and beaver running the riffles at Rock Slide, Twelve Mile
and the terrible _Dalles des Morts_. He declared that there were a
hundred miles of the Big Bend of the Columbia that had buffaloed to a
fare-ye-well any equal stretch on any of the great rivers of North
America for fall, rocks and wild rip-rarin' water generally. But the
dread Rapids of Death and the treacherous swirls and eddies of
Revelstoke Canyon were not the last of swift water by a long shot. Just
below the defile of the Arrow Lakes the white caps began to rear their
heads again, and from there right on down through the seven hundred
miles and more to tide-water below the Cascade Locks in Oregon there was
hardly a stretch of ten miles without its tumble of rapids, and mostly
they averaged not more than three or four miles apart.
"She's sure some 'he' river," the old chap concluded as he began to
unroll his blankets, "going somewhere all the time, tumbling over itself
all the way trying to beat itself to the finish."
Confusing as the Sergeant was with his "he" and "she" and "it" as to the
gender of the mighty Oregon, there was no question of the fascination of
the pictures conjured up by his descriptions of that so-well-called
"Achilles of Rivers." Before I closed my eyes that night I had promised
myself that I should take the first opportunity to boat the length of
the Columbia, to follow its tumultuous course from its glacial founts to
the salt sea brine, to share with it, to jostle it in its "tumble to get
there first."
I held by that resolve for more than a dozen years, although, by a
strange run of chance, I was destined to have some experience of almost
every one of the great rivers of the world before I launched a boat upon
the Columbia. My appetite for swift water boating had grown by what it
fed on. I had come more and more to the way of thinking of my
Yellowstone companion who held that boating down rivers was good because
it was not opposed to Nature, "like mountain climbing, for instance,
where you bucked the law of gravity all the way." In odd craft and
various, and of diverse degree of water worthiness, I had trusted to
luck and the law of gravity to land me somewhere to seaward of numerous
up-river points of vantage to which I had attained by means of travel
that ranged all the way from foot and donkey-back to elephant and auto.
The Ichang gorges of the Yangtze I had run in a _sampan_ manned by a
yelling crew of Szechuan coolies, and the Salween and Irawadi below the
Yunnan boundary in weird Burmese canoes whose crews used their legs as
well as their arms in plying their carved paddles. I had floated down
the Tigris from Diarbekir to Mosul on a _kalek_ of inflated sheepskins,
and the Nile below the Nyanzas in a cranky craft of zebra hide, whose
striped sides might have suggested the idea of modern marine camouflage.
On the middle Niger I had used a condemned gunboat's life-raft, and on
the Zambesi a dugout of saffron-tinted wood so heavy that it sank like
iron when capsized. And it had been in native dugouts of various crude
types that I had boated greater or lesser lengths of the swifter upper
stretches of the Orinoco, Amazon and Parana.
But through it all--whether I was floating in a reed-wrapped _balsa_ on
Titacaca or floundering in a pitch-smeared _gufa_ on the
Euphrates--pictures conjured up by remembered phrases of the old
ex-trapper keep rising at the back of my brain. "The big eddy at the
bend of Surprise Rapids, where you go to look for busted boats and dead
bodies;" "the twenty-one mile of white water rolling all the way from
Kinbasket Lake to Canoe River;" "the double googly intake at the head
of Gordon Rapid;" "the black-mouthed whirlpool waiting like a wild cat
at the foot of _Dalles des Morts_"--how many times had I seen all these
in fancy! And at last the time came when those pictures were to be made
real--galvanized into life.
It was well along toward the end of last summer that my friend C. L.
Chester, whose work in filming the scenic beauties of out-of-the-way
parts of the world has made the name Chester-Outing Pictures a byword on
both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned that he was sending one of his
cameramen to photograph the sources of the Columbia in the Selkirks and
Rockies of western Canada. Also that he was thinking of taking his own
holiday in that incomparably beautiful region. He supposed I knew that
there were considerable areas here that had barely been explored, to
saying nothing of photographed. This was notably so of the Big Bend
country, where the Columbia had torn its channel between the Rockies and
Selkirks and found a way down to the Arrow Lakes. He was especially
anxious to take some kind of a boat round the hundred and fifty miles of
canyon between Beavermouth and Revelstoke and bring out the first movies
of what he had been assured was the roughest stretch of swift water on
any of the important rivers of the world. Was there, by any chance, a
possibility that my plans and commitments were such that I would be free
to join him in the event that he made the trip personally?
As a matter of fact there were several things that should have prevented
my breaking away for a trip to the upper Columbia in September, not the
least among which was a somewhat similar trip I had already planned for
the Grand Canyon of the Colorado that very month. But the mention of the
Big Bend was decisive. "I'll go," I said promptly. "When do you start?"
It was finally arranged that I should go on ahead and engage men and
boats for the Big Bend part of the trip, while Chester would endeavour
to disentangle himself from business in Los Angeles and New York in time
to join his cameraman and myself for a jaunt by packtrain to the Lake of
the Hanging Glaciers. The latter is one of the high glacial sources of
the Columbia in the Selkirks, and Chester, learning that it had never
been photographed, desired especially to visit it in person. Returning
from our visit to the source of the river, we planned to embark on the
boating voyage around the Big Bend. It was not until business finally
intervened to make it impossible for Chester to get away for even a
portion of the trip which he had been at such trouble to plan, that I
decided to attempt the voyage down the Columbia as I had always dreamed
of it--all the way from the eternal snows to tide-water. At Chester's
suggestion, it was arranged that his cameraman should accompany me
during such portion of the journey as the weather was favourable to
moving picture work.
Our preliminary work and exploration among the sources of the river over
(this was carried on either on foot or by packtrain, or in runs by canoe
over short navigable stretches of the upper river), we pushed off from
Beavermouth, at the head of the Big Bend. For this most arduous part of
the voyage there were four in the party, with a big double-ended boat
specially built for rough water. Further down, for a considerable
stretch, we were three, in a skiff. Then, for a couple of hundred miles,
there were four of us again, manning a raft and a towing launch. After
that we were two--just the cameraman and myself, with the skiff. Him I
finally dropped at the foot of Priest Rapids, fifty miles above Pasco,
and the last two hundred and fifty miles down to Portland I rode alone.
This "solo" run--though a one-man boat crew is kept rather too busy in
swift water to have much time for enjoying the scenery--was far from
proving the least interesting period of the journey.
So far as I have been able to learn, my arrival in Portland marked the
end of the first complete journey that has been made from the glacial
sources of the Columbia to tide-water. David Thompson, scientist and
explorer for the Northwest Company, racing against the Astor sea
expedition to be first to establish a post at the mouth of the Columbia,
boated down a very large part of the navigable part of the river over a
hundred years ago. I have found no evidence, however, that he penetrated
to the glacial fields in the Selkirks above Windermere and Columbia Lake
from which spring the main feeders of the upper river. Thompson's, and
all of the other voyages of the early days of which there is authentic
record, started from Boat Encampment, where the road from the plains and
Montreal led down to the Columbia by the icy waters of Portage River,
or, as it is now called, Wood River. Thus all of the old Hudson Bay and
Northwest voyageurs ran only the lower seventy-five miles of the Big
Bend, and avoided what is by far its worst water--Surprise Rapids and
the twenty-one miles of cascades below Kinbasket Lake. Ross Cox,
Alexander Ross and Franchiere, whose diaries are the best commentaries
extant upon early Columbia history, had no experience of the river above
Boat Encampment. Lewis and Clark, and Hunt, with the remnants of the
Astor transcontinental party, boated the river only below the Snake, and
this was also true of Whitman and the other early missionaries and
settlers. Fremont made only a few days' journey down the river from the
Dalles.
Of recent down-river passages, I have been able to learn of no voyageur
who, having rounded the Big Bend, continued his trip down to the lower
Columbia. The most notable voyage of the last three or four decades was
that of Captain F. P. Armstrong and J. P. Forde, District Engineer of
the Department of Public Works of Nelson, British Columbia, who,
starting at the foot of the Lower Arrow Lake in a Peterboro canoe, made
the run to Pasco, just above the mouth of the Snake, in ten days. As
Captain Armstrong already knew the upper Columbia above the Arrow Lakes
from many years of steamboating and prospecting, and as both he and Mr.
Forde, after leaving their canoe at Pasco, continued on to Astoria by
steamer, I am fully convinced that his knowledge of that river from
source to mouth is more comprehensive than that of any one else of the
present generation. This will be, perhaps, a fitting place to
acknowledge my obligation to Captain Armstrong (who accompanied me in
person from the mouth of the Kootenay to the mouth of the Spokane) for
advice and encouragement which were very considerable factors in the
ultimate success of my venture. To Mr. Forde I am scarcely less indebted
for his courtesy in putting at my disposal a copy of his invaluable
report to the Canadian Government on the proposal to open the Columbia
to through navigation to the Pacific Ocean.
Compared to the arduous journeys of the old Astorian and Hudson Bay
voyageurs on the Columbia, my own trip--even though a considerably
greater length of river was covered than by any of my predecessors--was
negligible as an achievement. Only in rounding the Big Bend in Canada
does the voyageur of to-day encounter conditions comparable to those
faced by those of a hundred, or even fifty years ago who set out to
travel on any part of the Columbia. For a hundred miles or more of the
Bend, now just as much as in years long gone by, an upset with the loss
of an outfit is more likely than not to spell disaster and probably
tragedy. But in my own passage of the Big Bend I can claim no personal
credit that those miles of tumbling water were run successfully. I was
entirely in the hands of a pair of seasoned old river hands, and merely
pulled an oar in the boat and did a few other things when I was told.
But it is on the thousand miles of swiftly flowing water between the
lower end of the Big Bend and the Pacific that conditions have changed
the most in favour of the latter day voyageur. The rapids are, to be
sure, much as they must have appeared to Thompson, Ross, Franchiere and
their Indian contemporaries. The few rocks blasted here and there on the
lower river in an attempt to improve steamer navigation have not greatly
simplified the problems of the man in a rowboat or canoe. Nor is an
upset in any part of the Columbia an experience lightly to be courted
even to-day. Even below the Big Bend there are a score of places I could
name offhand where the coolest kind of an old river hand, once in the
water, would not have one chance in ten of swimming out. In half a
hundred others he might reckon on an even break of crawling out alive.
But if luck were with him and he _did_ reach the bank with the breath in
his body, then his troubles would be pretty well behind him. Below the
Canadian border there is hardly ten miles of the river without a farm, a
village, or even a town of fair size. Food, shelter and even medical
attention are not, therefore, ever more than a few hours away, so that
the man who survives the loss of his boat and outfit is rarely in
serious straits.
But in the case of the pioneers, their troubles in like instance were
only begun. What between hostile Indians and the loss of their only
means of travel, the chances were all against their ever pulling out
with their lives. The story of how the vicious cascade of the _Dalles
des Morts_ won its grisly name, which I will set down in its proper
place, furnishes a telling instance in point.
It is a callous traveller who, in strange lands and seas, does not
render heart homage to the better men that have gone before him. Just as
you cannot sail the Pacific for long without fancying that Cook and
Drake and Anson are sharing your night watches, so on the Columbia it is
Thompson and Cox and Lewis and Clark who come to be your guiding
spirits. At the head of every one of the major rapids you land just as
you know they must have landed, and it is as through their eyes that you
survey the work ahead. And when, rather against your better judgment,
you decide to attempt to run a winding gorge where the sides are too
steep to permit lining and where a portage would mean the loss of a
day--you know that the best of the men who preceded you must have
experienced the same hollowness under the belt when they were forced to
the same decision, for were they not always gambling at longer odds than
you are? And when, elate with the thrill of satisfaction and relief that
come from knowing that what had been a menacing roar ahead has changed
to a receding growl astern, you are inclined to credit yourself with
smartness for having run a rapid where Thompson lined or Ross Cox
portaged, that feeling will not persist for long. Sooner or later--and
usually sooner--something or somebody will put you right. A broken oar
and all but a mess-up in an inconsiderable riffle was all that was
needed to quench the glow of pride that I felt over having won through
the roughly tumbling left-hand channel of Rock Island Rapids with only a
short length of lining. And it was a steady-eyed old river captain who
brought me back to earth the night I told him--somewhat boastfully, I
fear--that I had slashed my skiff straight down the middle of the final
pitch of Umatilla Rapids, where Lewis and Clark had felt they had to
portage.
"But you must not forget," he said gently, with just the shadow of a
smile softening the line of his firm lips, "that Lewis and Clark had
something to lose besides their lives--that they had irreplaceable
records in their care, and much work still to do. It was their duty to
take as few chances as possible. But they never let the risk stop them
when there wasn't any safer way. When you are pulling through Celilo
Canal a few days from now, and being eased down a hundred feet in the
locks, just remember that Lewis and Clark put their whole outfit down
the Tumwater and Five-Mile Rapids of the Dalles, in either of which that
skiff of yours would be sucked under in half a minute."
Bulking insignificantly as an achievement as does my trip in comparison
with the many Columbia voyages, recorded and unrecorded, of early days,
it still seems to me that the opportunity I had for a comprehensive
survey of this grandest scenically of all the world's great rivers gives
me warrant for attempting to set down something of what I saw and
experienced during those stirring weeks that intervened between that
breathless moment when I let the whole stream of the Columbia trickle
down my back in a glacial ice-cave in the high Selkirks, and that
showery end-of-the-afternoon when I pushed out into tide-water at the
foot of the Cascades.
It is scant enough justice that the most gifted of pens can do to Nature
in endeavouring to picture in words the grandest of her manifestations,
and my own quill, albeit it glides not untrippingly in writing of
lighter things, is never so inclined to halt and sputter as when I try
to drive it to its task of registering in black scrawls on white paper
something of what the sight of a soaring mountain peak, the depth of a
black gorge with a white stream roaring at the bottom, or the morning
mists rising from a silently flowing river have registered on the
sensitized sheets of my memory. Superlative in grandeur to the last
degree as are the mountains, glaciers, gorges, waterfalls, cascades and
cliffs of the Columbia, it is to my photographs rather than my pen that
I trust to convey something of their real message.
If I can, however, pass on to my readers some suggestion of the keenness
of my own enjoyment of what I experienced on the Columbia--of the sheer
_joie de vivre_ that is the lot of the man who rides the running road;
it will have not been in vain that I have cramped my fingers and bent my
back above a desk during several weeks of the best part of the
California year. Robert Service has written something about
"Doing things just for the doing,
Letting babblers tell the story...."
Shall I need to confess to my readers that the one cloud on the seaward
horizon during all of my voyage down the Columbia was brooding there as
a consequence of the presentiment that, sooner or later, I should have
to do my own babbling?
PASADENA, July, 1921.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION vi
I PREPARING FOR THE BIG BEND 1
II UP HORSE THIEF CREEK 20
III AT THE GLACIER 48
IV THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS 63
V CANAL FLATS TO BEAVERMOUTH 77
VI THROUGH SURPRISE RAPIDS 92
VII KINBASKET LAKE AND RAPIDS 134
VIII BOAT ENCAMPMENT TO REVELSTOKE 160
IX REVELSTOKE TO THE SPOKANE 192
X RAFTING THROUGH HELL GATE 235
XI BY LAUNCH THROUGH BOX CANYON 267
XII CHELAN TO PASCO 286
XIII PASCO TO THE DALLES 323
XIV THE HOME STRETCH 360
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mt. Sir Donald, which drains from all sides to the Columbia
_Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Mt. Assiniboine, near the headwaters of the Columbia 10
Twin Falls, Takakaw Falls, two great cataracts of the
Columbia watershed 11
The "turning-in" scene shot in silhouette 38
"Reverse" of the "going-to-bed" shot 38
On the Horse Thief Trail 39
A dead-fall on the trail 39
Looking toward the entrance of the ice cave 52
Where the Hanging Glacier is about to fall 53
My shower bath in an ice cave 58
Warming up after my glacial shower bath 58
Ross and Harmon. Dragon moraine in distance 59
The horses in the mouth of the ice cave 59
Looking across the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers 66
The Lake of the Hanging Glaciers, taken from the ice
walls, looking north 67
The face of the Hanging Glacier 72
Where my party foregathered with Harmon's on the shore
of the Lake of the Hanging Glacier 73
Old Hudson Bay cart at Beavermouth 80
My first push-off at the head of canoe navigation on the
Columbia 80
Opening scene of the "Farmer" picture 81
Old stern wheelers at Golden 81
A quiet stretch of the Columbia near Golden 81
Arrival of our boat at Beavermouth 96
Our first camp at Beavermouth 96
The remains of a sunken forest 96
Trapper's cabin where we found shelter for the night 97
Where we landed above Surprise Rapids 97
Where we tied up at "Eight mile" 97
"Shooting" the first bit of lining at Surprise Rapids 122
The camp where the roar of the rapids deafened us 122
Where Steinhof was drowned 122
Where Andy just missed drowning in Surprise Rapids 123
Looking through the pines at Surprise Rapids 123
Head of second fall of Surprise Rapids 123
Blackmore and the ling that refused to "register" 142
The winter, with pike-pole just before lining Death Rapids 142
Andy and I pulling down Kinbasket Lake 143
Our wettest camp, at Kinbasket Lake 156
The old ferry tower above Canoe River 156
Where we tied up at Kinbasket Lake 157
The bridge which the Columbia carried a hundred miles and
placed across another stream 157
Lining down to the head of Death Rapids 157
Trapper's cabin being undermined by stream 168
The camp above Twelve-Mile 168
Landing at sunset above Canoe River 169
Andy and Blackmore swinging the boat into the head of
Rock Slide Rapids 169
The big rollers, from 15 to 20 feet from hollow to crest, at
head of Death Rapids 169
Looking across to Boat Encampment 180
"Wood smoke at twilight" above Twelve-Mile 180
Lining down Rock Slide Rapids 181
When the Columbia took half of my riding breeches 181
Bonnington Falls of the Kootenay 198
Plastered log cabin in the Doukhobor village 198
Trucking the skiff through Kettle Falls 199
Twilight in the gorge at Kettle Falls 199
Waiting for the fog to lift above Bishop's Rapids 210
Ross and Armstrong registering "gloom" 210
The "intake" at the Little Dalles 211
Where we started to line the Little Dalles 211
Map of the Upper Columbia 236
A "close-up" of Ike building his raft 237
My fifty pound salmon 237
Ike riding a log 256
Ike on the mooring line of the raft 256
Raft in tow of launch near mouth of San Poil 257
Ike at the sweep below Hell Gate 257
The suspension bridge at Chelan Falls 270
Old River veterans on the landing at Potaris. (Capt. McDermid
on left, Ike Emerson on right) 270
Night was falling as we headed into Box Canyon 271
The Columbia above Box Canyon 271
A rocky cliff near head of Lake Chelan 288
Rainbow Falls, 350 feet high, above head of Lake Chelan 288
Wenatchee under the dust cloud of its speeding autos 289
Head of Rock Island Rapids 289
The picture that cost me a wetting 310
The wreck of the "Douglas" 310
We cooked our breakfast in the galley of the wreck of the
"Douglas" 311
A rocky cliff above Beverly 311
Lifted drawbridge on Celilo Canal 354
Tumwater Gorge of the Grand Dalles 354
"Imshallah" in the lock at Five-Mile 355
"Imshallah" half way through the Celilo Canal 355
Palisade Rock, lower Columbia River 362
Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Highway, near Portland 363
City of Portland with Mt. Hood in the distance 370
Bridge on Columbia Highway near Portland, Oregon 371
DOWN THE COLUMBIA
DOWN THE COLUMBIA
CHAPTER I
PREPARING FOR THE BIG BEND
The itinerary of our Columbia trip as originally planned in Los Angeles
called, first, for an expedition to the source of the river, next, a
voyage by boat around the Big Bend from Beavermouth to Revelstoke, and,
finally, if there was time and good weather held, a voyage of indefinite
length on toward the sea. As the trip to the glaciers was largely a
matter of engaging a good packer well in advance, while there was no
certainty of getting any one who would undertake the passage of the Big
Bend, it was to the latter that we first directed our attention. Chester
wired the Publicity Department of the Canadian Pacific and I wrote
friends in various parts of British Columbia. The C. P. R. replied that
they had requested their Sub-Divisional Superintendent at Revelstoke to
institute inquiries for boatmen in our behalf. The only one of my
friends who contributed anything tangible stated that "while the
Columbia above Golden and below Revelstoke was admirably suited to
pleasure boating, any attempt to run the Big Bend between those points
would result in almost certain disaster."
As this appeared to be about the extent of what we were likely to learn
from a distance, I decided to start north at once to see what could be
arranged on the ground. Victoria yielded little save some large scale
maps, and even these, they assured me in the Geographic Department of
the B. C. Government where I secured them, were very inaccurate as to
detail. The Big Bend region, it appeared, had never been surveyed north
of the comparatively narrow zone of the C. P. R. grant. Several old
hunting friends whom I met at the Club, although they had ranged the
wildernesses of the Northwest from the Barren Lands to Alaska, spoke of
the Big Bend as a veritable _terra incognita_.
"It's said to be a great country for grizzly," one of them volunteered,
"but too hard to get at. Only way to get in and out is the Columbia, and
that is more likely to land you in Kingdom Come than back in
Civilization. Best forget about the Big Bend and go after sheep and goat
and moose in the Kootenays."
At Kamloops I was told of an Indian who had gone round the Big Bend the
previous May, before the Spring rise, and come out not only with his own
skin, but with those of seven grizzlies. I was unable to locate the
Indian, but did find a white man who had made the trip with him. This
chap spent half an hour apparently endeavouring to persuade me to give
up the trip on account of the prohibitive risk (my experience on other
rivers, he declared, would be worse than useless in such water as was to
be encountered at Surprise, Kinbasket and Death Rapids) and about an
equal amount of time trying to convince me that my life would be
perfectly safe if only I would engage him and his Indian and confide it
to their care. As the consideration suggested in return for this
immunity figured out at between two and three times the rate we had been
expecting to pay for boatmen, I had to decline to take advantage of it.
Finally, in Revelstoke, through the efforts of T. C. McNab of the
Canadian Pacific, who had been at considerable trouble to line up
possible candidates for a Big Bend trip, I met Bob Blackmore. After that
things began moving toward a definite end.
"You won't find old Bob Blackmore an active church-worker," I was told
in Revelstoke, "and at one time he had the reputation of being the
smoothest thing in the way of a boot-legger in this part of B. C. But he
drinks little himself, is a past-master of woodcraft, a dead shot, and
has twice the experience of swift-water boating of any man on the upper
Columbia. In spite of the fact that he has undergone no end of hardship
in his thirty years of packing, hunting, prospecting, trapping and
boating all over the West, he's as hard to-day at fifty odd as most men
are at thirty. Because he dished a boatload of freight last year
somewhere up river, there are a few who are saying that old Bob
Blackmore is losing his grip. Don't believe it. He was never better in
his life than he is right now, and if you can persuade him to run your
show round the Big Bend you're in luck. Once you start, you'll come
right on round to Revelstoke all right. No fear on that score. But if
you have old Bob Blackmore you'll stand a jolly lot better chance of
arriving on top of the water."
I found Bob Blackmore at his river-side home in the old town--what had
been the metropolitan centre of Revelstoke in the days when it was the
head of navigation of steamers from below the Arrow Lakes, and before
the railway had come to drag settlement a mile northeastward and away
from the Columbia. He was picking apples with one hand and slapping
mosquitoes with the other--a grey-haired, grey-eyed man of middle
height, with a muscular torso, a steady stare, and a grip that I had to
meet half way to save my fingers. He might have passed for a well-to-do
Middle Western farmer except for his iron-grey moustaches, which were
long and drooping, like those affected by cowboy-town sheriffs in the
movies.
I knew at once that this was the man I wanted, and my only doubt was as
to whether or not he felt the same way about me. They had told me in
town that Blackmore, having some means and being more or less
independent, never went out with a man or an outfit he did not like. I
felt that it was I who was on approval, not he. I need not have worried,
however. In this instance, at least, Bob Blackmore's mind was made up in
advance. It was the movies that had done it.
"The C. P. R. people wrote me that you might be wanting me for the
Bend," he said genially after I had introduced myself, "and on the
chance that we would be hitching up I have put my big boat in the water
to give her a good soaking. I've figured that she's the only boat on the
upper river that will do for what you want. I reckon I know them all.
She'll carry three or four times as much as the biggest Peterboro.
Besides, if you tried to go round in canoes, you'd be portaging or
lining in a dozen places where I would drive this one straight through.
With any luck, and if the water doesn't go down too fast, I'd figure on
going the whole way without taking her out of the river at more'n one
place, and maybe not there."
"So you're willing to go ahead and see us through," I exclaimed
delightedly. "They told me in the town that you'd probably need a lot of
persuading, especially as you've been saying for the last two or three
years that you were through with the Bend for good and all."
Blackmore grinned broadly and somewhat sheepishly. "So I have," he said.
"Fact is, I've never yet been round the Bend that I didn't tell myself
and everybody else that I'd never try it again. I really meant it the
last time, which was three or four years ago. And I've really meant it
every time I said it right up to a few days back, when I heard that you
wanted to take a movie machine in there and try and get some pictures.
If that was so, I said to myself, it was sure up to me to do what I
could to help, for there's scenery in there that is more worth picturing
than any I've come across in thirty years of knocking around all over
the mountain country of the West. So I'm your man if you want me. Of
course you know something of what you're going up against in bucking the
Bend?"
"Yes," I replied a bit wearily. "I've been hearing very little else for
the last week. Let's talk about the scenery."
"So they've been trying to frighten you out of it," he said with a
sympathetic smile. "They always do that with strangers who come here to
tackle the Bend. And mostly they succeed. There was one chap they
couldn't stop, though. He was a professor of some kind from
Philadelphia. Fact is, he wasn't enough frightened. That's a bad thing
with the Columbia, which isn't to be taken liberties with. I buried him
near the head of Kinbasket Lake. We'll see his grave when we come down
from Surprise Rapids. I'll want to stop off for a bit and see if the
cross I put up is still standing. He was...."
"_Et tu Brute_," I muttered under my breath. Then, aloud: "Let's look at
the boat."
Already this penchant of the natives for turning the pages of the Big
Bend's gruesome record of death and disaster was getting onto my nerves,
and it was rather a shock to find even the quiet-spoken, steady-eyed
Blackmore addicted to the habit. Afterwards, when I got used to it, I
ceased to mind. As a matter of fact, the good souls could no more help
expatiating on what the Big Bend had done to people who had taken
liberties with it than an aviator who is about to take you for a flight
can help leading you round back of the hangar and showing you the
wreckage of his latest crash. It seems to be one of the inevitable
promptings of the human animal to warn his brother animal of troubles
ahead. This is doubtless the outgrowth of the bogies and the "don'ts"
which are calculated to check the child's explorative and investigative
instincts in his nursery days. From the source to the mouth of the
Columbia it was never (according to the solicitous volunteer advisers
along the way) the really dangerous rapids that I had put behind me.
These were always somewhere ahead--usually just around the next bend,
where I would run into them the first thing in the morning. Luckily, I
learned to discount these warnings very early in the game, and so saved
much sleep which it would have been a real loss to be deprived of.
Blackmore led the way back through his apple orchard and down a stairway
that descended the steeply-sloping river bank to his boat-house. The
Columbia, a quarter of a mile wide and with just a shade of grey
clouding its lucent greenness to reveal its glacial origin, slid swiftly
but smoothly by with a purposeful current of six or seven miles an hour.
A wing-dam of concrete, evidently built to protect the works of a
sawmill a bit farther down stream, jutted out into the current just
above, and the boat-house, set on a raft of huge logs, floated in the
eddy below.
There were two boats in sight, both in the water. Blackmore indicated
the larger one of the pair--a double-ender of about thirty feet in
length and generous beam--as the craft recommended for the Big Bend
trip. "I built her for the Bend more than fifteen years ago," he said,
tapping the heavy gunwale with the toe of his boot. "She's the only boat
I know that has been all the way round more than once, so you might say
she knows the road. She's had many a hard bump, but--with any luck--she
ought to stand one or two more. Not that I'm asking for any more than
can be helped, though. There's no boat ever built that will stand a
head-on crash 'gainst a rock in any such current as is driving it down
Surprise or Kinbasket or Death Rapids, or a dozen other runs of swift
water on the Bend. Of course, you're going to hit once in a while, spite
of all you can do; but, if you're lucky, you'll probably kiss off
without staving in a side. If you're not--well, if you're not lucky, you
have no business fooling with the Bend at all.
"Now what I like about this big boat of mine," he continued, taking up
the scope of the painter to bring her in out of the tug of the current,
"is that she's a lucky boat. Never lost a man out of her--that is,
directly--and only one load of freight. Now with that one (indicating
the smaller craft, a canoe-like double-ender of about twenty feet) it's
just the other way. If there's trouble around she'll have her nose into
it. She's as good a built boat as any on the river, easy to handle up
stream and down--but unlucky. Why, only a few weeks ago a lad from the
town borrowed her to have a bit of a lark running the ripple over that
dam there. It's covered at high water, and just enough of a pitch to
give the youngsters a little excitement in dropping over. Safe enough
stunt with any luck at all. But that boat's not lucky. She drifted on
sidewise, caught her keel and capsized. The lad and the two girls with
him were all drowned. They found his body a week or two later. All his
pockets were turned wrong-side-out and empty. The Columbia current most
always plays that trick on a man--picks his pockets clean. The bodies of
the girls never did show up. Probably the sand got into their clothes
and held them down. That's another little trick of the Columbia. She's
as full of tricks as a box of monkeys, that old stream there, and you've
got to keep an eye lifting for 'em all the time if you're going to
steer clear of trouble."
"It won't be the first time I've had my pockets picked," I broke in
somewhat testily. "Besides, if you're going to charge me at the rate
that Indian I heard of in Kamloops demanded, there won't be anything
left for the Columbia to extract."
That brought us down to business, and I had no complaint to make of the
terms Blackmore suggested--twelve dollars a day for himself and boat, I
to buy the provisions and make my own arrangements with any additional
boatmen. I already had sensed enough of the character of the work ahead
to know that a good boatman would be cheap at any price, and a poor one
dear if working only for his grub. Blackmore was to get the big boat in
shape and have it ready to ship by rail to Beavermouth (at the head of
the Bend and the most convenient point to get a craft into the river)
when I returned from the source of the Columbia above Windermere.
Going on to Golden by train from Revelstoke, I looked up Captain F. P.
Armstrong, with whom I had already been in communication by wire. The
Captain had navigated steamers between Golden and Windermere for many
years, they told me at C. P. R. headquarters in Revelstoke, and had also
some experience of the Bend. He would be unable to join me for the trip
himself, but had spoken to one or two men who might be induced to do so.
In any event his advice would be invaluable.
I shall have so much to say of Captain Armstrong in the account of a
later part of my down-river voyage that the briefest introduction to a
man who has been one of the most picturesque personalities in the
pioneering history of British Columbia will suffice here. Short,
compactly but cleanly built, with iron-grey hair, square, determined jaw
and piercing black eyes, he has been well characterized as "the biggest
little man on the upper Columbia." Although he confessed to sixty-three
years, he might well have passed for fifty, a circumstance which
doubtless had much to do with the fact that he saw three years of active
service in the transport service on the Tigris and Nile during the late
war. Indeed, as became apparent later, he generally had as much reserve
energy at the end of a long day's paddling as another man I could
mention who is rather loath to admit forty.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
MT. ASSINIBOINE, NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE COLUMBIA]
[Illustration: TWIN FALLS]
[Illustration: TAKAKAW FALLS
TWO GREAT CATARACTS OF THE COLUMBIA WATERSHED]
Captain Armstrong explained that he was about to close the sale of one
of his mines on a tributary of the upper Columbia, and for that reason
would be unable to join us for the Big Bend trip, as much as he would
have enjoyed doing so. In the event that I decided to continue on down
the Columbia after circling the Bend, it was just possible he would be
clear to go along for a way. He spoke highly of Blackmore's ability as a
river man, and mentioned one or two others in Golden whom he thought
might be secured. Ten dollars a day was the customary pay for a boatman
going all the way round the Bend. That was about twice the ordinary wage
prevailing at the time in the sawmills and lumber camps. The extra five
was partly insurance, and partly because the work was hard and really
good river men very scarce. It was fair pay for an experienced hand.
A poor boatman was worse than none at all, that is, in a pinch, while a
good one might easily mean the difference between success and disaster.
And of course I knew that disaster on the Bend--with perhaps fifty miles
of trackless mountains between a wet man on the bank and the nearest
human habitation--was spelt with a big D.
So far as I can remember, Captain Armstrong was the only one with whom I
talked in Golden who did not try to dramatize the dangers and
difficulties of the Big Bend. Seemingly taking it for granted that I
knew all about them, or in any case would hear enough of them from the
others, he turned his attention to forwarding practical plans for the
trip. He even contributed a touch of romance to a venture that the rest
seemed a unit in trying to make me believe was a sort of a cross between
going over Niagara in barrel and a flight to one of the Poles.
"There was a deal of boot-legging on the river between Golden and Boat
Encampment during the years the Grand Trunk was being built," he said as
we pored over an outspread map of the Big Bend, "for that was the first
leg of the run into the western construction camps, where the sale of
liquor was forbidden by law. Many and many a boatload of the stuff went
wrong in the rapids. This would have been inevitable in any case, just
in the ordinary course of working in such difficult water. But what made
the losses worse was the fact that a good many of the bootleggers always
started off with a load under their belts as well as in their boats. Few
of the bodies were ever found, but with the casks of whisky it was
different, doubtless because the latter would float longer and resist
buffeting better. Cask after cask has kept turning up through the years,
even down to the present, when B. C. is a comparative desert. They are
found in the most unexpected places, and it's very rare for a party to
go all the way round the Bend without stumbling onto one. So bear well
in mind you are not to go by anything that looks like a small barrel
without looking to see if it has a head in both ends. If you have time,
it will pay you to clamber for a few hours over the great patch of drift
just below Middle River on Kinbasket Lake. That's the one great
catch-all for everything floatable that gets into the river below
Golden. I've found just about everything there from a canary bird cage
to a railway bridge. Failing there (which will only be because you don't
search long enough), dig sixteen paces northwest by compass from the
foundation of the west tower of the abandoned cable ferry just above
Boat Encampment."
"How's that again!" I exclaimed incredulously. "Sure you aren't
confusing the Big Bend with the Spanish Main?"
"If you follow my directions," replied the Captain with a grin, "you'll
uncover more treasure for five minutes' scratching than you'd be likely
to find in turning over the Dry Tortugas for five years. You see, it was
this way," he went on, smiling the smile of a man who speaks of
something which has strongly stirred his imagination. "It was only a few
weeks after Walter Steinhoff was lost in Surprise Rapids that I made
the trip round the Bend in a Peterboro to examine some silver-lead
prospects I had word of. I had with me Pete Bergenham (a first-class
river man; one you will do well to get yourself if you can) and another
chap. This fellow was good enough with the paddle, but--though I didn't
know it when I engaged him--badly addicted to drink. That's a fatal
weakness for a man who is going to work in swift water, and especially
such water as you strike at Surprise and the long run of Kinbasket
Rapids. The wreckage of Steinhoff's disaster (Blackmore will spin you
the straightest yarn about that) was scattered all the way from the big
whirlpool in Surprise Rapids down to Middle River, where they finally
found his body. We might easily have picked up more than the one
ten-gallon cask we bumped into, floating just submerged, in the shallows
of the mud island at the head of Kinbasket Lake.
"I didn't feel quite right about having so much whisky along; but the
stuff had its value even in those days, and I would have felt still
worse about leaving it to fall into the hands of some one who would be
less moderate in its use than would I. I knew Pete Bergenham was all
right, and counted on being able to keep an eye on the other man. That
was just where I fell down. I should have taken the cask to bed with me
instead of leaving it in the canoe.
"When the fellow got to the whisky I never knew, but it was probably
well along toward morning. He was already up when I awoke, and displayed
unwonted energy in getting breakfast and breaking camp. If I had known
how heavily he had been tippling I would have given him another drink
before pushing off to steady his nerve. That might have held him all
right. As it was, reaction in mind and body set in just as we headed
into that first sharp dip below the lake--the beginning of the
twenty-one miles of Kinbasket Rapids. At the place where the bottom has
dropped out from under and left the channel blocked by jagged rocks with
no place to run through, he collapsed as if kicked in the stomach, and
slithered down into the bottom of the canoe, blubbering like a baby. We
just did manage to make our landing above the cascade. With a less
skilful man than Bergenham at the stern paddle we would have failed, and
that would have meant that we should probably not have stopped for good
before we settled into the mud at the bottom of the Arrow Lakes.
"Even after that I could not find it in my heart to dish for good and
all so much prime whisky. So I compromised by burying it that night,
after we had come through the rapids without further mishap, at the spot
I have told you of. That it was the best thing to do under the
circumstances I am quite convinced. The mere thought that it was still
in the world has cheered me in many a thirsty interval--yes, even out on
the Tigris and the Nile, when there was no certainty I would ever come
back to get it again.
"And now I'm going to tell you how to find it, for there's no knowing if
I shall ever have a chance to go for it myself. If you bring it out to
Revelstoke safely, we'll split it fifty-fifty, as they say on your side
of the line. All I shall want to know is who your other boatmen are
going to be. Blackmore is all right, but if any one of the men whom he
takes with him is a real drinker, you'd best forget the whole thing. If
it's an 'all-sober' crew, I'll give you a map, marked so plainly that
you can't go wrong. It will be a grand haul, for it was Number One
Scotch even when we planted it there, and since then it has been ageing
in wood for something like ten years. I suppose you'll be keen to
smuggle your dividend right on down into the 'The Great American
Desert'?" he concluded with a grin.
"Trust me for that," I replied with a knowing shake of my head. "I
didn't spend six months writing up opium smuggling on the China Coast
for nothing." Then I told him the story of the Eurasian lady who was fat
in Amoy and thin in Hongkong, and who finally confessed to having
smuggled forty pounds of opium, three times a week for five years, in
oiled silk hip- and bust-pads.
"You must have a lot of prime ideas," said the Captain admiringly. "You
ought to make it easy, especially if you cross the line by boat. How
would a false bottom ... but perhaps it would be safer to float it down
submerged, with an old shingle-bolt for a buoy, and pick it up
afterwards."
"Or inside my pneumatic mattress," I suggested. "But perhaps it would
taste from the rubber." By midnight we had evolved a plan which could
not fail, and which was almost without risk. "The stuff's as good as in
California," I told myself before I went to sleep--"and enough to pay
all the expenses of my trip in case I should care to bootleg it, which
I won't."
Captain Armstrong's mention of the Steinhoff disaster was not the first
I had heard of it. The chap with whom I had talked in Kamloops had
shown me a photograph of a rude cross that he and his Indian companion
had erected over Steinhoff's grave, and in Revelstoke nearly every one
who spoke of the Bend made some reference to the tragic affair. But here
in Golden, which had been his home, the spectacularity of his passing
seemed to have had an even more profound effect. As with everything else
connected with the Big Bend, however, there was a very evident tendency
to dramatize, to "play up," the incident. I heard many different
versions of the story, but there was one part, the tragic finale, in
which they all were in practical agreement. When his canoe broke loose
from its line, they said, and shot down toward the big whirlpool at the
foot of the second cataract of Surprise Rapids, Steinhoff, realizing
that there was no chance of the light craft surviving the maelstrom,
coolly turned round, waved farewell to his companions on the bank, and,
folding his arms, went down to his death. Canoe and man were sucked
completely out of sight, never to be seen again until the fragments of
the one and the battered body of the other were cast up, weeks later,
many miles below.
It was an extremely effective story, especially as told by the local
member in the B. C. Provincial Assembly, who had real histrionic talent.
But somehow I couldn't quite reconcile the Nirvanic resignation implied
by the farewell wave and the folded arms with the never-say-die,
cat-with-nine-lives spirit I had come to associate with your true
swift-water boatman the world over. I was quite ready to grant that the
big sockdolager of a whirlpool below the second pitch of Surprise
Rapids was a real all-day and all-night sucker, but the old river hand
who gave up to it like the Kentucky coons at the sight of Davy
Crockett's squirrel-gun wasn't quite convincing. That, and the iterated
statement that Steinhoff's canoe-mate, who was thrown into the water at
the same time, won his way to the bank by walking along the bottom
_beneath_ the surface, had a decidedly steadying effect on the erratic
flights to which my fancy had been launched by Big Bend yarns generally.
There had been something strangely familiar in them all, and finally it
came to me--Chinese _feng-shui_ generally, and particularly the legends
of the sampan men of the portage villages along the Ichang gorges of the
Yangtze. The things the giant dragon lurking in the whirlpools at the
foot of the rapids would do to the luckless ones he got his back-curving
teeth into were just a slightly different way of telling what the good
folk of Golden claimed the Big Bend would do to the hapless wights who
ventured down its darksome depths.
Now that I thought of it in this clarifying light, there had been
"dragon stuff" bobbing up about almost every stretch of rough water I
had boated. Mostly it was native superstition, but partly it was small
town pride--pride in the things their "Dragon" had done, and would do.
Human nature--yes, and river rapids, too--are very much the same the
world over, whether on the Yangtze, Brahmaputra or upper Columbia.
That brought the Big Bend into its proper perspective. I realized that
it was only water running down hill after all. Possibly it was faster
than anything I had boated previously, and certainly--excepting the
Yukon perhaps--colder. A great many men had been drowned in trying to
run it; but so had men been drowned in duck-ponds. But many men had gone
round without disaster, and that would I do, _Imshallah_. I always liked
that pious Arab qualification when speaking of futurities. Later I
applied the name--in fancy--to the skiff in which I made the voyage down
the lower river.
Yes, undoubtedly the most of the yarns and the warnings were "dragon
stuff" pure and simple, but Romance remained. A hundred miles of river
with possible treasure lurking in every eddy, and one place where it
_had_ to be! I felt as I did the first time I read "Treasure Island,"
only more so. For that I had only _read_, and now I was going to search
for myself--yes, and I was going to find, too. It was a golden sunset in
more ways than one the evening before I was to leave for the upper
river. Barred and spangled and fluted with liquid, lucent gold was the
sky above hills that were themselves golden with the tints of early
autumn. And in the Northwest there was a flush of rose, old rose that
deepened and glowed in lambent crimson where a notch between the
Selkirks and Rockies marked the approximate location of historic Boat
Encampment. "Great things have happened at Boat Encampment," I told
myself, "and its history is not all written." Then: "Sixteen paces
northwest by compass from the foundation of the west tower of the
abandoned cable ferry...." Several times during dinner that evening I
had to check myself from humming an ancient song. "What's that about,
'_Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum_'?" queried the mackinaw drummer from
Winnipeg who sat next me. "I thought you were from the States. I don't
quite see the point."
"It's just as well you don't," I replied, and was content to let it go
at that.