THE HOME STRETCH
The Dalles was the largest town I touched on the Columbia, and one of
the most attractive. Long one of the largest wool-shipping centres of
the United States, it has recently attained to considerable importance
as a fruit market. It will not, however, enter into anything approaching
the full enjoyment of its birthright until the incalculably enormous
power possibilities of Celilo Falls and the Dalles have been developed.
So far, as at every other point along the Columbia with the exception of
a small plant at Priest Rapids, nothing has been done along this line.
When it is, The Dalles will be in the way of becoming one of the most
important industrial centres of the West.
In the days of the _voyageurs_ The Dalles was notorious for the
unspeakably treacherous Indians who congregated there to intimidate and
plunder all who passed that unavoidable portage. They were lying,
thieving scoundrels for the most part, easily intimidated by a show of
force and far less prone to stage a real fight than their more warlike
brethren who disputed the passage at the Cascades. That this
"plunderbund" tradition is one which the present-day Dalles is making a
great point of living down, I had conclusive evidence of through an
incident that arose in connection with my hotel bill. I had found my
room extremely comfortable and well appointed, so that the bill
presented for it at my departure, far from striking me as unduly high,
seemed extremely reasonable. I think I may even have said something to
that effect; yet, two days later in Portland, I received a letter
containing an express order for one dollar, and a note saying that this
was the amount of an unintentional over-charge for my room. That was
characteristic of the treatment I received from first to last in
connection with my small financial transactions along the way. I never
dreamed that there were still so many people in the world above
profiteering at the expense of the passing tourist until I made my
Columbia voyage.
I had intended, by making an early start from The Dalles, to endeavour
to cover the forty odd miles to the head of the Cascades before dark of
the same day. Two things conspired to defeat this ambitious plan: first,
some unexpected mail which had to be answered, and, second, my equally
unexpected booking of a passenger--a way passenger who had to be landed
well short of the Cascades. Just as I was cleaning up the last of my
letters, the hotel clerk introduced me to the "Society Editor" of The
Dalles _Chronicle_, who wanted an interview. I told her that I was
already two hours behind schedule, but that if she cared to ride the
running road with me for a while, she could have the interview, with
lunch thrown in, on the river. She accepted with alacrity, but begged
for half an hour to clean up her desk at the _Chronicle_ office and
change to out-door togs. Well within that limit, she was back again at
the hotel, flushed, pant-ing and pant-ed, and announced that she was
ready. Picking up a few odds and ends of food at the nearest grocery, we
went down to the dock, where I launched and loaded up _Imshallah_ in
time to push off at ten o'clock. I had, of course, given up all idea of
making the Cascades that day, and reckoned that Hood River, about
twenty-five miles, would be a comfortable and convenient halting place
for the night. And so it would have been....
[Illustration: PALISADE ROCK, LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER]
[Illustration: MULTNOMAH FALLS COLUMBIA RIVER HIGHWAY, NEAR PORTLAND]
I don't remember whether or not we ever got very far with the
"interview," but I do recall that Miss S---- talked very interestingly
of Johan Bojer and his work, and that she was in the midst of a keenly
analytical review of "The Great Hunger" when a sudden darkening of what
up to then had been only a slightly overcast sky reminded me that I had
been extremely remiss in the matter of keeping an eye on the weather.
Indeed, up to that moment the menace of storms on the river had been of
such small moment as compared to that of rapids that I had come to rate
it as no more than negligible. Now, however, heading into the heart of
the Cascades, I was approaching a series of gorges long notorious among
river _voyageurs_ as a veritable "wind factory"--a "storm-breeder" of
the worst description. After all that I had read of the way in which the
early pioneers had been held up for weeks by head winds between the
Dalles and the Cascades, there was no excuse for my failure to keep a
weather eye lifting at so treacherous a point. The only _alibi_ I can
think of is Adam's: "The woman did it." Nor is there any ungallantry in
that plea. Quite the contrary, in fact; for I am quite ready to
confess that I should probably fail to watch the clouds again under
similar circumstances.
There were a few stray mavericks of sunshine shafts trying to struggle
down to the inky pit of the river as I turned to give the weather a
once-over, but they were quenched by the sinister cloud-pall even as I
looked. The whole gorge of the river-riven Cascades was heaped full of
wallowing nimbus which, driven by a fierce wind, was rolling up over the
water like an advancing smoke-barrage. The forefront of the wind was
marked by a wild welter of foam-white water, while a half mile behind a
streaming curtain of gray-black indicated the position of the advancing
wall of the rain. It would have been a vile-looking squall even in the
open sea; here the sinister threat of it was considerably accentuated by
the towering cliffs and the imminent outcrops of black rock studding the
surface of the river. I had no serious doubt that _Imshallah_, after all
the experience she had had in rough water, would find any great
difficulty in riding out the blow where she was, but since it hardly
seemed hospitable to subject my lady guest to any more of a wetting than
could be avoided, I turned and headed for the lee shore. Miss S---- was
only about half muffled in the rubber saddle _poncho_ and the light
"shed" tent I tossed to her before resuming my oars when the wall of the
wind--hard and solid as the side of a flying barn--struck us full on the
starboard beam. It was rather careless of me, not heading up to meet
that squall before it struck; but the fact was that I simply couldn't
take seriously anything that it seemed possible _could_ happen on such a
deep, quiet stretch of river. The consequence of taking that buffet on
the beam was quite a merry bit of a mix-up. The shower-bath of blown
spray and the dipping under of the lee rail were rather the least of my
troubles. What did have me guessing for a minute, though, was the result
of the fact that that confounded fifty-miles-an-hour zephyr got under
the corners of the tent and, billowing it monstrously, carried about
half of it overboard; also a somewhat lesser amount of Miss S----, who
was just wrapping herself in it. I had to drop my oars to effect
adequate salvage operations, and so leave the skiff with her port
gunwale pretty nearly hove under. As soon as I got around to swing her
head up into the teeth of the wind things eased off a bit.
The river was about a mile wide at this point--ten miles below The
Dalles and about opposite the station of Rowena--and, save for
occasional outcroppings of black bedrock, fairly deep. The north shore
was rocky all the way along, but that to the south (which was also the
more protected on account of a jutting point ahead) was a broad sandy
beach. That beach seemed to offer a comparatively good landing, and, as
it extended up-stream for half a mile, it appeared that I ought to have
no great difficulty in fetching it. The first intimation I had that this
might not be as easy as I had reckoned came when, in spite of the fact
that I was pulling down-stream in a three or four-mile current, the wind
backed the skiff up-stream past a long rock island at a rate of five or
six miles an hour. That was one of the queerest sensations I experienced
on the whole voyage--having to avoid bumping the _lower_ end of a rock
the while I could see the riffle where a strong current was flowing
around the _upper_ end.
I settled down to pulling in good earnest after that rather startling
revelation, trying to hold the head of the skiff just enough to the left
of the eye of the wind to give her a good shoot across the current.
Luckily, I had been pretty well over toward the south bank when the wind
struck. There was only about a quarter of a mile to go, but I was blown
back just about the whole length of that half mile of sandy beach in
making it. The last hundred yards I was rowing "all out," and it was
touch-and-go as to whether the skiff was going to nose into soft sand or
the lower end of a long stretch of half-submerged rocks. I was a good
deal relieved when it proved to be the beach--by about twenty feet. We
would have made some kind of a landing on the rocks without doubt, but
hardly without giving the bottom of the boat an awful banging.
The sand proved unexpectedly soft when I jumped out upon it, but I
struck firm bottom before I had sunk more than an inch or two above my
boot tops and managed to drag the skiff up far enough to escape the
heaviest of the wash of the waves. It was rather a sodden bundle of wet
canvas that I carried out and deposited under a pine tree beyond
high-water mark, but the core of it displayed considerable life after it
had been extracted and set up to dry before the fire of pitchy cones
that I finally succeeded in teasing into a blaze. To show Miss S----
that the storm hadn't affected my equanimity, I asked her to go on with
her review of "The Great Hunger;" but she replied her own was more
insistent, and reminded me that I hadn't served lunch yet. Well,
rain-soaked biscuit and milk chocolate are rather difficult to take
without a spoon; but a pound of California seedless raisins, if munched
slowly, go quite a way with two people.
The worst of the squall was over in half an hour, and, anxious to make
hay while the sun shone, I pushed off again in an endeavor to get on as
far as I could before the next broadside opened up. Miss S---- and I
landed at the Rowena Ferry, to catch the afternoon train back to The
Dalles. She was a good ship-mate, and I greatly regret she had the bad
luck to be my passenger on the only day I encountered a really hard blow
in all of my voyage.
There was another threatening turret of black cloud beginning to train
its guns as I pulled out into the stream beyond Rowena, and it opened
with all the big stuff it had before I had gone a mile. While it lasted,
the bombardment was as fierce as the first one. Fortunately, its
ammunition ran out sooner. I kept the middle of the current this time,
pulling as hard as I could against the wind. I got a thorough raking,
fore-and-aft, for my temerity, but, except at the height of the wind, I
managed to avoid the ignominy of being forced back against the stream.
The third squall, which opened up about three-thirty, was a better
organized assault, and gave me a pretty splashy session of it. When that
blow got the range of me I was just pulling along to the left of a
desolate tongue of black basalt called Memaloose Island. For many
centuries this rocky isle was used by the Klickatats as a burial place,
which fact induced a certain Indian-loving pioneer of The Dalles, Victor
Trevett by name, to order his own grave dug there. A tall marble shaft
near the lower end of the island marks the spot. Now I have no objection
to marble shafts in general, nor even to this one in particular--as a
shaft. I just got tired of seeing it, that was all. If any skipper on
the Columbia ever passed Vic Trevett's monument as many times in a year
as I did in an hour, I should like to know what run he was on.
Swathed in oilskins, my potential speed was cut down both by the
resistance my augmented bulk offered to the wind and the increased
difficulty of pulling with so much on. Down past the monument I would go
in the lulls, and up past the monument I would go before the gusts.
There, relentless as the _Flying Dutchman_, that white shaft hung for
the best part of an hour. I only hope what I said to the wind didn't
disturb old Vic Trevett's sleep. Finally, a quarter of an hour's easing
of the blow let me double the next point; and then it turned loose with
all its guns again. Quite gone in the back and legs, I gave up the
unequal fight and started to shoot off quartering toward the shore.
Glancing over my shoulder in an endeavour to get some kind of an idea of
where, and against what, I might count on striking, an astounding sight
met my eyes, a picture so weird and infernal that I had to pause
(mentally) and assure myself that those raisins I had for lunch had not
been "processed."
Of all the sinister landscapes I ever saw--including the lava fields of
a good many volcanoes and a number of the world's most repulsive "bad
lands"--that which opened up to me as I tried to head in beyond that
hard-striven-for point stands alone in my memory for sheer awesomeness.
The early winter twilight had already begun to settle upon the gloomy
gorge, the duskiness greatly accentuating the all-pervading murk cast
upon the river by the pall of the sooty clouds. All round loomed walls
of black basalt, reflecting darkly in water whose green had been
completely quenched by the brooding purple shadows. The very pines on
the cliffs merged in the solid opacity behind their scraggly forms, and
even the fringe of willows above high-water-mark looped round the
crescent of beach below like a fragment of mourning band. And that
stretch of silver sand--the one thing in the whole infernal landscape
whose whiteness the gloom alone could not drown: how shall I describe
the jolt it gave me when I discovered that six or seven black devils
were engaged in systematically spraying it with an inky liquid that left
it as dark and dead to the eye as a Stygian strand of anthracite? It was
a lucky thing those raisins had _not_ been "processed;" else I might not
have remembered readily what I had heard of the way the "South-Bank"
railway had been keeping the sand from drifting over its tracks by
spraying with crude oil the bars uncovered at low water.
With that infernal mystery cleared up, my mind was free to note and take
advantage of a rather remarkable incidental phenomenon. The effect of
oil on troubled waters was no new thing to me, for on a number of
occasions I had helped to rig a bag of kerosene-soaked oakum over the
bows of a schooner hove-to in a gale; but to find a stretch of water
already oiled for me at just the time and place I was in the sorest need
of it--well, I couldn't see where those manna-fed Children of Israel
wandering in the desert found their advance arrangements looked to any
better than that. The savage wind-whipped white-caps that were buffeting
me in mid-stream dissolved into foam-streaked ripples the moment they
impinged upon the broadening oil-sleeked belt where the petroleum had
seeped riverward from the sprayed beach. A solid jetty of stone could
not have broken the rollers more effectually. On one side was a wild
wallow of tossing water; on the other--as far as the surface of the
river was concerned--an almost complete calm.
It was a horrible indignity to heap upon _Imshallah_ (and, after the way
she had displayed her resentment following her garbage shower under the
Wenatchee bridge, I knew that spirited lady would make me pay dear for
it if ever she had the chance); still--dead beat as I was--there was
nothing else to do but to head into that oleaginous belt of calm and
make the best of it. The wind still took a deal of bucking, but with the
banging of the waves at an end my progress was greatly accelerated.
Hailing the black devils on the bank, I asked where the nearest village
was concealed, to learn that Moosier was a couple of miles below, but
well back from the river. They rather doubted that I could find my way
to the town across the mudflats, but thought it might be worth trying
in preference to pushing on in the dark to Hood River.
Those imps of darkness were right about the difficulty of reaching
Moosier after nightfall. A small river coming in at that point seemed to
have deposited a huge bar of quicksand all along the left bank, and I
would never have been able to make a landing at all had not a belated
duck-hunter given me a hand. After tying up to an oar, he very
courteously undertook to pilot me to the town through the
half-overflowed willow and alder flats. As a consequence of taking the
lead, it was the native rather than the visitor who went off the caving
path into the waist-deep little river. Coming out of the woods, a
hundred-yards of slushing across a flooded potato-patch brought us to
the railway embankment, and from there it was comparatively good going
to the hotel. Luckily, the latter had a new porcelain tub and running
hot water, luxuries one cannot always be sure of in the smaller Columbia
River towns.
[Illustration: CITY OF PORTLAND WITH MT. HOOD IN THE DISTANCE]
It was just at the close of the local apple season, and I found the
hotel brimming over with departing packers. Most of the latter were
girls from Southern California orange-packing houses, imported for the
season. Several of them came from Anaheim, and assured me that they had
packed Valencias from a small grove of mine in that district. They were
a good deal puzzled to account for the fact that a man with a Valencia
grove should be "hobo-ing" round the country like I was, and seemed
hardly to take me seriously when I assured them it was only a matter of
a year or two before all farmers would be hobos. It's funny how
apple-packing seems to bring out all the innate snobbery in a lady
engaging in that lucrative calling; they didn't seem to think tramping
was quite respectable. I slept on the parlour couch until three in the
morning, when I "inherited" the room occupied by a couple of packettes
departing by the Portland train. As they seem to have been addicted to
"_attar of edelweiss_," or something of the kind, and there hadn't been
time for fumigation, I rather regretted making the shift.
[Illustration: BRIDGE ON COLUMBIA HIGHWAY NEAR PORTLAND, OREGON]
When I had splashed back to the river in the morning, I found that
_Imshallah_ anxious to hide the shame of that oil-bath, had spent the
night trying to bury herself in the quicksand. Dumping her was out of
the question, and I sank mid-thigh deep two or three times myself before
I could persuade the sulking minx even to take the water. I knew she
would take the first chance that offered to rid herself of the filth,
just as she had before; but, with no swift water above the Cascades,
there seemed small likelihood of her getting out-of-hand. Knowing that
she was quite equal to making a bolt over the top of that terrible
cataract if she hadn't managed to effect some sort of purification
before reaching there, I made an honest attempt at conciliation by
landing at the first solid beach I came to and giving her oily sides a
good swabbing down with a piece of carpet. That seemed to mollify the
temperamental lady a good deal, but just the same I knew her too well to
take any chances.
Of all the great rivers in the world, there are only two that have had
the audacity to gouge a course straight through a major range of
mountains. These are the Brahmaputra, which clove a way through the
Himalaya in reaching the Bay of Bengal from Tibet, and the Columbia,
which tore the Cascades asunder in making its way to the Pacific. But
the slow process of the ages by which the great Asian river won its way
to the sea broke its heart and left it a lifeless thing. It emerges from
the mountains with barely strength enough to crawl across the most
dismal of deltas to lose its identity in the brackish estuaries at its
many insignificant mouths. The swift stroke by which the Cascades were
parted for the Columbia left "The Achilles of Rivers" unimpaired in
vigour. It rolls out of the mountains with a force which endless aeons
have not weakened to a point where it was incapable of carrying the silt
torn down by its erosive actions far out into the sea. It is the one
great river that does not run for scores, perhaps hundreds, of miles
through a flat, monotonous delta; the one great stream that meets the
ocean strength for strength. The Nile, the Niger, the Amazon, the
Yangtse, the Mississippi--all of the other great rivers--find their way
to the sea through miasmic swamps; only the Columbia finishes in a
setting worthy of that in which it takes its rise. Nay, more than that.
Superlative to the last degree as is the scenery along the Columbia,
from its highest glacial sources in the Rockies and Selkirks right down
to the Cascades, there is not a gorge, a vista, a panorama, a cascade of
which I cannot truthfully say: "That reminds me of something I have seen
before." The list would include the names of most of the scenic wonders
that the world has come to know as the ultimate expression of the grand
and the sublime; but in time my record of comparisons would be complete.
But for the distinctive grandeur of that fifty miles of cliff-walled
gorge where the Columbia rolls through its Titan-torn rift in the
Cascades, I fail completely to find a comparison. It is unique; without
a near-rival of its kind.
Because so many attempts--all of them more or less futile--have been
made to describe the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia, I shall not rush in
here with word pictures where even railway pamphleteers have failed. The
fact that several of the points I attained in the high Selkirks are
scarcely more than explored, and that many stretches I traversed of the
upper river are very rarely visited, must be the excuse for such essays
at descriptions as I have now and then been tempted into in the
foregoing chapters. That excuse is not valid in connection with the
Cascade Gorge, and, frankly, I am mighty glad of the chance to side-step
the job. I must beg leave, however, to make brief record of an
interesting "scenic coincidence" that was impressed on my mind the
afternoon that I pulled through the great chasm of the Cascades.
It was a day of sunshine and showers, with the clouds now revealing, now
concealing the towering mountain walls on either hand. The almost
continuous rains of the last four days had greatly augmented the flow of
the streams, and there was one time, along toward evening, that I
counted seven distinct waterfalls tumbling over a stretch of tapestried
cliff on the Oregon side not over two miles in length. And while these
shimmering ribbons of fluttering satin were still within eye-scope, a
sudden shifting of the clouds uncovered in quick succession three
wonderful old volcanic cones--Hood, to the south, Adams, to the north,
and a peak which I think must have been St. Helens to the west.
Instantly the lines of Tennyson's _Lotos Eaters_ came to my mind.
"A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.
They saw the gleaming river seaward flow
From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops,
Three silent pinnacles of aged snow,
Stood sunset-flushed; and, dew'd with showery drops,
Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse."
Tennyson, of course, was writing of some tropic land thirty or forty
degrees south of Oregon, for in the next verse he speaks of palms and
brings the "mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters" swimming about the keel;
and yet there is his description, perfect to the last, least word, of
what any one may see in a not-too-cloudy day from the right point on the
lower Columbia.
The Hood and the White Salmon flow into the Columbia almost opposite
each other, the former from Mount Hood, to the south, and the latter
from Mount Adams, to the north. White Salmon, perched on the mountains
of the Washington side, is, so far as I can recall, the "Swiss-iest"
looking village in America. At close range it would doubtless lose much
of its picturesqueness, but from the river it is a perfect bit of the
Tyrol or the Bernese-Oberland. The Hood River Valley is one of the very
richest in all the West, running neck-and-neck with Yakima and Wenatchee
for the Blue Ribbon honours of Northwestern apple production. It is
also becoming a dairying centre of considerable importance. I was
genuinely sorry that my "through" schedule made it impossible to visit a
valley of which I had heard so much and so favourably.
Nearing the Cascades, I headed over close to the Oregon bank for a
glimpse of the famous "sunken forest." This is one of the strangest
sights on the lower river. For a considerable distance I pulled along
the stumps of what had once been large forest trees, the stubby boles
showing plainly through the clear water to a very considerable depth.
There is some division of opinion as to whether these trees were
submerged following the damming up of the river by the slide which
formed the Cascades, or whether they have slid in from the mountainside
at a later date. As there is still enough of a riverward earth-movement
to necessitate a realignment of the rails on the south bank of the
Cascades, it is probable that the latter is the correct theory. The
self-preservative character of Oregon pine is proverbial, but it hardly
seems reasonable to believe that it would last through the very
considerable geologic epoch that must have elapsed since the Cascades
were formed.
Hugging the Oregon shore closely, I pulled down toward the head of the
Cascades canal. The water continued almost lake-like in its slackness
even after the heavy rumble of the fall began to beat upon the air. I
was taking no chances of a last-minute bolt from the still restive
_Imshallah_, however, and skirted the sandy bank so closely that twice I
found myself mixed up in the remains of the past season's salmon-traps.
Passing a big sawmill, I entered the canal and kept rowing until I came
plump up against the lofty red gates. An astonishingly pretty girl who
peered down from above said she didn't know what a lock-master was
(being only a passenger waiting for the steamer herself), but thought a
man hammering on the other side of the gate looked like he might be
something of that kind. She was right. The lock-master said he would
gladly put me through, but would be greatly obliged if I would wait
until he locked down the steamer, as he was pretty busy at the moment.
That would give me half an hour to go down and size up the tail of the
Cascades, which I would have to run immediately on coming out at the
foot of the lock.
There is a fall of twenty-five feet at the Cascades, most of it in the
short, sharp pitch at the head. It is this latter stretch that is
avoided by the canal and locks, the total length of which is about half
a mile. The two lock chambers are identical in dimensions, each being
ninety feet by four hundred and sixty-five in the clear. They were
opened to navigation in 1896, and were much used during the early years
of the present century. With the extension of the railways, (especially
with the building of the "North-bank" line), and the improvement of the
roads, with the incidental increase of truck-freighting, it became more
and more difficult for the steamers to operate profitably even on the
lower river. One after another they had been taken off their runs, until
the _J. N. Teal_, for which I was now waiting, was the last steamer
operating in a regular service on the Columbia above Portland.
Opening the great curving gates a crack, the lock-master admitted
_Imshallah_ to the chamber, from where--in the absence of a ladder--I
climbed up fifty feet to the top on the beams of the steel-work. That
was a pretty stiff job for a fat man, or rather one who had so recently
been fat. I was down to a fairly compact two hundred and twenty by now,
but even that required the expenditure of several foot-tons of energy to
lift it out of that confounded hole. The main fall of the Cascades was
roaring immediately on my right, just beyond the narrow island that had
been formed when the locks and canal were constructed. It was indeed a
viciously-running chute, suggesting to me the final pitch of the
left-hand channel of Rock Island Rapids rather than Grand Rapids, to
which it is often compared. I had heard that on rare occasions steamers
had been run down here at high water; at the present stage it looked to
me that neither a large nor a small boat would have one chance in a
hundred of avoiding disaster.
The canal and locks avoided that first heavy fall of the Cascades
completely, but the swift tumble of waters below was quite rough enough
to make a preliminary survey well worth while. The steamer channel was
on the Washington side, so that it was necessary for a boat to head
directly across the current immediately on emerging from the lower lock
chamber. The Oregon side of the river was thick with rocks right away
round the bend, with not enough clear water to permit the passage of
even a skiff. My course, therefore, would have to be the same as that of
the steamer--just as sharply across to the opposite side as oars would
take me. I had put _Imshallah_ through worse water than that a score of
times, and, while it wasn't the sort of a place where one would want to
break an oar or even catch a "crab," there was no reason to believe that
we should have the least trouble in pulling across the hard-running
swirls. Of course, if _Imshallah_ really was still smarting under the
indignity of that oil-bath.... But no--I honestly think there was nothing
of distrust of my well-tried little skiff behind my sudden change of
plans. Rather, I should say, it was due to the fact that a remark of the
lock-master had brought me to a sudden realization that I now arrived at
what I had always reckoned as my ultimate objective--tide-water.
I had been planning to run on four miles farther to Bonneville that
afternoon, in the hope of being able to pull through the forty miles of
slackening water to Vancouver the following day. There I would get a tug
to take the skiff up the Willamette to Portland, where I intended to
leave her. As some of the finest scenery on the Columbia is passed in
the twenty miles below the Cascades, this promised me another memorable
day on the river--provided that there was only an occasional decent
interval between showers. It was the lock-master's forecast of another
rainy day, together with his assurance that the foot of the locks was
generally rated as the head of tide-water, that prompted me to change
my mind a few moments before I was due to pull out again to the river,
and book through to Portland on the _Teal_.
With the idea of avoiding the wash of the steamer, I pulled down to the
extreme lower end of the locks before she entered, taking advantage of
the interval of waiting to trim carefully and look to my oars for the
pull across the foot of the Cascades. I was intending to let the _Teal_
lock out ahead of me, and then pull as closely as possible in her wake,
so as to have her below me to pick up the pieces in case anything went
wrong. It was close to twilight now, with the sodden west darkening
early under the blank grey cloud-mass of another storm blowing up-river
from the sea. If that impetuous squall could have curbed its impatience
and held off a couple of minutes longer, it might have had the
satisfaction of treating me to a good soaking, if nothing more. As it
was, I flung up my hands and _kamerad-ed_ at the opening pelt of the big
rain-drops. Speaking as one Columbia River skipper to another, I hailed
the Captain of the _J. N. Teal_ and asked him if he would take me and my
boat aboard.
"Where bound?" he bawled back.
"Portland," I replied.
"Aw right. Pull up sta'bo'd bow lively--'fore gate open!"
A dozen husky roustabouts, urged on by an impatient Mate, scrambled to
catch the painter and give us a hand-up. I swung over the side all
right, but _Imshallah_, hanging back a bit, came in for some pretty
rough pulling and hauling before they got her on deck. The two or three
of her planks that were started in the melee constituted about the worst
injury the little lady received on the whole voyage.
And so _Imshallah_ and I came aboard the _J. N. Teal_ to make the last
leg of our voyage as passengers. The gates were turning back before I
had reached the upper deck, and a few minutes later the
powerfully-engined old stern-wheeler went floundering across the
foam-streaked tail of the Cascades and off down the river. Castle
Rock--nine hundred feet high and sheer-walled all around--was no more
than a ghostly blur in the darkness as we slipped by in the still
rapidly moving current. Multnomah's majesty was blanked behind the
curtain of night and a driving rain, and only a distant roar on the port
beam told where one of the loveliest of American waterfalls took its
six-hundred-foot leap from the brink of the southern wall of the river.
Cape Horn and Rooster Rock were swathed to their foundations in
streaming clouds.
Once the _Teal_ was out on the comparatively open waters of the lower
river, the Captain came down for a yarn with me--as one Columbia skipper
to another. He had spent most of his life on the Snake and lower
Columbia, but he seemed to know the rapids and canyons below the
Canadian line almost reef by reef, and all of the old skippers I had met
by reputation. He said that he had never heard of any one's ever having
deliberately attempted to run the Cascades in anything smaller than a
steamer, although an endless lot of craft had come to grief by getting
in there by accident. The only time a man ever went through in a small
boat and came out alive was about ten years ago. That lucky navigator,
after drinking most of a Saturday night in the town, came down to the
river in the dim grey dawn of a Sunday, got into his boat and pushed
off. It was along toward church-time that a ferry-man, thirty miles or
more down river, picked up a half filled skiff. Quietly sleeping in the
stern-sheets, with nothing but his nose above water, was the only man
that ever came through the Cascades in a small boat.
The Captain looked at me with a queer smile after he told that story. "I
don't suppose you were heeled to tackle the Cascades just like that?" he
asked finally.
And so, for the last time, I was taken for a boot-legger. But no--not
quite the last. I believe it was the porter at Hotel Portland who asked
me if--ahem!--if I had got away with anything from Canada. And for all
of that incessant trail of smoke, no fire--or practically none.
The day of my arrival in Portland I delivered _Imshallah_ up to the
kindest-faced boat-house proprietor on the Willamette and told him to
take his time about finding her a home with some sport-loving Oregonian
who knew how to treat a lady right and wouldn't give her any kind of
menial work to do. I told him I didn't want to have her work for a
living under any conditions, as I felt she had earned a rest; and to
impress upon whoever bought her that she was high-spirited and not to be
taken liberties with, such as subjecting her to garbage shower-baths and
similar indignities. He asked me if she had a name, and I told him that
she hadn't--any more; that the one she had been carrying had ceased to
be in point now her voyage was over. It had been a very appropriate name
for a boat on the Columbia, though, I assured him, and I was going to
keep it to use if I ever made the voyage again.
Portland, although it is not directly upon the Columbia, has always made
that river distinctively its own. I had realized that in a vague way for
many years, but it came home to me again with renewed force now that I
had arrived in Portland after having had some glimpse of every town and
village from the Selkirks to the sea. (Astoria and the lower river I had
known from many steamer voyages in the past.) Of all the thousands
living on or near the Columbia, those of Portland still struck me as
being the ones who held this most strikingly individual of all the
world's rivers at most nearly its true value. With Portlanders, I should
perhaps include all of those living on the river from Astoria to The
Dalles. These, too, take a mighty pride in their great river, and regard
it with little of that distrustful reproach one remarks so often on the
upper Columbia, where the settlers see it bearing past their parched
fields the water and the power that would mean the difference to them
between success and disaster. When this stigma has been wiped out by
reclamation (as it soon will be), without a doubt the plucky pioneers of
the upper Columbia will see in their river many beauties that escape
their troubled eyes to-day.
The early Romans made some attempt to give expression to their love of
the Tiber in monuments and bridges. It would be hard indeed to conceive
of anything in marble or bronze, or yet in soaring spans of steel, that
would give adequate expression to the pride of the people of the lower
Columbia in their river; and so it is a matter of felicitation that they
have sought to pay their tribute in another way. There was inspiration
behind the conception of the idea of the Columbia Highway, just as there
was genius and rare imagination in the carrying out of that idea. I have
said that the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia is a scenic wonder apart
from all others; that it stands without a rival of its kind. Perhaps the
greatest compliment that I can pay to the Columbia Highway is to say
that it is worthy of the river by which it runs.
(THE END)
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER NOTES:
Alternate spellings and archaic words have been retained.
page 82: "experienced" changed to "inexperienced" (Roos was young
and inexperienced).
page 96: added closing quotation mark which was missing in the
original ("... than some the old girl's had.").
page 147: "rifflles" changed to "riffles" (four or five riffles
below).
page 160: "Lientenant" changed to "Lieutenant" (Lieutenant Thomas
W. Symons).
page 163: "avenue" changed to "Avenue" (Fifth Avenue).
page 300: "spilts" changed to "splits" (the river splits upon).
page 315: "goddes" changed to "goddess" (this goddess of the
Columbia).
page 320: "staight" changed to "straight" (straight on through
to).
page 331: "a" added to sentence for continuity (We were going to
have a run for our money).
page 366: added "and" (Miss S---- and I).
page 380: "of" changed to "or" (The two or three of her planks).
page 380: "melee" changed to "melee" (that were started in the
melee).