The first man to whom we spoke about canoeing down the Lumbee was
not encouraging. The water would be too high for fishing, and what
with whirlpools and other dire, vaguely hinted-at dangers he did not
reckon we would even get to Lumberton, to say nothing of going all the
way through to the sea. But our weather-stained mail held forth no
inducements to return North to be buffeted about by a blizzard, and our
dismal friend’s croakings but seemed to us promises of an exciting trip
and strengthened our determination to go--to go, we secretly hoped,
despite all hazard. He proved to be a melancholy deceiver; we found
excitement, but not the kind he foretold. The natives know precious
little about the Lumbee.
Our first confirmation of this was when we discovered that the
authority on the river is Dr. John Warren Achorn, who has a winter
home at Pinebluff. This canoeing enthusiast told us much about the
river--that till three years ago, barring the natives’ cypress dugouts,
the Lumbee had never borne a canoe, and that, while he and others
had been down a hundred and eighty miles, no one had ever gone clear
through from the headwaters to the sea at Georgetown, S. C. Here was
an additional fillip--we were going to blaze the way! Dr. Achorn also
extended to us the courtesies of the Mid-Winter Canoe Club, and, thanks
to him, we used one of the club canoes. He would have fitted us out
with a complete kit had we needed it.
“It was a misty, moisty morning, and cloudy was the weather,” when we
pushed off from Blue’s Bridge and started down the Lumbee. We, by the
way, were two men and two dogs, Leonard Chester Freeman and I, his
setter “Belle” and my Scottish terrier “Dixie”. Snugly stowed away
in our sixteen foot canoe were a shelter tent, blankets and ponchos,
duffle bags, two shotguns and a .22 rifle with ammunition, a camera,
cooking kit and food supplies for a week; a two hundred pound outfit,
but there are no carrys on the Lumbee.
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
BLUE’S BRIDGE, PINE BLUFF, N. C.]
Half a dozen strokes and we were round a bend. The little clubhouse
under the great pines had vanished. Faintly, through the thickets,
Dr. Achorn’s cheery voice reached us, calling the Indian’s “_Bon
Voyage!_”--“Good hunting!” Then, save for the swish of the paddles and
the buzzing of a couple of precocious dragon-flies all was silent.
Apparently, we were miles from civilization. The strange wildness of
the Lumbee country strikes you at once. It is all a tangled wilderness,
wild and rampant. There are no stump pastures, such as one meets along
the banks of the rivers of the North Woods; no clearings with a squatty
cabin and a field of scraggly corn; no trace of the hand of man. Except
for the friends who pursued us in a motor to give us a farewell banquet
in our first night’s camp, we saw no human being for eighty miles.
Again unlike the northern rivers, the headwaters of the Lumbee do not
“chatter over stony ways”; they zigzag, silent and swift, over a bed
of white sand. If every river had its own private trade-mark, surely
“XXX” would be granted to the Lumbee, for it twists and turns and loops
about till beside it the proverbial corkscrew seems to be the shortest
distance between two points. If you are mathematically inclined, you
can calculate the curves from this data: we paddled twenty-eight miles
from Blue’s Bridge to McLeod’s Bluff, where we made our first camp, and
our friends’ speedometer showed they had covered just six miles over
the road between these two points.
There are no rapids or falls in the upper Lumbee, but the water
glides along at a merry rate, scooting round the bends--“cow faces”
the natives call them--in a way that, till you get just the knack of
cutting the corners, is quite disconcerting. Every once in a while,
which may mean every three miles or every thirteen, we came to what
the natives are pleased to call bluffs, rises of ground that stand,
dry and sheltered, a couple of feet above the swirling high water.
Between these bluffs the river is literally bankless. The flood flows
round and through the trees, a floating forest not a swamp, for there
is no marshy ground and few reeds or water grasses. On the entire trip
we never slapped at a mosquito or a fly. During the hot summers, this
tangled jungle must teem with them, but from September to May, though
the weather is mild enough, they vanish completely.
As it slips quietly to the sea, the Lumbee passes through three
distinct phases, each different, each with a charm all its own. During
the first stage, the hundred and thirty miles from the headwaters to
Lumberton, the river winds its way through the Sandhills. Here the
bottom land is heavily timbered, but it is hard country to lumber,
and the woods are almost virgin forest. During the cold weather the
swirling high water, and in the summer the noxious malaria, have kept
the lumberman and his swinging axe out of the Lumbee woods, and the
country is a great natural game preserve. Giant long-leafed pines
dominate the thickets. These great trees shoot straight up fifty or
seventy-five feet, their heads crowned by their long needles and huge
cones, as the palms are crowned. Beneath are great dark clumps of
mountain laurel, glossy bluegums, and tall bushes of bright holly all
dotted with scarlet berries. Here and there the strained and twisted
branches of a black-jack, that curious dwarf oak that seems to have
been racked by some terrible torture, stand stark and bold among the
leaves of its fellows, for even in December, the Lumbee woods are
bright and green.
What capital places for a snug camp the little bluffs are--dry and
sandy, sheltered by the evergreens, and stocked with great stores of
the best fire-wood in all the world. Those dry pine sticks, saturated
with rosin and tar, crackle at a single match’s provocation into a
bright flame. Some of these Lumbee camps of ours cling in my memory as
the most glorious camps I have known. I can hear now the happy gurgle
of the river and the swishing whispers of the wind in the pines. The
pungent incense of our snapping fire, mixed with the fragrance of the
pines and damp, cool, woodsy smell of the river bank even now fills my
nostrils.
From the very first we paddled one at a time, one hour on and one hour
off; and oh, how much more quickly passed the “sabbatical hour,” when
you lolled in the bow, than the “paddlatical hour” in the stern. This
trip ruthlessly destroyed all my faith in copybook maxims about toil
making the hours pass quickly.
We had left Blue’s Bridge but a few moments when we came suddenly upon
a great colony of blue herons, giants of the race, standing over five
feet. Disturbed at our boorish intrusion upon their domestic affairs,
the great, grey birds flapped laboriously up from their crude nests
in the tree-tops. They rise as painfully as a gouty old man, but once
fairly underway they sail gracefully in huge arcs. We grew to know
them well before our trip was over, for they and the buzzards are both
plentiful. For their beauty they are protected the year round, and the
law, for the utilitarian reason that they act as public scavengers, is
equally kind to the buzzards, who are tame to the point of familiarity.
One battered old fellow, whose wings and tail lacked several feathers,
took a keen, morbid interest in us. Soaring just behind us, watching
with his wicked, hungry eyes, he followed us all one morning, but he
finally convinced himself that we were going to get through all right,
and disgusted, he gave up the chase.
In the Lumbee woods are many wild turkeys, and during the fall and
early winter, before the water has risen so high, if one has a still
paddle, he can often slip round a bend and surprise a stately old
gobbler and his hens feeding on the bank. ’Coons and ’possums--African
pork--are also plentiful. Often a slim brown mink slips silently off a
log, and sometimes a lusty otter streaks across the stream, leaving a
wake like a miniature power boat.
The middle of the third afternoon, while I dozed in the bow, Freeman
shot us through a narrow strip where a fallen tree had all but dammed
the stream. As we skinned skilfully between the bank and the branches,
a most unmistakably hog-like grunt woke me thoroughly, and Freeman,
with a couple of vigorous strokes, brought us about and headed up
stream. Several times we had come up with wild hogs, great porkers who
have taken the back-to-nature call too seriously. Years ago--no one
knows when--they forsook the pen with its three square meals a day to
roam the woods in search of uncertain livelihood. Nomadic life has
made them lean and gaunt, and armed them with stubby tusks that stick
wickedly through their lips. We had some pot shots at these tough
customers, but they had always rushed away through the flooded woods
where pursuit was impossible. We were therefore mightily surprised to
find, when Freeman paddled us back, a great three-hundred pounder,
black as the ace of spades and ugly as sin, who stood ground on a
little ribbon of land between the river and the back waters. Cautiously
we approached, I in the bow with gun ready waiting for the splashing
rush to cover, Freeman paddling and trying to quiet the dogs who were
most forcefully expressing their opinions on the subject of wild hogs.
In vain did we wait for the snort and the splashing rush to cover, and,
when almost on top of her, we discovered the reason for her determined
stand. A volley of wild squeals greeted us. We had found a sow with
twelve day-old piggies. I landed, and “Uff er--r--runt!” she bowled
at me. I stuck my gun barrel in her face and she stopped, grunting
and chopping her short, thick tusks. Freeman, having tied the dogs to
the canoe braces, joined me and staved off her bold attacks while I
snapped the brave lady’s picture. Then, after a deal of maneuvring,
we kidnapped one of her offspring. I managed to get a youngster on a
paddle and flipped him like a pancake over to Freeman, who deposited
him unceremoniously in the canoe. Off we pushed, delighted with
visions of roast pigling, and the old lady gave us a parting rush.
[Illustration: THE BRAVE LADY’S PORTRAIT]
Our little piggie was, barring nothing, the most homely beastie ever
seen. He was black and shiny, like a shaved and varnished puppy, with
a big, shapeless wedge of a head, topped off with enormous, flappy
ears. He squealed, and squawked, and snorted, and grunted in every key,
and every waking minute he kept up his racket. But his comical antics
and unfailing good nature won our hearts. We did not enjoy roast pig,
and since he did not prove to be a good canoeist, we sold him, three
days later, for the munificent sum of “two bits.” His new owner carried
him off to join him to a family of tame pigs in his pens.
[Illustration: FEEDING THE CAPTIVE]
Just above Alma (Alma is a puffing saw mill surrounded by dirty,
dilapidated negro shacks), we passed under Gilchrist’s Bridge, where
Sherman’s army, marching north after taking Charleston, crossed the
river. Just below Alma is the reservation of the Croatoan Indians, the
mysterious blue-eyed race descended, so it is said, from Sir Walter
Raleigh’s Lost Colony, which was planted on Roanoke Island in 1587
and disappeared as completely as if swallowed by the earth. We met
several of these Indians--short, thick-set fellows with yellow skins
and wide-set, blue eyes--and found them so engrossed in planting cotton
that it was hard to believe they were for years a thorn in the side of
the Government and the army.
Nearing Lumberton, a busy little town with an attractive Confederate
Monument, all strangely like a New England village with its shaft “To
our Soldiers and Sailors,” the country began to change. We were leaving
the long-leafed pines of the Sandhills. Cypress became more and more
common, and occasionally we spied a bunch of Spanish moss swaying in
the branches overhead. Just above Lumberton the river twists itself all
into knots and then straightens out, so the last couple of miles into
the town are straight as a canal, between banks that rise steeply from
each side of the swift, deep stream.
We created a sensation in Lumberton. Khaki clad, in flannel shirts,
much in need of the barber’s services, traveling in a strange craft
whose frailty aroused great admiration of our supposed courage, and
accompanied by two dogs and a young wild pig--it is small wonder we
disembarked amid a crowd that thought we were crazy, but was too
polite to say so. The sole and only hotel, so we discovered, had been
torn down to make room for a bank, but we found a genial savior in an
energetic gentleman who combines the various duties of proprietor of
the movies, political boss, reporter for the local paper, and last, but
not least, husband of the landlady of “th’ best eatin’-house in town.”
Here we could eat, and our factotum found us a place to sleep with one
of his neighbors.
Below Lumberton, which we left next morning after stocking our larder
and purchasing a nursing-bottle for piggie, we came fairly to the
second stage of the river. The woods of the Sandhills had vanished;
we were in a semi-tropical jungle. Bottle-neck cypress rose, like
the columns of a cathedral, right out of the water. When they rise
in mid-stream, the lumbermen recognize such a phenomenon of Nature
by calling them “dram trees” and claiming a drink when the logs
are safely by. There are parts of the river where, if this jovial
custom is strictly followed, it must take a remarkably hard head to
bring the lumber to the mill. The undergrowth is a tangle of giant
ferns and cactus-like palms, all snarled up with twining creepers.
Overhead every crotch in the trees is a jardiniere of ferns, and every
branch is coated with lichens, and festooned with Spanish moss and
vines. Here is fascinating canoeing. The current slips along merrily
between the banks, and one can whirl along almost without dipping the
paddle in the water. In other places, the water sprawls out through
the cypress jungle and there is no more current than in a bath-tub.
Chattering black birds in whole colonies scolded us roundly; red and
yellow wood-peckers played tag up and down the tree trunks; scarlet
tanagers and sapphire kingfishers darted down the stream before us,
while humming-birds, like great bejewelled moths, hovered about our
canoe. The trees had burst into leaf as if by magic, and the delicate
greens of their new foliage made a delightful setting against which to
show off the brilliant colors of the bright birds. We had canoed right
into the heart of Fairyland at the first of a glorious spring. Who
would believe that it was the first of March and that a blizzard was
throttling the North?
[Illustration: “DRAM TREES”]
Soon we left this Fairyland and came to the great Buzzard Flats, the
stillest, weirdest waters one ever canoed. After threading our way
between the decaying bastions of the Old State Line Bridge, once a
famous thoroughfare, now but a mark to tell the lumbermen they have
passed from North to South Carolina, we had slipped with the Lumbee
into the waters of the Little Pee Dee. They slide together these two
great rivers and except that the banks are now a hundred yards from
side to side one would hardly know the change. But it is different
when the Little Pee Dee joins the Great Pee Dee. Here the rush of the
big river’s muddy floods backs up the slower waters of the smaller
river. They sprawl over the flat country into a great labyrinth of
lakes and lagoons, the famous Buzzard Flats of the Pee Dee. It was a
cool, still, grey afternoon when we paddled through this strange place.
The sky stretched steely grey above us, and on all sides the still
water reached away like great sheets of ground glass. The great, grey
cypress, all hung with grey Spanish moss, rose in straight colonnades.
Save for the swish-swish of the paddles and the clunk-a-plunk of
innumerable turtles which dropped dully into the water at our coming,
all was still as the tomb. Even the birds added to the eerie spell; big
blue heron swinging in lazy circles; grey cranes streaking across the
sky; buzzards hanging all but motionless far overhead; and owls bolting
away in their senseless flight.
But with all their witching spell these Flats are a capital place in
which to get lost. Forewarned, we kept to the right when in doubt,
for the Great Pee Dee comes in on the right side. All afternoon we
paddled through these bewitched lagoons, and the sun, a great, hazy
red ball, was just sinking when the rush of yellow water told us we
were in the Great Pee Dee. We both heaved a sigh of relief, and then
laughed at each other. Neither had spoken of it, but we had both been
contemplating the prospect of a chilly night, cold and without a warm
supper, spent in the canoe among the misty reaches of water and cypress.
The river’s swift current carried us along without paddling and
for half an hour we idly watched the rearguard of the great duck
army hurrying northwards from their winter quarters among the rice
islands at the mouth of the Great Pee Dee. They came as if flung
from catapults, flying high, singly, in couples, trios, and little
flocks of five or six. Often in the evening stillness we could hear
the whr-r-r-r-r of their strong wings long before they would burst
out of the twilight. Then a black streak would be drawn against the
pink, western sky, and be lost in the hazy distance over the Buzzard
Flats. We were too late for duck shooting, but just in time for the run
of spring shad, and we drifted by two rowboats in which some singing
darkies toiled with a giant’s net loaded with the fish that soon would
be commanding a fancy price in the Northern markets.
That night we camped our last camp on the river. High up on the right
bank we pitched our tent under a spreading live oak, and we sat
silently smoking till our fire had died to a handful of glowing embers.
Tomorrow we would be back in the world of today again, the bustling,
busy world of men; but tonight we were still in the great, wild woods,
close to the heart of Mother Earth. A chugging little flat-bottomed
steamer awoke us in the morning. She puffed laboriously up stream,
and threatened to soon tire of being overloaded with bulging cotton
bales, and drop quietly to the river bottom. We made a late start, and
slipped reluctantly by the banks of magnolias, wild honeysuckle, and
yellow jasmines. Here was the third stage of the trip. We had come out
of the jungle into a bit of the Old South, a bit curiously preserved
from the hard blows of Fate.
[Illustration: A PEE DEE PLANTATION]
Behind the magnolias we caught glimpses of great colonial mansions,
many of them in ruins, others we knew in the hands of strangers, for
the rice islands across the river are now all wild and untilled. These
rice islands have a strange history. ’Way back in Colonial days they
were given over to indigo culture, and in Georgetown Indigo Growers’
Hall, an impressive building, still bears silent testimony to the
importance of the industry that was destroyed by better communication
with the East. During the Revolution, these same islands sheltered
Marion, the Swamp Fox, and his ragged patriots, and Yohahanna’s Ferry
is still pointed out as their favorite crossing place to and from
their raids on the British forces. Later these islands became huge
rice plantations, accounted the most valuable land in the South and
supporting the flower of southern chivalry. The Civil War laid waste
this gardenland, but the rice enabled it to regain a shadow of its
former greatness, till, twenty years ago, it was a fourth time ruined
by the discovery that rice could be more economically grown in Texas.
[Illustration: YOHANNAHAS FERRY]
Warm-hearted friends greeted us with open hospitality in this country,
and when we reached Georgetown, after ten glorious days on the river,
we were feted as if we had discovered both Poles and been on a little
side trip to the moon.
[Illustration: INDIGO MAKERS HALL, GEORGETOWN, S. C.]
It took us ten days to follow the winding Lumbee down to the ocean. If
one wishes to break our record it will not be a hard task, for we went
along at a go-as-you-please pace. Anyone who has only canoed in the
North will find curious things and new delights along this little-known
stream. Do not believe it, if some veteran canoeist says “muddy water”
to you. The last forty miles are muddy water, but, even at flood-time,
the Lumbee and the Little Pee Dee twisting through the Sandhills are
clear, or at most stained with juniper. Remember, too, that they glide
between the green banks when northern streams are frozen hard. January
in North Carolina is amazingly like October in Maine or Wisconsin. The
Lumbee is the canoeist’s great excuse to dodge Winter.
[Illustration: Photo by Dr. Achorn
A VISTA OF THE LUMBEE]
=Transcriber’s Notes=
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation and compound words have been maintained
as printed.