Down the Columbia Part 1

Down the Columbia.

by Lewis R. Freeman.

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 appet.i.te 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 t.i.tacaca 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 a.s.sured 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 c.o.x, 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 pa.s.sages, 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 pa.s.sage 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 c.o.x 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 c.o.x 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 Ca.n.a.l 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, pa.s.s 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.

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 pa.s.sage 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 inst.i.tute 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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.