Umatilla is a decrepit little old town that knew its best days away back in the last century, when it was the head of steamer navigation on the Columbia and the terminus of the freighting route to Idaho and eastern Washington. There are rich irrigated lands farther up the Umatilla River, but the development of these seems to have done little for the stagnating old settlement by the Columbia, which has little left but its historic memories. It was by the Umatilla that the rugged Hunt and the remnants of the Astor overland party came to the Columbia, after what was perhaps the most terrible journey ever made acrossthe continent. And all through the time of thevoyageurs, the trappers and the pioneers, Umatilla was only less important as a halting and portage point than the Cascades and the Dalles.
I pulled away from the jetty of Umatilla at eight o’clock in the morning of November fifteenth. The sky was clear and there was no trace of the mist of the previous evening. There was brilliant, diamond-bright visibility on the river, with the usual early morning mirage effects, due to the chill stratum of air lying close to the water. This exaggerated considerably the height of distant riffles, lifting them up into eye-scope much sooner than they would have been picked up ordinarily. I put on my “Gieve” and blew it up in anticipation of a stiff fight at Devil’s Run, only to find just enough rocks and riffles there to make me certain of locating them. I could see, however, that the formation was such that there might have been very troublesome water there at higher, and possibly lower, stages. Out of charity for the tellers of a good many awesome tales I had to listen to in respect of rapids I subsequently found to be comparatively innocuous, I am inclined to believe that a number of them were substantially straight accounts of disasters which had actually occurred in flood season, or at times when other water levels than those I encountered made the riffles in question much more troublesome.
I had an easy day of it for rapids, but, as a consequence of the comparatively slow water, rather a hard one for pulling. Canoe Encampment Rapids, twenty miles below Devil’s Run, gave me a good lift for amile or more, but not enough to make much of a respite from the oars if I was going to make the fifty miles I had set for my day’s run. I was still ten miles short of that at four o’clock when a drizzling rain setting in from the south-west decided me to land for shelter at Hepburn Junction, on the left bank. That was the first rain I had encountered since passing the Canadian Boundary, after a month of practically continuous storms. There was nothing but a railway station at the Junction, but a nearby road-camp offered the chance of food and shelter. The young contractor—he was doing the concrete work on a State Highway bridge at that point—eyed my bedraggled figure somewhat disapprovingly at first, at a loss, apparently, as to whether I was a straight hobo or merely a disguised boot-legger. An instant later we had recognized each other as football opponents of Los Angeles-Pasadena school-days. His name was Walter Rees, of a family prominent among early Southern California pioneers. With the rain pattering on the tent roof, we talked each other to sleep lamenting the good old days of the “flying wedge” and massed play in football.
It was clear again the following morning, but with a mistiness to the west masking Mount Hood and the Cascades, to which I was now coming very near. The cliffs had been rearing up higher and higher at every mile, great walls of red-brown and black rock strongly suggestive, in their rugged barrenness, of the buttressed, turreted and columned formation through which the river runs below the mouth of the Spokane. Owyhee, Blalock and Four O’clock rapids were easyrunning, but the sustained roar which the slight up-river breeze brought to my ears as the black, right-angling gorge of Rock Creek came in sight was fair warning that there was really rough water ahead. Although I had been able to gather very little information along the way, the fact that I had so far descended but a small part of the two hundred feet of drop between Umatilla and Celilo Falls meant that the several rapids immediately ahead would have to make up for the loafing the Columbia had been guilty of for the last sixty miles.
Taking advantage of the quiet stretch of water below Four O’clock Rapids, I went all over the skiff as she drifted in the easy current, tuning her up for the slap-banging she could not fail to receive in the long succession of sharp riffles which began at Rock Creek. In tightening up the brass screws along the gunwale, I removed and threw into the bottom of the boat both of my oar-locks. When I started to restore them to place as the roar of the nearing rapid grew louder, I found that one of them—the left—had been kicked out of reach under the bottom-boards. Rather than go to the trouble of tearing up the latter just then, I replaced the missing lock with one from my duffle-bag, a roughly-smithed piece of iron that I had carried away as a mascot from an oldbatteauat Boat Encampment. It proved quite a bit too snug for its socket, besides being a deal wider than it should have been for the shaft of my light oar. There was a spoon oar, with a ring lock, under the thwarts, but I was somewhat chary of using it since its mate had snapped with me below Rock Island Rapids.
The river narrowed sharply above Rock Creek, and, standing on a thwart as the skiff drifted down, I saw that the rapid dropped away in a solid stretch of white foam tumbling between black basaltic walls. There was a good, stiff fall, but it was reassuring that I could see right away to the end of the white water, which did not appear to continue around the ninety-degree bend at the foot. It was just the sort of waterImshallahwas at her best in running, so I decided it was simply a matter of choosing the clearest channel and letting her go. A white cross-barred post on the mountainside at the angle of the bend gave me the bearing for the channel a minute or two before I made out the dip of the “intake.” Stowing everything well aft, as I had done at Umatilla, I took up my oars and put her straight over the jade-green tip of the “V.”
That was rough-and-rowdy water, and no mistake. Every roller meant a slam, and every slam meant a shower-bath; but withal, it was mostly spray that came over her bows—nothing really to bother about. And soImshallahwould have run it right through—had not a sharp dig I gave with my left oar jerked the latter out of that “open-faced” Boat Encampment mascot lock and sent me keeling over backwards. The next moment she was wallowing, beam-on, into the troughs and over the crests of the combers, dipping green water at every roll.
Recovering my seat as quickly as possible, I tried to bring her head up again by backing with the right oar. She swung obediently enough, but I could not hold her bow down-stream once she was headed right.Rather than chance that “mascot” oar-lock again, I tumbled aft and did what I could with the paddle. Down as she was by the stern, that brought her head right out of the water and made it rather hopeless getting any way on her. She tumbled on through to the foot of the rapid without putting a gunwale under again, however, a circumstance for which I was highly thankful. She already had five or six inches of water in her, as I found as soon as I began to bail. It is just as well the trouble didn’t occur at the head of the rapid. We were half way down when I ceased to function, andImshallahhad about all she wanted to navigate the remainder. I was also duly thankful that there was nothing more than a few bad swirls at the foot of the rapid. Standing on her tail as she was after I plumped down in the stern with the paddle, a good strong whirlpool, such as must form at that sharp bend at high-water, would have made not more than one comfortable mouthful of her.
From the foot of Rock Creek Rapids to the head of Squally Hook Rapids is something less than four miles of not very swift water. It took me about all the time the boat was drifting that distance to get her bailed out enough to retrieve my lost oar-lock from under the bottom-boards. Squally Hook, I could see, was much the same sort of a short, sharp, savage rapid as Rock Creek. There was the same restricted “intake,” and the same abrupt bend just beyond the foot; only below Squally Hook the river turned to the left, where at Rock Creek it had turned to the right.
The sheer two-thousand-foot cliff on the inside of the bend that gives its name to the rapid is well calledSqually Hook. What had been a gentle ten-miles-an-hour breeze on the river above began resolving itself into a succession of fitful gusts of twenty or thirty as I approached the rock-walled bend. Even a steady head-wind makes steering awkward in going into a rapid; a gusty one is a distinct nuisance. To avoid the necessity of any sharp change of course after I was once among the white-caps, I resolved to use every care in heading into the rapid at exactly the right place. That was why, when I became aware that two girls from a farm-house on a bench above the right bank were motioning me imperiously in that direction, I swerved sharply from the course I had decided upon in an endeavour to locate the channel into which I was sure they were trying to tell me to head. Just what those confounded half-breed Loreli werereallydriving at I never did learn. Perhaps they had apples to sell, or some sweet cider; or perhaps they thought I had some cider that was not sweet. Perhaps it was pure sociability—the desire of a bit of a “talky-talk” with the green-boatedvoyageur. At any rate, they were certainlynottrying to pilot me into a clear channel. That fact walloped me right between the eyes the instant I discovered that I had pulled beyond the entrance of a perfectly straight channel and that there was a barely submerged barrier of rock blocking the river all the way on to the right bank.
That, of course, left me no alternative but to pull back for all that was in me to wait the “intake.” It was a very similar predicament to the one in which the mist had tricked me at the head of Umatilla; onlythere I had room to make the channel and here I didn’t. The current, running now like a mill-race, carried me onto the reef sixty feet to the right of the smooth green chute of the “fairway.”
If it had taken half an hour instead of half a second to shoot out across the shoaling shelf of that froth-hidden reef there might have been time for a goodly bit of worrying anent the outcome. As it was, there was just the sudden thrill of seeing the bottom of the river leaping up to hit the bottom of the boat, the instant of suspense as she touched and dragged at the brink, and then the dizzy nose-dive of two or three feet down into deeper water. It was done so quickly that a stroke checked by the rock of the reef was finished in the up-boil below the little cascade. With an inch or two less of water she might have hung at the brink and swung beam-on to the current, which, of course, would have meant an instant capsize. The way it was, she made a straight clean jump of it, and only buried her nose in the souse-hole for the briefest part of a second when she struck. The rest was merely the matter of three hundred yards of rough running down a rock-clear channel.
The authors of my near-mess-up came capering down the bank in pursuit as I swung out into the smoothening swirls, but I only shook my fist at them and resumed my oars. Darn women, anyway!—when a man’s running rapids, I mean.
Now one would have thought that those two performances were enough for one afternoon, especially as both were very largely due to my own carelessness; but I suppose the “trilogy of trouble” had to berounded out complete. From the foot of Squally Hook Rapids to the head of Indian Rapids is about three miles. The water became ominously slack as I neared what appeared to be a number of great rock islands almost completely barring the river. It was not until I was almost even with the first of them that a channel, very narrow and very straight, opened up along the left bank. Various other channels led off among the islands, but with nothing to indicate how or where they emerged. That flume-like chute down the left bank was plainly the way the steamers went, and certainly the quickest and most direct course on down the river. Peering through the rocky vista, I could see a rain storm racing up the Columbia, with the grey face of it just blotting out a wedge-shaped gorge through the southern cliffs which I knew must be the mouth of the John Day. That storm was another reason why I should choose the shortest and swiftest channel. There ought to be some kind of shelter where this important southern tributary met the Columbia.
Of course, I knew all about still water running deep (which was of no concern to me) and “twisty” (which was of considerable concern). I should certainly have given more thought to the matter of trimming for what was sure to be waiting to snap upImshallahat the foot of that speeding chute of green-black water had not an old friend of mine breezed along just then. He was the engineer of the way freight on the “South-bank” line. We had been exchanging signals in passing for three days now—twice on his down run andonce on his up. This was the first opportunity I had had to show him how a rapid should be run, and I noted with gratification that he appeared to be slowing down so as to miss none of the fine points. On my part, dispensing with my wonted preliminary “look-see,” I swung hard on the oars in an effort to get into the swiftest water before the spectators were out of sight.
As the engine drew up even with me, I balanced my oars with my right hand for a moment and waved the engineer greetings with my left; he, in turn, ran the locomotive with his left hand and waved with his right. Then I saw that the fireman was also waving, and, farther back, the brakeman, from the top of a car, and the conductor from the “lookout” of the caboose. The occupants of the “dirigible grandstand” at the Poughkeepsie regattas had nothing on the crew of that way freight. And the latter, moreover, were treated to a burst of speed such as no man-propelled boat in still water ever came close to. I was not pulling over four or five miles an hour myself, but that smooth, steep, unobstructed chute must have been spilling through its current at close to twenty. In a couple of hundred yards I pulled up three or four car-lengths on the comparatively slow-moving train, and I was still gaining when a sudden “toot-a-too-toot!” made me stop rowing and look around. I had recognized instantly the familiar danger signal, and was rather expecting to see a cow grazing with true bovine nonchalance on the weeds between the ties. Instead, it was the engineer’s wildly gesticulating arm that caught my back-cast eye. He was pointing just ahead of me, and down—evidently at something in the water.
Then I saw it too—a big black funnel-shaped hole down which a wide ribbon of river seemed to be taking a sort of a spiral tumble. It was that entirely well-meanttoot-a-toot, which was intended to prod me, not a cow, into activity, that was primarily responsible for what followed. Had I not ceased rowing on hearing it, it is probable that the skiff would have had enough way when she did strike that whirlpool to carry her right on through. As it wasImshallahsimply did an undulant glide into the watery tentacles of the lurking octopus, snuggled into his breast and prepared to spend the night reeling in a dervish dance with him. I must do the jade the justice of admitting that she had no intention of outraging the proprieties by going any further than a nocturnal terpsichorean revel. Going home for the night with him never entered her mind; so that when he tried to pull the “Cave-Man stuff” and drag her down to his under-water grottoes, she put up the most virtuous kind of resistance. The trouble was that I didn’t want to go even as far as she did. Dancing was the last thing I cared for, with that rain-storm and night coming on. Yet—at least as far as my friends on the way freight ever knew—an all-nightDanse d’Apachelooked very much like what we were up against; for I recall distinctly that when the train was disappearing round the next bendImshallah, her head thrown ecstatically skyward, was still spinning in circles, while Icontinued to fan the air with my oars like an animated Dutch windmill.
It was a mighty sizeable whirlpool, that black-mouthed maelstrom into whichImshallah’ssusceptibility had betrayed both of us. I should say that it was twice the diameter of the one which had given us such a severe shaking just above the Canadian Boundary, and with a “suck” in proportion. What helped the situation now, however, was the fact that the skiff carried rather less than half the weight she did then. At the rate she was taking water over the stern during that first attack, she could not have survived for more than half a minute; now she was riding so much more buoyantly that she was only dipping half a bucket or so once in every two or three rounds. When I saw that she could probably go on dancing for an hour or two without taking in enough water to put her under, something of the ludicrousness of the situation began to dawn on me. Missing the water completely with half of my strokes, and only dealing it futile slaps with the rest, I was making no more linear progress than if I had been riding a merry-go-round. I didn’t dare to put the stern any lower by sliding down there and trying to paddle where there was water to be reached. Crowding her head down by working my weight forward finally struck me as the only thing to do.
With the forward thwart almost above my head this was not an easy consummation to effect, especially with an oar in either hand. Luckily, I was now using the “ring” oar-locks, so that they came along on the oars when I unshipped the latter. Standing up was,of course, out of the question. I simply slid off backwards on to the bottom and wriggled forward in a sitting position until I felt my spine against the thwart. That brought her nose out of the clouds, and she settled down still farther when, after getting my elbows over the seat behind me, I worked up into a rowing position.
The whirlpool was spinning from right to left, and one quick stroke with my left oar—against the current of the “spin,” that is—was enough to shoot her clear. Bad swirls and two or three smaller “twisters” made her course a devious one for the next hundred yards, but she never swung in a complete revolution again. I pulled into smooth water just as the first drops of the storm began to patter on the back of my neck.
The first riffle of John Day Rapids sent its warning growl on the up-river wind before I was a quarter of a mile below the whirlpool, and ahead loomed a barrier of rock islands, rising out of the white foam churned up as the Columbia raced between them. I had to run the first riffle—an easy one—to make the mouth of the John Day, but that was as far as I went. I reckoned there had been quite enough excitement for one afternoon without poking into any more rough water against a rain and head wind. Dropping below the gravel bar off the mouth of the Day, I pulled fifty yards up-stream in a quiet current and mooredImshallahunder the railway bridge. I camped for the night with a couple of motor tourists in a shack near the upper end of the bridge. My hosts were two genial souls, father and son, enjoying an indefinitespell of fishing, hunting and trapping on a stake the former had made in the sale of one of his “prospects” in southern Oregon. They were bluff, big-hearted, genuine chaps, both of them, and we had a highly delightful evening of yarning.
It was clear again the next morning, but with the barometer of my confidence jolted down several notches by what had occurred the previous afternoon. I pulled across the river and sought a quieter way through the second riffle of John Day Rapids than that promised by the boisterous steamer channel. By devious ways and sinuous, I wound this way and that among the black rock islands, until a shallow channel along the right bank let me out of the maze at the lower end. This waste of time and effort was largely due to funkiness on my part, and there was no necessity for it. The steamer channel is white and rough, with something of a whirlpool on the left side at the lower end, but nothing that there is any real excuse for avoiding. The third riffle was nothing to bother about; nor did Schofield’s Rapids, two miles below, offer any difficulties. As a matter of fact, Adventure, having had its innings, was taking a day off, leaving me to follow the Golden Trail of Romance. To-day was “Ladies’ Day” on the Columbia.
Romance first showed her bright eyes at a little farm on the right bank, three miles below Schofield’s Rapids. Landing here to ask about the channel through a rather noisy rapid beginning to boom ahead, I found a delectable apple-cheeked miss of about twelve in charge, her father and mother having gone across to Biggs for the day. She was in sore troubleat the moment of my advent because her newly-born brindle bull calf—her really-truly very own—wouldn’t take nourishment properly. Now as luck would have it, teaching a calf table-manners chanced to be one of the few things I knew about stock-farming. So I showed her how to start in by lettingCultus(that was merely a temporary name, she said, because he was so bad) munch her own finger for a spell, from which, by slow degrees, the lacteal liaison with “Old Mooley” was established. It took us half an hour to getCultusfunctioning on all fours, and rather longer than that to teach her collie, tabby cat, and the latter’s three kittens to sit in a row and have their mouths milked into. It didn’t take us long to exhaust “Old Mooley’s” milk supply at that game, and when I finally climbed over the barnyard fence on the way down to my boat, poorCultuswas left butting captiously at an empty udder. “Apple Cheek” rather wanted me to stay until her father came back, saying that he had gone to Biggs to get a ’breed for a hired man, and that, if he didn’t get the ’breed, maybe I would do. She almost burst into tears with shame when I told her I was a moving picture actor seeking rest and local colour on the Columbia. “You a actor, and I made you milk ‘Old Mooley!’” she sobbed; and it took all my lunch ration of milk chocolate to bring back her smile. Then, like the Scotch bride at Windermere, she asked me if I was Bill Hart. Somehow, I wasn’t quite base enough to tell her a concrete lie like that; so I compromised with a comparative abstraction. I was a rising star in the movie firmament, I said; an eclectic, taking the bestof all the risen stars, of whom much would be heard later. She was still pondering “eclectic” when I pushed off into the current. Bless your heart, little “Apple Cheek,” I hope you didn’t get a spanking for wasting all ofCultus’dinner on the dogs and cats and the side of the barn! You were about the first person I met on the Columbia who didn’t accuse me of being a boot-legger, and the only one who believed me hot off the bat when I said I was a movie star.
The rapid ahead became noisier as I drew nearer, and when I saw it came from a reef which reached four-fifths of the way across the river from the left bank, I pulled in and landed at Biggs to inquire about the channel. The first man I spoke to called a second, and the latter a third, and so onad infinitum. Pretty near to half the town must have been gathered at the railway station giving me advice at the end of a quarter of an hour. Each of them had a different suggestion to make, ranging from dragging through a half-empty back channel just below the town to taking the boat out and running it down the track on a push-cart. As they all were agreed that the steamers used to go down the opposite side, I finally decided that would be the best way through. Not to run too much risk of being carried down onto the reef in pulling across, I lined and poled a half mile up-stream before pushing off. Once over near the right bank, I found a channel broad and deep enough to have run at night.
A couple of miles below Biggs the Columbia is divided by a long narrow rocky island. The deep, direct channel is that to the right, and is called HellGate—the third gorge of that hackneyed name I had encountered since pushing off from Beavermouth. Possibly it was because I was fed-up with the name and all it connoted that I avoided this channel; more likely it was because Romance was at the tow-line. At any rate, I headed into the broad shallow channel that flows by the mouth of the River Des Chutes. It was up this tumultuous stream that Frémont, after camping at the Dalles and making a short boat voyage below, started south over the mountains in search of the mythical river that was supposed to drain from the Utah basin to the Pacific in the vicinity of San Francisco—one of the indomitable “Pathfinder’s” hardest journeys.
Just beyond where the River of the Falls, true to name to the last, came cascading into the Columbia, Romance again raised her golden head—this time out of the steam rising above an Indian “Turkish-bath.” The first time I had found her in the guise of a twelve-year-old; this time it was more like a hundred and twelve. One can’t make certain within a year or two about a lady in a Turkish-bath; it wouldn’t be seemly even totryto do so. Pulling in close to the left bank to look at some queer mud-plastered Indian wickiups, a rush of steam suddenly burst from the side of the nearest one, and out of that spreading white cloud, rising like Aphrodite from the sea-foam, emerged the head and shoulders of an ancient squaw. She was horribly old—literally at the sans eyes, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything (including clothes) stage. Cackling and gesticulating in the rolling steam, shewas thebelle idealof the witch of one’s fancy, muttering incantations above her boiling cauldron.
Frémont, in somewhat humorous vein, tells of visiting an Indian camp in this vicinity on the Columbia, and of how one of the squaws who had rushed forth in completedéshabilleon hearing the voices of strangers, “properized” herself at the last moment by using her papoose—as far as it would go—as a shield. But this old “Aphrodite” I had flushed from cover was so old that, if her youngest child had been ready to hand, and that latter had had one of her own children within reach, and this third one had had a child available, I am certain that still another generation or two would have had to be descended before a papoose sufficiently young enough to make “properization” prop“r would have been found. I trust I make that clear. And when youhavevisualized it, isn’t it a funny pyramid?
With two or three more “Aphrodites” beginning to bubble up through the steam, it is just possible that some such an ocular barrage actually was in process of formation; but I think not. My hard-plied oars had hardly lengthened my interval to much over fifty yards, when the whole lot of them trooped down to the river—steaming amazingly they were at the touch of the sharp early winter air—and plunged into the icy water. I learned later that this “sweat-bath” treatment is the favourite cure-all with the Indians of that part of the Columbia Basin.
Where the left-hand channel returned to the main Columbia a mile or more below the mouth of the River Des Chutes I encountered an extensive seriesof rock-reefs which, until I drew near them, seemed to block the way completely. It was a sinuous course I wound in threading my way through the ugly basaltic outcroppings, but the comparatively slow water robbed it of any menace. Once clear of the rocks, I found myself at the head of the long, lake-like stretch of water backed up above Celilo Falls. The low rumble of the greatest cataract of the lower Columbia was already pulsing in the air, while a floating cloud of “water-smoke,” white against the encroaching cliffs, marked its approximate location. I was at last approaching the famous “long portage” of the oldvoyageurs, a place noted (in those days) for the worst water and the most treacherous Indians on the river. Now, however, the Indians no longer blocked the way and exacted toll, while the portage had been bridged by a Government canal. I caught the loom of the head-gate of the latter about the same time that the bridge of the “North-Bank” branch line, which spans the gorge below the falls, began rearing its blurred fret-work above the mists. Then, once again, Romance. “Ladies’ Day” was not yet over. As I pulled in toward the entrance to the canal, at the left of the head of the falls, I observed a very gaily-blanketed dame dancing up and down on the bank and gesticulating toward the opposite side of the river. As I landed and started to pull the skiff up on the gravelly beach, she came trotting down to entreat, in her best “Anglo-Chinook,” that I ferry her to the opposite bank, where her home was, and, where, apparently, she was long overdue. She wasn’t a beggar, she assured me, but—jingling her beaded bag undermy nose—was quite willing to pay me “hiyu chickamon” for my services. Nor was she unduly persistent. No sooner had I told her that I was in a “hiyu rush” and hadn’t the time just then to be a squire of dames, than she bowed her head in stoical acquiescence and went back to her waving and croaking. It was that futile old croak (with not enough power behind it to send it a hundred yards across a mile-wide river) that caved my resolution. ShovingImshallahback into the water, I told her to pile in.
And so Romance drew near to me again, this time perched up in the long-empty stern-sheets of my boat. This one was neither an infant nor a centurienne, but rather a fair compromise between the two. Nor was she especially fair nor especially compromising (one couldn’t expect that of a sixty-year-old squaw); but she was the most trusting soul I ever met, and that’s something. The falls were thundering not fifty yards below—near enough to wet us with their up-blown spray,—and yet not one word of warning did she utter about giving the brink a wide birth in pulling across. Not that I needed such a warning, for the first thing I did was to start pulling up-stream in the slack water; but, all the same, it was a distinct compliment to have it omitted. As it turned out, there was nothing to bother about, for the current was scarcely swifter in mid-stream than along the banks. It was an easy pull. Romance beamed on me all the way, and once, when one of her stubby old toes came afoul of my hob-nailed boot, she bent over and gave a few propitiary rubs to—the boot ... as ifthathad lost any cuticle. And at parting,when I waved her money-bag aside and told her to keep herchickamonto spend on the movies, she came and patted me affectionately on the shoulder, repeating over and over “Close tum-tum mika!” And that, in Chinook, means: “You’re very much all right!” As far as I can remember, that is the only unqualified praise I ever had from a lady—one of that age, I mean. Squiring squaws—especially dear old souls like that one—is a lot better fun than a man would think.
LIFTED DRAWBRIDGE ON CELILO CANAL (above)TUMWATER GORGE OF THE GRAND DALLES (below)
“IMSHALLAH” IN THE LOCK AT FIVE-MILE (left)“IMSHALLAH” HALF WAY THROUGH THE CELILO CANAL (right)
It was four o’clock when I turned up at the lock-master’s house at Celilo, and then to find that that worthy had just taken his gun and gone off up on the cliffs to try and bag a goose. As it would probably be dark before he returned, his wife reckoned I had better put up with them for the night and make an early start through the Canal the following morning. The lock-master, a genial Texan, came down with his goose too late it get it ready for supper, but not to get it picked that night. Indeed, we made rather a gala occasion of it. “Mistah” Sides got out his fiddle and played “The Arkansaw Traveller” and “Turkey in the Straw,” the while his very comely young wife accompanied on the piano and their two children, the village school-marm and myself collaborated on the goose. It was a large bird, but many hands make light work; that is, as far as getting the feathers off the goose was concerned. Cleaning up the kitchen was another matter. As it was the giddy young school-teacher whostartedthe trouble by putting feathers down my neck, I hope “Missus” Sides made that demure-eyed minx swab down decks in the morning before she went to teach the young idea how to shoot.
There is no lock at the head of the Celilo Canal, but a gate is maintained for the purpose of regulating flow and keeping out drift. Sides, silhouetted against the early morning clouds, worked the gates and let me through into the narrow, concrete-walled canal, down which I pulled with the thunder of the falls on one side and on the other the roar of a passing freight. The earth-shaking rumbles died down presently, and beyond the bend below the railway bridge I found myself rowing quietly through the shadow of the great wall of red-black cliffs that dominate the Dalles from the south.
Celilo Falls is a replica on a reduced scale of the Horse-shoe cataract at Niagara. At middle and low-water there is a drop of twenty feet here, but at the flood-stage of early summer the fall is almost wiped out in the lake backed up from the head of the Tumwater gorge of the Dalles. The Dalles then form one practically continuous rapid, eight or nine miles in length, with many terrific swirls and whirlpools, but with all rocks so deeply submerged that it ispossiblefor a well-handled steamer to run through in safety—provided she is lucky. With the completion of the Canal this wildest of all steamer runs was no longer necessary, but in the old days it was attempted a number of times when it was desired to take some craft that had been constructed on the upper river down to Portland. The first steamer was run through successfully in May, 1866, by Captain T. J. Stump, but the man who became famous for his success in getting away with this dare-devil stunt was Captain James Troup, perhaps the greatest of all Columbia skippers. Professor W. D. Lyman gives the following graphic account of a run through the Dalles with Captain Troup, on theD. S. Baker, in 1888.
“At that strange point in the river, the whole vast volume is compressed into a channel but one hundred and sixty feet wide at low water and much deeper than wide. Like a huge mill-race the current continues nearly straight for two miles, when it is hurled with frightful force against a massive bluff. Deflected from the bluff, it turns at a sharp angle to be split asunder by a low reef of rock. When theBakerwas drawn into the suck of the current at the head of the ‘chute’ she swept down the channel, which was almost black, with streaks of foam, to the bluff, two miles in four minutes. There feeling the tremendous refluent wave, she went careening over toward the sunken reef. The skilled captain had her perfectly in hand, and precisely at the right moment rang the signal bell, ‘Ahead, full speed,’ and ahead she went, just barely scratching her side on the rock. Thus close was it necessary to calculate distance. If the steamer had struck the tooth-like point of the reef broadside on, she would have been broken in two and carried in fragments on either side. Having passed this danger point, she glided into the beautiful calm bay below and the feat was accomplished.”
“At that strange point in the river, the whole vast volume is compressed into a channel but one hundred and sixty feet wide at low water and much deeper than wide. Like a huge mill-race the current continues nearly straight for two miles, when it is hurled with frightful force against a massive bluff. Deflected from the bluff, it turns at a sharp angle to be split asunder by a low reef of rock. When theBakerwas drawn into the suck of the current at the head of the ‘chute’ she swept down the channel, which was almost black, with streaks of foam, to the bluff, two miles in four minutes. There feeling the tremendous refluent wave, she went careening over toward the sunken reef. The skilled captain had her perfectly in hand, and precisely at the right moment rang the signal bell, ‘Ahead, full speed,’ and ahead she went, just barely scratching her side on the rock. Thus close was it necessary to calculate distance. If the steamer had struck the tooth-like point of the reef broadside on, she would have been broken in two and carried in fragments on either side. Having passed this danger point, she glided into the beautiful calm bay below and the feat was accomplished.”
There is a fall of eighty-one feet in the twelve miles from the head of Celilo Falls to the foot of the Dalles. This is the most considerable rate of descent in the whole course of the Columbia in the United States, though hardly more than a third of that over stretchesof the Big Bend in Canada. It appeared to be customary for the oldvoyageursto make an eight or ten miles portage here, whether going up or down stream, though there were doubtless times when their bigbatteauxwere equal to running the Dalles below Celilo. I climbed out and took hurried surveys of both Tumwater and Five-Mile (sometimes called “The Big Chute”) in passing, and while they appeared to be such that I would never have considered taking a chance with a skiff in either of them, it did look as though a big double-ender, with an experienced crew of oarsmen and paddlers, would have been able to make the run. That was a snap judgment, formed after the briefest kind of a “look-see,” and it may well be that I was over optimistic.
The Celilo Canal, which was completed by the Government about five years ago, is eight and a half miles long, has a bottom width of sixty-five feet, and a depth of eight feet. It has a total lift of eighty feet, of which seventy are taken by two locks in flight at the lower end. That this canal has failed of its object—that of opening up through navigation between tide-water and the upper Columbia—is due to no defect of its own from an engineering standpoint, but rather to the fact that, first the railway, and now the truck, have made it impossible for river steamers to pay adequate returns in the face of costly operation and the almost prohibitive risks of running day after day through rock-beset rapids. There is not a steamer running regularly on the Columbia above the Dalles to-day. The best service, perhaps, which the Celilo Canal rendered was the indirect one offorcing a very considerable reduction of railway freight rates. That alone is said to have saved the shippers of eastern Oregon and Washington many times the cost of this highly expensive undertaking.
I pulled at a leisurely gait down the Canal, stopping, as I have said, at Tumwater and Five-Mile, and at the latter giving the lock-master a hand in droppingImshallahdown a step to the next level. Rowing past a weird “fleet” of laid-up salmon-wheels in the Big Eddy Basin, I sheered over to the left bank in response to a jovial hail, and found myself shaking hands with Captain Stewart Winslow, in command of the Government dredge,Umatilla, and one of the most experienced skippers on the upper river. He said that he had been following the progress of my voyage by the papers with a good deal of interest, and had been on the lookout to hold me over for a yarn. As I was anxious to make the Dalles that night, so as to get away for an early start on the following morning, he readily agreed to join me for the run and dinner at the hotel.
While Captain Winslow was making a hurried shift of togs for the river, I had a brief but highly interesting visit with Captain and Mrs. Saunders. Captain Saunders, who is of the engineering branch of the army, has been in charge of the Celilo Canal for a number of years. Mrs. Saunders has a very large and valuable collection of Indian relics and curios, and at the moment of my arrival was following with great interest the progress of a State Highway cut immediately in front of her door, which was uncovering, evidently in an old graveyard, some stonemortars of unusual size and considerable antiquity. When Captain Winslow was ready, we went down to the skiff, and pulled along to the first lock. With Captain Saunders and a single helper working the machinery, passing us down to the second lock and on out into the river was but the matter of a few minutes.
Big Eddy must be rather a fearsome hole at high water, but below middle stage there is not enough power behind its slow-heaving swirls to make them troublesome. It was a great relief to have a competent river-man at the paddle again, and my rather over-craned neck was not the least beneficiary by the change. The narrows at Two-Mile were interesting rather for what they might be than what they were. Beyond a lively snaking about in the conflicting currents, it was an easy passage through to the smooth water of the broadening river below. One or two late salmon-wheels plashed eerily in the twilight as we ran past the black cliffs, but fishing for the season was practically over weeks before. We landed just above the steamer dock well before dark, beached the skiff, stowed my outfit in the warehouse, and reached the hotel in time to avoid an early evening shower. Captain Winslow had to dine early in order to catch his train back to Big Eddy, but we had a mighty good yarn withal.
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 thevoyageursThe 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 hadfound 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 DallesChronicle, 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 theChronicleoffice 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 upImshallahin 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....
PALISADE ROCK, LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER
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 rivervoyageursas 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 onlyalibiI 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 amquite 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 thatImshallah, 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 saddleponchoand 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 possiblecouldhappen on such a deep, quiet stretch ofriver. 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 avoidbumping thelowerend of a rock the while I could see the riffle where a strong current was flowing around theupperend.
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 herto 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 MemalooseIsland. 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 theFlying 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 hadnotbeen “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 oilon 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 uponImshallah(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 acrossthe 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.