WAITING FOR THE FOG TO LIFT ABOVE BISHOP’S RAPID (left)ROSS AND ARMSTRONG REGISTERING "GLOOM" (right)
THE “INTAKE” AT THE LITTLE DALLES (above)WHERE WE STARTED TO LINE THE LITTLE DALLES (below)
A heavy fog filled the river gorge from bank to bank when we pushed off the following morning, and we had to nose down carefully to avoid the piers of the bridge of the Great Northern branch line to Rossland. A quarter of a mile farther down the river began shoaling over gravel bars, and out of the mist ahead came the rumble of water tumbling over boulders. This was an inconsiderable riffle called Bishop’s Rapid, but the Captain was too old a river man to care to go into it without light to choose his channel. A half hour’s wait on a gravel bar in mid-stream brought a lifting of the fog, and we ran through bythe right hand of the two shallow channels without difficulty. In brilliant sunshine we pulled down a broad stretch of deep and rapidly slackening water to the gleaming white lime-stone barrier at the head of the Little Dalles.
All of Northport had been a unit in warning us not to attempt to run the Little Dalles. Nearly every one, as far as I could judge, had lost some relative there, and one man gave a very circumstantial description of how he had seen a bigbatteau, with six Swede lumbermen, sucked out of sight there, never to reappear. On cross-questioning, he admitted that this was at high water, and that there was nothing like so much “suck” in the whirlpools at the present stage. The Captain, however, having just received telephonic word from Nelson that “moderation” had carried in B. C. by a decisive majority, felt that nothing short of running the Little Dalles would be adequate celebration. He had managed to come through right-side-up in a Peterboro once, and he thought our skiff ought to be equal to the stunt. He held that opinion just long enough for him to climb to the top of the cliff that forms the left wall of river at the gorge and take one good, long, comprehensive look into the depths.
“Nothing doing,” he said, with a decisive shake of his broad-brimmed Stetson. “The river’s four or five feet higher than when we ran through here in ’fifteen, and that makes all the difference. It was touch-and-go for a minute then, and now it’s out of the question for a small boat. If we can’t line, we’ll have to find some way to portage.”
The Little Dalles are formed by a great reef of lime-stone which, at one time, probably made a dam all the way across the river. The narrow channel which the Columbia has worn through the stone is less than two hundred feet in width for a considerable distance, and has lofty perpendicular walls. The river is divided by a small rock island into two channels at the head, the main one, to the right, being about two hundred feet in width, and the narrow left-hand one not over forty feet. The depth of the main channel is very great—probably much greater than its narrowest width; so that here, as also at Tumwater and “Five-Mile” in the Great Dalles, it may be truly said that the Columbia “has to turn on its side to wriggle through.”
It is that little rock island at the head of the gorge, extending, as it does, almost longitudinallyacrossthe current that makes all the trouble. It starts one set of whirlpools running down the right-hand channel and another set down the left-hand. Every one of the vortices in this dual series of spinning “suckers” is more than one would care to take any liberties with if it could be avoided; and either line of whirlpools, taken alone, probablycouldbe avoided. The impassable barrage comes a hundred feet below the point where the left-hand torrent precipitates itself at right-angles into the current of the right-hand one, and the two lines of whirlpools converge in a “V” and form one big walloping sockdolager. Him there would still be room to run by if he were “whouf-ing” there alone; but his satellites won’t have it. Their accursed team-work is such that the spreading “V”above catches everything that comes down stream and feeds it into the maw of the big whirlpool as into a hopper. Logs, ties, shingle-bolts, fence-posts—all the refuse of sawmills and the flotsam and jetsam of farms and towns—are gulped with a “whouf!” and when they reappear again, a mile or two down river, they are all scoured smooth and round-cornered by their passage through the monster’s alimentary canal.
“I’m sorry not to celebrate the victory of ‘moderation,’” said the Captain finally, with another regretful shake of his head; “but ‘moderation’ begins at home. It would be immoderately foolish to put the skiff into that line of whirlpools, the way they’re running now.” Roos was the only one who was inclined to dispute that decision, and as his part would have been to stand out on the brink of the cliff and turn the crank, it was only natural that he should take the “artistic” rather than the “humanitarian” view.
As a last resort before portaging, we tried lining down, starting at the head of the narrow left-hand channel. We gave it up at the end of a hundred feet. A monkey at one end of the line and a log of wood at the other would have made the only combination calculated to get by that way. It was no job for a shaky-kneed man and a sinkable boat. There was nothing to do but look up a team or truck. What appeared to be the remains of the ancient portage road ran down from an abandoned farm to the river, and it seemed likely some kind of vehicle could be brought over it.
As the highway ran along the bench, four or five hundred feet above the river, I set off by the railroadtrack, which was comparatively close at hand. At the end of a couple of miles I reached a small station called Marble, the shipping point for a large apple orchard project financed by the J. G. White Company of New York. Mr. Reed, the resident manager, immediately ordered a powerful team and wagon placed at my disposal, and with that I returned northward over the highway. We had a rough time getting down through brush and dead-falls to the river, but finally made it without an upset. Roos having finished what pictures he wanted—including one of the Captain standing on the brink of the cliff and registering “surprise-cum-disappointment-cum-disgust,”—we loaded the skiff and our outfit onto the wagon and started the long climb up to the top of the bench. The discovery of an overgrown but still passable road offered a better route than that followed in coming down, and we made the highway, and on to the village, in good time. Mr. Reed dangled the bait of a Frenchchefand rooms in the company’s hotel as an inducement to spend the night with him, but we had not the time to accept the kind invitation. His ready courtesy was of the kind which I learned later I could expect as a matter of course all along the river. Never did I have trouble in getting help when I needed it, and when it was charged for, it was almost invariably an under rather than an over-charge. The running road is the one place left where the people have not been spoiled as have those on the highways frequented by motor tourists.
Launching the boat from the Marble Ferry at four o’clock, we pulled off in a good current in the hopeof reaching Bossburg before dark. Between the windings of the river and several considerable stretches of slack water, however, our progress was less than anticipated. Shut in by high hills on both sides, night descended early upon the river, and at five-thirty I found myself pulling in Stygian blackness. Knowing there was no really bad water ahead, the Captain let her slide through a couple of easy riffles, the white-topped waves barely guessed as they flagged us with ghostly signals. But a deepening growl, borne on the wings of the slight up-river night-breeze, demanded more consideration. No one but a lunatic goes into a strange rapid in a poor light, to say nothing of complete darkness. Pulling into an eddy by the left bank, we stopped and listened. The roar, though distant, was unmistakable. Water was tumbling among rocks at a fairly good rate, certainly too fast to warrant going into it in the dark.
While we were debating what to do, a black figure silhouetted itself against the star-gleams at the top of the low bank. “Hello, there!” hailed the Captain. “Can you tell us how far it is to Bossburg?” “Thisis Bossburg,” was the surprising but gratifying response. “You’re there—that is, you’re here.” It proved to be the local ferry-man, and Columbia ferry-men are always obliging and always intelligent, at least in matters relating to the river. Tying up the boat, we left our stuff in his nearby house and sought the hotel with our hand-bags. It was not a promising looking hotel when we found it, for Bossburg was that saddest of living things, an all-but-extinguished boom-town; but the very kindly old couple who livedthere and catered to the occasional wayfarer bustled about and got us a corking good meal—fried chicken and biscuits as light as the whipped cream we had on the candied peaches—and our beds were clean and comfortable.
As we were now but a few miles above Kettle Falls, the most complete obstruction in the whole length of the Columbia, I took the occasion to telephone ahead for a truck with which to make the very considerable portage. There would be two or three miles at the falls in any case, Captain Armstrong said, and he was also inclined to think it would be advisable to extend the portage to the foot of Grand Rapids, and thus save a day’s hard lining. It was arranged that the truck should meet us at the ruins of the old Hudson Bay post, on the east bank some distance above the upper fall.
We pushed off from Bossburg at eight o’clock on the morning of October twenty-third. The water was slack for several hundred yards, which was found to be due to a reef extending all of the way across the river and forming the rapid which we had heard growling in the dark. This was called “Six Mile,” and while it would have been an uncomfortable place to tangle up with in the night, it was simple running with the light of day. “Five Mile,” a bit farther down, was studded with big black rocks, but none of them hard to avoid. As we were running rather ahead of the time of our rendezvous with the truck, we stretched our legs the length and back of the main street of Marcus, a growing little town which is the junction point for the Boundary Branch of the GreatNorthern. We passed the mouth of the Kettle River shortly after running under the railway bridge, and a pull across a big eddy carried us to the lake-like stretch of water backed up by the rocky obstructions responsible for Kettle Falls. The roar of the latter filled the air as we headed into a shallow, mud-bottomed lagoon widening riverward from the mouth of a small creek and beached the skiff under a yellowing fringe of willows. The site of the historic post was in an extremely aged apple orchard immediately above. It was one of those “inevitable” spots, where thevoyageursof all time passing up or down the river must have begun or ended their portages. I was trying to conjure up pictures of a few of these in my mind, when the chug-chugging of an engine somewhere among the pines of the distant hillside recalled me to a realization of the fact that it was time to get ready for my own portage. Before we had our stuff out of the boat the truck had come to a throbbing standstill beyond the fringe of the willows. It promised to be an easier portage than some of our predecessors had had, in any event.
To maintain his “continuity,” Roos filmed the skiff being taken out of the water and loaded upon the truck, the truck passing down the main street of the town of Kettle Falls, and a final launching in the river seven miles below. Half way into town we passed an old Indian mission that must have been about contemporaneous with Hudson Bay operations. Although no nails had been used in its construction, the ancient building, with its high-pitched roof, still survived in a comparatively good state of preservation. The town is some little distance below the Falls, and quite out of sight of the river, which flows here between very high banks. We stopped at the hotel for lunch before completing the portage.
After talking the situation over with Captain Armstrong, I decided to fall in with his suggestion to pass Grand Rapids as well as Kettle Falls in the portage. There were only about five miles of boatable water between the foot of the latter and the head of the former, and then an arduous three-quarters of a mile of lining that would have entailed the loss of another day. There is a drop of twelve feet in about twelve hundred yards in Grand Rapids, with nothing approaching a clear channel among the huge black basaltic rocks that have been scattered about through them as from a big pepper shaker. As far as I could learn, there is no record of any kind of a man-propelled craft of whatever size ever having run through and survived, but a small stern-wheeler, theShoshone, was run down several years ago at high water. She reached the foot a good deal of a hulk, but still right side up. This is rated as one of the maddest things ever done with a steamer on the Columbia, and the fact that it did not end in complete disaster is reckoned by old river men as having been due in about equal parts to the inflexible nerve of her skipper and the intervention of the special providence that makes a point of watching over mortals who do things like that. I met Captain McDermid a fortnight later in Potaris. He told me then, what I hadn’t heard before, that he took his wife and children with him. “Nellie thought a lot of both me and the little oldShoshone,” he said with a wistful smile, “and she reckoned that, if we went, she wouldn’t exactly like to be left here alone. And so—I never could refuse Nellie anything—I took her along. And now she and theShoshoneare both gone.” He was a wonderful chap—McDermid. All old Columbia River skippers are. They wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t been.
There was a low bench on the left bank, about a mile below the foot of Grand Rapids, which could be reached by a rough road, and from which the boat could be slid down over the rocks to the river. Running to this point with the truck, we left our heavier outfit at a road camp and dropped the boat at the water’s edge, ready for launching the following morning. Returning to the town, we were driven up to the Falls by Dr. Baldwin, a prominent member of this live and attractive little community, where Roos made a number of shots. The upper or main fall has a vertical drop of fifteen feet at low water, while the lower fall is really a rough tumbling cascade with a drop of ten feet in a quarter of a mile. The river is divided at the head of the Falls by an arrow-shaped rock island, the main channel being the one to the right. The left-hand channel loops in a broad “V” around the island and, running between precipitous walls, accomplishes in a beautiful rapid the same drop that the main channel does by the upper fall. A rocky peninsula, extending squarely across the course of the left-hand channel, forces the rolling current of the latter practically to turn a somersault before accepting the dictum that it must double backnorthward for five or six hundred feet before uniting with the main river. It was the savage swirling of water in that rock-walled elbow where the “somersault” takes place that prompted the imaginative French-Canadianvoyageursto apply the appropriately descriptive name ofChaudièreto the boiling maelstrom.
Up to the present the development of the enormous power running to waste over Kettle Falls has gone little further than the dreams of the brave community of optimists who have been attracted there in the belief that a material asset of such incalculable value cannot always be ignored in a growing country like our own. And they are right, of course, but a few years ahead of time. It is only the children and grandchildren of the living pioneers of the Columbia who will see more than the beginning of its untold millions of horse-power broken to harness. And in the meantime the optimists of Kettle Falls are turning their attention to agriculture and horticulture. Never have I seen finer apple orchards than those through which we drove on the way to resume our down-river voyage.
The point from which we pushed off at ten o’clock on the morning of October twenty-fourth must have been only a little below that at which Lieutenant Symons launched thebatteaufor his historic voyage to the mouth of the Snake in 1881. Forty years have gone by since that memorable undertaking, yet Symons’ report is to-day not only the most accurate description of an upper Columbia voyage that has ever been written, but also the most readable. Duringthe time I was running the three hundred and fifty miles of river surveyed by Lieutenant Symons, I found his admirable report only less fascinating on the human side than it was of material assistance on the practical.
Of his preparations for the voyage Lieutenant Symons writes:
“I was fortunate enough to procure from John Rickey, a settler and trader, who lives at the Grand Rapids, a strongly builtbatteau, and had his assistance in selecting a crew of Indians for the journey. Thebatteauwas about thirty feet long, four feet wide at the gunwales, and two feet deep, and is as small a boat as the voyage should ever be attempted in, if it is contemplated to go through all the rapids. My first lookout had been to secure the services of ‘Old Pierre Agare’ as steersman, and I had to carry on negotiations with him for several days before he finally consented to go. Old Pierre is the only one of the old Hudson Bayvoyageursnow left who knows the river thoroughly at all stages of water, from Colville to its mouth.... The old man is seventy years of age, and hale and hearty, although his eyesight is somewhat defective.... The other Indians engaged were Pen-waw, Big Pierre, Little Pierre, and Joseph. They had never made the trip all the way down the river, and their minds were full of the dangers and terrors of the great rapids below, and it was a long time before we could prevail upon them to go, by promising them a high price and stipulating for their return by rail and stage. Old Pierre and John Rickey laboured and talked with them long and faithfully, to gain their consent, and I am sure that they started off with as many misgivings about getting safely through as we did who had to trust our lives to their skill, confidence and obedience.”
“I was fortunate enough to procure from John Rickey, a settler and trader, who lives at the Grand Rapids, a strongly builtbatteau, and had his assistance in selecting a crew of Indians for the journey. Thebatteauwas about thirty feet long, four feet wide at the gunwales, and two feet deep, and is as small a boat as the voyage should ever be attempted in, if it is contemplated to go through all the rapids. My first lookout had been to secure the services of ‘Old Pierre Agare’ as steersman, and I had to carry on negotiations with him for several days before he finally consented to go. Old Pierre is the only one of the old Hudson Bayvoyageursnow left who knows the river thoroughly at all stages of water, from Colville to its mouth.... The old man is seventy years of age, and hale and hearty, although his eyesight is somewhat defective.... The other Indians engaged were Pen-waw, Big Pierre, Little Pierre, and Joseph. They had never made the trip all the way down the river, and their minds were full of the dangers and terrors of the great rapids below, and it was a long time before we could prevail upon them to go, by promising them a high price and stipulating for their return by rail and stage. Old Pierre and John Rickey laboured and talked with them long and faithfully, to gain their consent, and I am sure that they started off with as many misgivings about getting safely through as we did who had to trust our lives to their skill, confidence and obedience.”
Lieutenant Symons does not state whether any confusion ever arose as a consequence of the fact that three of his five Indians bore the inevitable French-Canadian name of “Pierre.” Of the method of work followed by himself and his topographical assistant, Downing, throughout the voyage, he writes:
“Mr. Downing and myself worked independently in getting as thorough knowledge of the river as possible, he taking the courses with a prismatic compass, and estimating distances by the eye, and sketching in the topographical features of the surrounding country, while I estimated also the distances to marked points, and paid particular attention to the bed of the river, sounding wherever there were any indications of shallowness. Each evening we compared notes as to distances, and we found them to come out very well together, the greatest difference being six and three-fourths miles in a day’s run of sixty-four miles. Some days they were identical. The total distance from our starting point ... to the mouth of the Snake River was estimated by Mr. Downing to be three hundred and sixty-three miles, and by myself to be three hundred and fifty. His distances were obtained by estimating how far it was to some marked point ahead, and correcting it when the point was reached; mine by the time required to pass over the distances, in which the elements considered were the swiftness of the current and the labour of the oarsmen.”
“Mr. Downing and myself worked independently in getting as thorough knowledge of the river as possible, he taking the courses with a prismatic compass, and estimating distances by the eye, and sketching in the topographical features of the surrounding country, while I estimated also the distances to marked points, and paid particular attention to the bed of the river, sounding wherever there were any indications of shallowness. Each evening we compared notes as to distances, and we found them to come out very well together, the greatest difference being six and three-fourths miles in a day’s run of sixty-four miles. Some days they were identical. The total distance from our starting point ... to the mouth of the Snake River was estimated by Mr. Downing to be three hundred and sixty-three miles, and by myself to be three hundred and fifty. His distances were obtained by estimating how far it was to some marked point ahead, and correcting it when the point was reached; mine by the time required to pass over the distances, in which the elements considered were the swiftness of the current and the labour of the oarsmen.”
I may state that it was only rarely that we found the distances arrived at by Lieutenant Symons and Mr. Downing to be greatly at variance with those established by later surveys. In the matter of bars, rapids, currents, channels and similar things, there appeared to have been astonishingly little change inthe four decades that had elapsed since he had made his observations. Where he advised, for instance, taking the right-hand in preference to the middle or left-hand channels, it was not often that we went far wrong in heeding the direction. Bars of gravel, of course, shift from season to season, but reefs and projections of the native rock are rarely altered by more than a negligible erosion. The prominent topographical features—cliffs, headlands,coulees, mountains—are immutable, and for mile after mile, bend after bend, we picked them up just as Symons reported them.
The river is broad and slow for a few miles below Grand Rapids (they are called Rickey’s Rapids locally), with steep-sided benches rising on either hand, and the green of apple orchards showing in bright fringes along their brinks. There had been the usual warnings in Kettle Falls of a bad rapid to be encountered “somewhere below,” but the data available on this part of the river made us practically certain that nothing worse than minor riffles existed until the swift run of Spokane Rapids was reached. Seven miles below Grand Rapids several islands of black basalt contracted the river considerably, but any one of two or three channels offered an easy way through them. The highest of them had a driftwood crown that was not less than fifty feet above the present stage of the river, showing graphically the great rise and fall at this point.
At the shallow San Poil bar we saw some Indians from the Colville Reservation fishing for salmon—the crooked-nosed “dogs” of the final run. If theywere of the tribe from which the bar must have been named, civilization had brought them its blessing in the form of hair-restorer. They were as hirsute a lot of ruffians as one could expect to find out of Bolshevia—and as dirty.
Turtle Rapid was the worst looking place we found during the day, but the menace was more apparent than real. The riffle took its name from a number of turtle-backed outcroppings of bedrock pushing up all the way across the river. The current was swift and deep, making it just the sort of place one would have expected to encounter bad swirls. These were, indeed, making a good deal of a stir at the foot of several of the narrow side runs, but by the broader middle channel which we followed the going was comparatively smooth. We finished an easy day by tying up at four o’clock where the road to the Colville Reservation comes down to the boulder-bordered bank at Hunter’s Ferry.
Columbia River ferry-men are always kindly and hospitable, and this one invited us to sleep on his hay and cook our meals in his kitchen. He was an amiable “cracker” from Kentucky, with a delectable drawl, a tired-looking wife and a houseful of children. Ferry-men’s wives always have many children. This one was still pretty, though, and her droop—for a few years yet—would be rather appealing than otherwise. I couldn’t be quite sure—from a remark she made—whether she had a sense of humor, or whether she had not. Seeing her sitting by the kitchen stove with a baby crooked into her left arm, a two-year-old on her lap, and a three-year-old riding herfoot, the while she was trying to fry eggs, bake biscuit and boil potatoes, I observed, by way of bringing a brighter atmosphere with my presence, that it was a pity that the human race hadn’t been crossed with octopi, so that young mothers would have enough arms to do their work with. She nodded approvingly at first, brightening visibly at the emancipative vision conjured up in her tired brain, but after five minutes of serious cogitation relapsed into gloom. “I reckon it wouldn’t be any use, mistah,” she said finally; “them octupusses would only give the young ’uns mo’ ahms to find troubl’ with.” Nowdidshe have a sense of humour, or did she not?
We had a distinctly bad night of it hitting the hay. The mow was built with a horseshoe-shaped manger running round three sides of it, into which the hay was supposed to descend by gravity as the cows devoured what was below. As a labour-saving device it had a good deal to recommend it, but as a place to sleep—well, it might not have been so bad if each of the dozen cows had not been belled, and if the weight of our tired bodies on the hay had not kept pressing it into the manger all night, and so made a continuous performance of feeding and that bovine bell-chorus. I dozed off for a spell along toward morning, awakening from a Chinese-gong nightmare to find my bed tilted down at an angle of forty-five degrees and a rough tongue lapping my face. With most of my mattress eaten up, I was all but in the manger myself. Turning out at daybreak, we pushed off at an early hour.
A run of nine miles, made in about an hour, tookus to Gerome, where another ferry crossed to the west or Colville Reservation bank. A couple of swift, shallow rapids above and below Roger’s Bar was the only rough water encountered. We were looking for a point from which Spokane could be reached by car, as Captain Armstrong, who had originally planned to go with us only to Kettle Falls, was now quite at the end of the time he was free to remain away from Nelson and business. There were two reasons for our making a temporary halt at Gerome Ferry. One was the fact that Spokane could be reached as readily from there as from any point lower down, and the other was Ike Emerson. I shall have so much to say of Ike a bit further along that I shall no more than introduce him for the moment.
As much of the worst water on the American course of the Columbia occurs in the two hundred and thirty miles between the head of Spokane Rapids and the foot of Priest Rapids,[2]I was considerably concerned about finding a good river man to take Captain Armstrong’s place and help me with the boat. Roos made no pretensions to river usefulness, and I was reluctant to go into some of the rapids that I knew were ahead of us without a dependable man to handle the steering paddle and to help with lining. Men of this kind were scarce, it appeared—even more so than on the Big Bend, in Canada, where there was a certain amount of logging and trapping going on. Two or three ferry-men had shaken their heads when Ibrought the matter up. There was nothing they would like better if they were free, they said, but, as ferries couldn’t be expected to run by themselves, that was out of the question on such short notice.
[2]Not be confused with the rapids of the same name we had run on the Big Bend in Canada.L. R. F.
[2]Not be confused with the rapids of the same name we had run on the Big Bend in Canada.
L. R. F.
It was that genial “cracker” at Hunter’s Ferry who was the first to mention Ike Emerson. Ike would be just my man, he said, with that unmistakable grin that a man grins when the person he speaks of is some kind of a “character.” Or, leastways, Ike would be just my man—if I could find him. “And where shall I be likely to find him?” I asked. He wasn’t quite sure about that, but probably “daun rivah sumwhah.” There was no telling about Ike, it appeared. Once he had been seen to sink when his raft had gone to pieces in Hell Gate, and he had been mourned as dead for a fortnight. At the end of that time he had turned up in Kettle Falls, but quite unable—or else unwilling—to tell why the river had carried him eighty-five milesupstream instead of down to the Pacific. A keg of moonshine which had been Ike’s fellow passenger on the ill-fated raftmayhave had something to do both with the wreck and that long up-stream swim after the wreck. At any rate, it had never been explained. However, Gerome was Ike’s headquarters—if any place might be called that for a man who lived on or in the river most of the time—and that would be the place to inquire for him.
When I asked the ferry-man at Gerome if Ike Emerson had been seen thereabouts recently, he grinned the same sort of grin his colleague at Hunter’s had grinned when the same subject was under discussion. Yes, he had seen Ike only the night before. He was a real old river rat; just the man I wanted—if I could find him. He was as hard as a flea to put your hand on when youdidwant him, though. Well, it took us four hours to run our man down, but luck was with us in the end. Every lumber-jack, farmer and Indian that we asked about Ike, grinned that same grin, dropped whatever he was doing and joined in the search. There were a score of us when the “View Halloo” was finally sounded, and we looked more like a lynching party on vengeance bent than anything else I can think of. Ike, who was digging potatoes (of all the things in the world for a river rat to be doing), glowered suspiciously as we debouched from acouleeand streamed down toward him, but his brow cleared instantly when I hastily told him what we had come for.
You bet, he would go with us. But, wait a moment! Why should we not go with him? He was overdue with a raft of logs and cordwood he had contracted to take down below Hell Gate, and was just about to get to work building it. We could just throw our boat aboard, and off we would go together. If he could get enough help, he could have the raft ready in two or three days, and, once started, it would not be a lot slower than the skiff, especially if we took a fast motor-boat he knew of for towing purposes and to “put her into the rapids right.” It would make a lot more of a show for the movies, and he had always dreamed of having himself filmed on a big raft running Hell Gate and Box Canyon. Just let us leave it to him, and he would turn out something that would be the real thing.
All of this sounded distinctly good to me, but I turned to Roos and Captain Armstrong for confirmation before venturing a decision. Roos said it would be “the cat’s ears” (late slang meaningau fait, or something like that, in English); that a raft would photograph like a million dollars. Armstrong’s face was beaming. “It will be the chance of a lifetime,” he said warmly. “Go by all means. I’m only sorry I can’t be with you.” So we gave Ikecarte blancheand told him to go ahead; we would arrange the financial end when he knew more about what he would be spending. I was glad of the wait for one reason; it would give us a chance to speed the Captain on his way as far as Spokane.
Running over a Spokane paper in the post office and general store at Gerome, the program of the Chamber of Commerce luncheon for the morrow, October the twenty-sixth, recalled to me that I had a conditional engagement to perform at that function. Major Laird, the Publicity Secretary of the Chamber, had phoned me before we left Nelson, asking if I would run up to Spokane from some convenient point on the river and give them a bit of a yarn about our voyage at the next Tuesday luncheon. I had replied that, as it was quite out of the question keeping to any definite schedule in river travel, I could give him no positive assurance of turning up in time, but suggested that if he would sign up some one else forpièce de résistance, he could be free to use me for soup or nuts in the event I put in an appearance. As it now appeared that we had arrived within a few hours of Spokane, I phoned Major Laird, and hesaid he would start a car off at once to take us there.
We spent the afternoon helping Roos patch up the continuity of his “farmer” picture. Although Captain Armstrong had appeared in all the scenes shot since we started with the skiff, he had never made his official entry into the picture. Properly, this should have been done in one of the introductory scenes shot at the source of the river, near Lake Windermere. It will be remembered that, when I leaned on my hay-fork and gazed pensively off toward the river, I was supposed to see a prospector tinkering with his boat. I had walked out of two scenes on my way to join that prospector: the first time to ask if he would take me with him, and the second time, with a blanket-roll on my shoulder (the improvised one with the two “nicht-goons” and other foreign knick-knacks in it), to jump into the boat and push off. Obviously, as we had neither prospector nor boat at the time, these shots could not be made until later. Now, with the “prospector” about to leave us, it was imperative to continuity that we should get him into the picture before we could go ahead getting him out of it.
“Location” was our first care, and in this fortune favoured us. The mouth of a small creek flowing in just below Gerome furnished a “source of the Columbia” background that would have defied an expert to tell from an original. In fact, it looked more like the popular idea of a “source” than did the real one; and that is an important point with the movies. Here we made the “tinkering” and the “first push-off” shots. Of course, I had a different blanket-roll on my shoulder this time, but I took great care to make it as close an imitation as possible of the one I had so hastily flung together out of “Jock’s” bedding. A close imitation externally, I mean—there were no “frou-frous” in it.
Now that we had the “prospector” properly into the picture, we were ready for the “farewell” shot—the getting him out of it. For this the Captain and I were “picked up” on a picturesque rocky point, regarding with interest something far off down-river. Presently he registers “dawning comprehension,” and tells me in fluent French-Canadian pantomime that it is a raft—a whale of a big one. That will offer a way for me to continue my voyage now that he has to leave me. Then we go down to the boat, which he presents to me with a comprehensive “it-is-all-yours” gesture, before shouldering his sack of ore (one of our bags of canned stuff answered very well for this) and climbing off up the bank toward the “smelter.” (We had intended to make a real smelter scene at Trail or Northport, but the light was poor at both places.) Finally I pushed off alone, pulling down and across the current to throw in my fortunes with the “raft.” That left the thread of “continuity” dangling free, to be spliced up as soon as Ike had the raft completed. That worthy was losing no time. All afternoon we heard the rumble of logs rolling over boulders, and every now and then a fan-shaped splash of spray would flash up with a spangle of iridescence in the light of the declining sun.
The car arrived for us at seven-thirty that evening. It was driven by Commissioner Howard, of the Spokane County Board, who had courteously volunteered to come for us when it appeared there would be some delay in getting a hired car off for the hundred and sixty-mile round trip. He was accompanied by his son, a high-school youngster. As they had eaten lunch on the way, they announced themselves ready to start on the return trip at once. The road turned out to be a rough mountain track, and rather muddy. Ten miles out from Gerome a suspicious clicking set in somewhere under the rear seat, and at twenty miles the differential had gone. Mr. Howard finally induced an empty truck to take us in tow, and behind that lumbering vehicle we did the last sixty miles. The tow-chain parted on an average of once a mile while we were still in the mountains, but did better as the roads improved. The temperature fell as the altitude increased, and it must have been well under twenty before daylight—and a mean, marrow-searching cold at that. Mr. Howard, refusing every offer of relief, stuck it out at the wheel all the way in—a remarkable example of nerve and endurance, considering that he had only recently come out of a hospital. Armstrong, as always, was indomitable, singing French-Canadian boating songs of blood-stirringtempomost of the way. I shall ever associate his
“Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,En roulant, ma boule roulant!”
rather with the chug-chugging of a motor truck than with the creak of oars from which it derived its inspiration.
We struck the paved state highway at Davenport about four o’clock, and in the very grey dawn of the morning after came rumbling into Spokane. Somewhere in the dim shadowy outskirts we stopped rumbling. The truck driver reported he had run out of gas. Assiduous milking of the Cole’s tank yielded just enough to carry us on to the hotel. The Davenport of Spokane is one of the very finest hotels in all the world, but if it had been just a cabin with a stove, it would still have seemed a rose-sweet paradise after those last two nights we had put in—one on the hay with belled cows eating up the beds beneath our backs, and the other jerked over a frosty road in the wake of a skidding truck. Soaking for an hour in a steaming bath, I rolled in between soft sheets, leaving orders not to be called until noon.
Spokane is one of the finest, cleanest and most beautiful cities of the West, and I have never left it after a visit without regret. This time, brief as our stay had to be, was no exception. It was an unusually keen looking lot of business and professional men that turned out for the Chamber luncheon, among whom I found not a few old college friends and others I had not seen for a number of years. Notable of these were Herbert Moore and Samuel Stern, with whom I had spent six weeks on a commercial mission in China in 1910. I was also greatly interested to meet Mr. Turner, the field engineer of the great project for reclaiming a million and three-quarters acres of land in the Columbia Basin of eastern Washington by diverting to it water from the Pend d’Oreille. The incalculable possibilities, as well as the great needof this daring project I was to see much of at firsthand during that part of my voyage on which I was about to embark.
Captain Armstrong left by train for Nelson the evening of the 27th, and the following morning Major Laird drove Roos and me back to Gerome. For a considerable part of the distance we followed the highly picturesque route along the Spokane River, stopping for lunch at the hydro-electric plant of the Washington Power Company at Long Lake. This enterprising corporation has power installations already in operation on the Spokane which must make that stream pretty nearly the most completely harnessed river of its size in America. The lofty concrete barrier which backs up Long Lake has the distinction of being the highest spillway dam in the world. The “Spokane interval” proved a highly enjoyable spell of relaxation before tackling the rough stretch of river ahead. I knew I was going to miss greatly the guiding hand and mind of Captain Armstrong, but had high hopes of Ike Emerson. I was not to be disappointed.
Ike had been working at high speed during our absence, but his imagination appeared rather to have run ahead of his powers of execution. The hundred-feet-long, thirty-feet-wide raft he had set himself to construct (so as to have something that would “stack up big in the movie”) took another two days to complete, and even then was not quite all that critical artist wanted to make it. After filling in the raft proper with solid logs of spruce and cedar, he began heaping cordwood upon it. He was trying to make something that would loom up above the water, he explained; “somethin’ tu make a showin’ in the pictur’.” He had three or four teams hauling, and as many men piling, for two days. We stopped him at fifty cords in order to get under way the second day after our return. There was some division of opinion among the ’long shore loafers as to whether or not this was thelargestraft that had ever started down this part of the Columbia, but they were a unit in agreeing that it was thehighest. Never was there a raft with so much “freeboard.” The trouble was that every foot of that “freeboard” was cordwood, and then some; for the huge stacks of four-foot firewood had weighted down the logs under them until those great lengths of spruce and cedar were completely submerged. When you walked about “ondeck” you saw the river flowing right along through the loosely stacked cordwood beneath. Roos was exultant over the way that mighty mass of rough wood charging down a rock-walled canyon was going to photograph, and Ike was proud as a peacock over the Thing he had brought into being. But Roos was going to be cranking on the cliff when we went through Hell Gate, and Ike didn’t care a fig what happened to him anyhow. And Ididcare. There were a lot of things that could happen to a crazy contraption of that kind,if ever it hit anything solid; and I knew that the walls of Hell Gate and Box Canyon must be solid or they wouldn’t have stood as long as they had. And as for hitting ... that raft must be pretty nearly as long as Hell Gate was wide, and if ever it got to swinging.... It’s funny the things a man will think of the night before he is going to try out a fool stunt that he doesn’t know much about.
MAP OF THE UPPER COLUMBIA
A “CLOSE-UP” OF IKE BUILDING HIS RAFT (left)MY FIFTY POUND SALMON (right)
A fine motherly old girl called Mrs. Miller had put us up in her big, comfortable farm-house during our wait while Ike completed his ship-building operations. She must have known all of seven different ways of frying chicken, and maybe twice that number of putting up apple preserves. We had just about all of them for breakfast the morning we started. Jess, the ferry-man, treated us to vanilla extract cordials and told us the story of a raft that had struck and broken up just above his father’s ranch near Hawk Creek. Only guy they fished out was always nutty afterward. Cracked on the head with a length of cordwood while swimming. Good swimmer, too; but a guy had no chance in a swish-swashing bunch ofbroke-loose logs. Thus Jess, and thus—or in similar vein—about a dozen others who came down to see us off from the ferry landing. They all told stories ofraftdisasters, just as they would have enlarged onboatdisasters if it had been a boat in which we were starting to run Hell Gate and Box Canyon.
I pulled across and landed Roos at the raft to make an introductory shot or two of Ike before picking up the thread of his “continuity” with my (pictorial) advent. A corner of the raft had been left unfinished for this purpose. Ike was discovered boring a log with a huge auger, after which he notched and laid a stringer, finishing the operation by pegging the latter down with a twisted hazel withe. The old river rat seemed to know instinctively just what was wanted of him, going through the action so snappily that Roos clapped him on the back and pronounced him “the cat’s ears” as an actor.
Ike showed real quality in the next scene; also the single-minded concentration that marks the true artist. Looking up from his boring, he sees a boat paddling toward him from up-river. The nearing craft wasImshallah, with the “farmer” at the oars, just as he had started (for the still unbuilt raft) when the “prospector” gave him the boat before disappearing up the bank to the “smelter” with his sack of “ore” over his shoulder. Thus “continuity” was served.
The “farmer” pulls smartly alongside, tosses Ike the painter and clambers aboard the raft. An animated colloquy ensues, in which the “farmer” asks about the river ahead, and Ike tells him, with dramatic gestures, that it will be death to tackle it in so fraila skiff. A raft is the only safe way to make the passage and—here Ike spreads out his hands with the manner of a butler announcing that “dinner is served!”—the raft is at the “farmer’s” disposal. That suits the “farmer” to a “T;” so the skiff is lifted aboard and they are ready to cast off.
Where Ike displayed the concentration of a true artist was in the skiff-lifting shot. Just as the green bow ofImshallahcame over the side, a boy who had been stacking cordwood, in rushing forward to clear the fouled painter, stepped on an unsecured log and went through into the river. By this time, of course, I knew better than to spoil a shot by suspending or changing action in the middle of it, but that Ike should be thus esoterically sapient was rather too much to expect. Yet the sequel proved how much more consummate an artist of the two of us that untutored (even by Roos) old river rat was. When we had finished “Yo-heave-ho-ing” as the skiff settled into place, I (dropping my histrionics like a wet bathing suit) shouted to Ike to come and help me fish that kid out. “What kid?” he drawled in a sort of languid surprise. Then, after a kind of dazed once-over of the raft, fore-and-aft: “By cripes, the kidisgone!” Now has that ever been beaten for artistic concentration?
The lad, after bumping down along the bottom to the lower end of the raft, had come to the surface no whit the worse for his ducking. He was clambering up over the logs like a wet cat before either Ike or I, teetering across the crooked, wobbly cordwood, had stumbled half the distance to the “stern.” “It mustbe a right sma’t betta goin’ daun unda than up heah,” was Ike’s only comment.
The motor-boat which Ike had engaged to tow the raft was already on hand. It had been built by a Spokane mining magnate for use at his summer home on Lake Cœur d’Alene, and was one of the prettiest little craft of the kind I ever saw. With its lines streaming gracefully back from its sharp, beautifully-flared bow, it showed speed from every angle. Hardwood and brass were in bad shape, but the engines were resplendent; and the engines were the finest thing about it. They had been built to drive it twenty-five miles an hour when she was new, the chap running it said, and were probably good for all of twenty-two yet when he opened up. Except that its hull wasn’t rugged enough to stand the banging, it was an ideal river boat, though not necessarily for towing rafts. However, it was mighty handy even at that ignominious work.
I couldn’t quite make up my mind about the engineer of the motor boat—not until he settled down to work, that is. His eye was quite satisfactory, but his habit of hesitating before answering a question, and then usually saying “I dunno,” conveyed rather the impression of torpid mentality if not actual dulness. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as I realized instantly the moment he started swinging the raft into the current. He merely said “I dunno” because he really didn’t know, where an ordinary man would have felt impelled to make half an answer, or at least to say something about the weather or the stage of the river. Earl (I never learned his lastname) was sparing with his tongue because he was unsparing with his brain. His mind was always ready to act—and to react. There were to arise several situations well calculated to test the mettle of him, and he was always “there.” I have never known so thoroughly useful and dependable a man for working a launch in swift water.
While Ike was completing his final “snugging down” operations, I chanced to observe a long steel-blue and slightly reddish-tinged body working up the bottom toward the stern of the raft. It looked like a salmon, except that it was larger than any member of that family I had ever seen. A blunt-pointed pike-pole is about the last thing one would use for a fish-spear, but, with nothing better ready to hand, I tried it. My first thrust was a bad miss, but, rather strangely, I thought—failed to deflect the loggily nosing monster more than a foot or two from his course. The next thrust went home, but where I was half expecting to have the pole torn from my hands by a wild rush, there was only a sluggish, unresentful sort of a wriggle. As there was no hook or barb to the pike, the best I could do was to worry my prize along the bottom to the bank, where a couple of Indians lifted it out for me. It was a salmon after all—a vicious looking “dog,” with a wicked mouthful of curving teeth—but of extraordinary size. It must have weighed between fifty and sixty pounds, for the pike-pole all but snapped when I tried to lift the monster with it. Indeed, its great bulk was undoubtedly responsible for the fact that it was already half-dead from battering on the rocks before I speared it.As the flesh was too soft even for the Indians, I gave it to a German farmer from a nearby clearing to feed to his hogs. Or rather, I traded it. The German had a dog which, for the sake of “human interest,” Roos very much wanted to borrow. (Why, seeing it was a dog, he should not have called it “canine interest,” I never quite understood; but it was the “heart touch” he wanted, at any rate). So Ike proposed to the “Dutchman” that we give him fifty pounds of dead “dog” for half that weight of live dog, the latter to be returned when we were through with him. That was Ike’sproposition. As soon as we were under way, however, he confided to me that he never was going to give that good collie back to a Dutchman. A people that had done what the “Dutchmen” did to Belgium had no right to have a collie anyhow. If they must have dogs, let them keep dachshunds—or pigs. And he forthwith began to alienate that particular collie’s affection by feeding him milk chocolate. Poor old Ike! Being only a fresh-water sailor, I fear he did not have a wife in every port, so that there was an empty place in his heart that craved affection.
We cast off at ten o’clock, Earl swung the raft’s head out by a steady pull with the launch, and the current completed the operation of turning. Once in mid-stream she made good time, the motor-boat maintaining just enough of a tug to keep the towing-line taut and give her a mile an hour or so of way over the current. That gave Earl a margin to work with, and, pulling sharply now to one side, now to the other, he kept the great pile of logs headed where the current was swiftest and the channel clearest. It was allin using his power at the right time and in the right way. A hundred-ton tugboat would have been helpless in stopping the raft once it started to go in the wrong direction. The trick was to start it right and not let it go wrong, Ike explained—just like raising pups or kids. It was certainly no job for a novice, and I found constant reassurance in the consummate “raftsmanship” our taciturn engineer was displaying.
The hills on both sides of the river grew loftier and more rugged as we ran to the south, and the trees became patchier and scrubbier. The bunch grass on the diminishing benches at the bends was withered and brown. It was evident from every sign that we were nearing the arid belt of eastern Washington, the great semi-desert plateau that is looped in the bend of the Columbia between the mouth of the Spokane and the mouth of the Snake. The towering split crest of Mitre Rock marked the approach to the slack stretch of water backed up by the boulder barrage over which tumbles Spokane Rapids. The run through the latter was to be our real baptism; a short rapid passed a few miles above proving only rough enough to set the raft rolling in fluent undulations and throw a few light gobs of spray over her “bows.” We were now going up against something pretty closely approximating the real thing. It wasn’t Hell Gate or Box Canyon by a long way, Ike said, but at the same time it wasn’t any place to risk any slip-up.
Save for two or three of the major riffles on the Big Bend of Canada, Spokane Rapids has a stretch of water that must go down hill just about as fast as any on all the Columbia. The channel—although runningbetween boulders—was narrow in the first place, and the deepest part of it was still further restricted by an attempt to clear a way through for steamer navigation in the years when a through service up and down the Columbia was still dreamed of. The channel was deepened considerably, but the effect of this was to divert a still greater flow into it and form a sort of a chute down which the water rushed as through a flume. Being straight, this channel is not very risky to run, even with a small boat—provided one keeps to it. A wild tumble of rollers just to the left of the head must be avoided, however, even by a raft. That was why we had the motor-boat—to be sure of “hitting the intake right,” as Ike put it. And the motor-boat ought to be able to handle the job without help. He had been working hard ever since we started on a gigantic stern-sweep, but that was for Hell Gate and Box Canyon. Here, with her nose once in right, she should do it on her own.
Mooring the raft against the right bank in the quiet water a couple of hundred yards above the “intake,” Earl ran us down to the mouth of the Spokane River in the launch. We were purchasing gasoline and provisions in the little village of Lincoln, just below the Spokane, and Ike thought that the lower end of the rapid would be the best place for Roos to set up to command the raft coming through. It was indeed terrifically fast water, but—because the launch had the power to pick the very best of the channel—the run down just missed the thrill that would have accompanied it had it been up to one’s oars to keep his boat out of trouble. Earl shut off almost completely as he slipped into the “V,” keeping a bare steerage-way over the current. Twenty miles an hour was quite fast enough to be going in the event shedidswerve from the channel and hit a rock; there was no point in adding to the potential force of the impact with the engine. As there was a heavy wash from the rapids in even the quietest eddy he could find opposite the town, Earl stayed with the launch, keeping her off the rocks with a pole while Ike, Roos and myself went foraging. Ike spilled gasoline over his back in packing a leaking can down over the boulders, causing burns from which he suffered considerable pain and annoyance when he came to man the sweep the following day.
After dropping Roos on the right bank to set up for the picture, Earl drove the launch back up the rapid to the raft. I hardly know which was the more impressive, the power of the wildly racing rapid or the power of the engine of the launch. It was a ding-dong fight all the way. Although he nosed at times to within a few inches of the overhanging rocks of the bank in seeking the quietest water, the launch was brought repeatedly to a standstill. There she would hang quivering, until the accelerating engine would impart just the few added revolutions to the propellers that would give her the upper hand again. The final struggle at the “intake” was the bitterest of all, and Earl only won out there by sheering to the right across the “V”—at imminent risk of being swung round, it seemed to me—and reaching less impetuous water.
Throwing off her mooring lines, Earl towed theraft out into the sluggish current. There was plenty of time and plenty of room to manœuvre her into the proper position. All he had to do was to bring her into the “intake” well clear of the rocks and rollers to the left, and then keep towing hard enough to hold her head down-stream. It was a simple operation—compared, for instance, with what he would have on the morrow at Hell Gate—but still one that had to be carried out just so if an awful mess-up was to be avoided. Novice as I was with that sort of a raft, I could readily see what would happen if she once got to swinging and turned broadside to the rapid.
That was about the first major rapid I ever recall running when I didn’t have something to do, and it was rather a relief to be able to watch the wheels go round and feel that there was nothing to stand-by for. Even Ike, with no sweep to swing, was foot-loose, or rather hand-free. Knowing Earl’s complete capability, he prepared to cast aside navigational worries for the nonce. He had picked up his axe and was about to turn to hewing at the blade of his big steering-oar, when I reminded him that he was still an actor and that he had been ordered to run up and down the raft and register “great anxiety” while within range of the camera.
Perhaps the outstanding sensation of that wild run was the feeling of surprise that swept over me at the almost uncanny speed with which that huge unwieldy mass of half submerged wood gathered way. In still water it would have taken a powerful tug many minutes to start it moving; here it picked up and leapt ahead like a motor-boat. One moment it was driftingalong at three miles an hour; five seconds later, having slid over the “intake,” it was doing more than twenty. The actual slope of that first short pitch must have been all of one-in-ten, so that I found myself bracing against the incline of the raft, as when standing in a wagon that starts over the brow of a hill. Then the pitch eased and she hit the rollers, grinding right through them like a floating Juggernaut. The very worst of them—haughty-headed combers that would have sent the skiff sky-rocketing—simply dissolved against the logs and died in hissing anguish in the tangle of cordwood. The motion had nothing of the jerkiness of even so large a craft as the launch, and one noticed it less under his feet than when he looked back and saw the wallowing undulations of the “deck.”
But best of all was the contemptuous might with which the raft stamped out, obliterated, abolished the accursed whirlpools. Spokane was not deep and steep-sided enough to be a dangerous whirlpool rapid, like the Dalles or Hell Gate, but there were still a lot of mighty mean-mouthed “suckers” lying in ambush where the rollers began to flatten. There was no question of their arrogance and courage. The raft might have been the daintyImshallah, with her annoying feminine weakness for clinging embraces, for all the hesitancy they displayed in attacking it. But, oh, what a difference! Where the susceptibleImshallahhad edged off in coy dalliance and ended by all but surrendering, the raft simply thundered ahead. The siren “whouf!” of the lurking brigand was forced back down its black throat as it was literally effaced, smeared from the face of the water. Gad, how I loved to see them die, after allImshallahand I had had to endure at their foul hands!Imshallah, perched safely aloft on a stack of cordwood, took it all with the rather languid interest one would expect from a lady of her quality; but I—well, I fear very much that I was leaning out over the “bows,” at an angle not wholly safe under the circumstances, and registering “ghoulish glee” at the exact point where Roos had told me three times that I must be running up and down in the wake of Ike and registering “great anxiety.”
As there was no stopping the raft within a mile or two of the foot of the rapid, it had been arranged that we should launch the skiff as soon as we were through the worst water, and pull in to the first favourable eddy to await Roos and his camera. It was Ike bellowing to me to come and lend him a hand with the skiff that compelled me to relinquish my position at the “bow,” where, “thumbs down” at every clash, I had been egging on the raft to slaughter whirlpools. The current was still very swift, so that Ike was carried down a considerable distance before making a landing. As it was slow going for Roos, laden with camera and tripod, over the boulders, ten or fifteen minutes elapsed before they pushed off in pursuit of the raft. The latter, in the meantime, had run a couple of miles farther down river before Earl found a stretch sufficiently quiet to swing her round and check her way by towing up against the current.
In running down to this point the raft had splashed through a slashing bit of riffle, which I afterwardslearned was called Middle Rapid locally. There was a short stretch of good rough white water. Offhand, it looked to me rather sloppier than anything we had put the skiff into so far; but, as it appeared there would be no difficulty in steering a course in fairly smooth water to the left of the rollers, I was not greatly concerned over it. Presently Ike came pulling round the bend at a great rate, and the next thing I knewImshallahwas floundering right down the middle of the frosty-headed combers. Twice or thrice I saw the “V” of her bow shoot skyward, silhouetting like a black wedge against a fan of sun-shot spray. Then she began riding more evenly, and shortly was in smoother water. It was distinctly the kind of thing she did best, and she had come through with flying colours. Roos was grinning when he climbed aboard, but still showed a tinge of green about the gills. “Why didn’t you head her into that smooth stretch on the left?” I asked. “Youhad the steering paddle.” “I tried to hard enough,” he replied, still grinning, “but Ike wouldn’t have it. Said he kinda suspected she’d go through that white stuff all right, and wanted to see if his suspicions were correct.” And that was old Ike Emerson to a “T.”
We wallowed on through French Rapids and Hawk Creek Rapids in the next hour, and past the little village of Peach, nestling on a broad bench in the autumnal red and gold of its clustering orchards. Ike, pacing the “bridge” with me, said that they used to make prime peach brandy at Peach, and reckoned that p’raps.... “No,” I cut in decisively; “Ihaveno desire to return to Kettle Falls.” I had jumped at the chance to draw Ike on that remarkable up-river journey of his after the disaster in Hell Gate, but he sheered off at once. I have grave doubts as to whether that strange phenomenon ever will be explained.
We were now threading a great canyon, the rocky walls of which reared higher and higher in fantastic pinnacles, spires and weird castellations the deeper we penetrated its glooming depths. There had been painters at work, too, and with colourings brighter and more varied than any I had believed to exist outside of the canyons of the Colorado and the Yellowstone. Saffron melting to fawn and dun was there, and vivid streaks that were almost scarlet where fractures were fresh, but had changed to maroon and terra cotta under the action of the weather. A fluted cliff-face, touched by the air-brush of the declining sun, flushed a pink so delicate that one seemed to be looking at it through a rosy mist. There were intenser blocks and masses of colours showing in vivid lumps on a buttressed cliff ahead, but they were quenched before we reached them in a flood of indigo and mauve shadows that drenched the chasm as the sun dropped out of sight. From the heights it must have been a brilliant sunset, flaming with intense reds and yellows as desert sunsets always are; but looking out through the purple mists of the great gorge there was only a flutter of bright pennons—crimson, gold, polished bronze and dusky olive green—streaming across an ever widening and narrowing notch of jagged rock, black and opaque like splintered ebony. For a quarterof an hour we seemed to be steering for those shimmering pennons as for a harbor beacon; then a sudden up-thrust of black wall cut them off like a sliding door. By the time we were headed west again the dark pall of fallen night had smothered all life out of the flame-drenched sky, leaving it a pure transparent black, pricked with the twinkle of kindling stars. Only by the absence of stars below could one trace the blank opacity of the blacker black of the towering cliffs.
No one had said anything to me about an all-day-and-all-night schedule for the raft, and, as a matter of fact, running in the night had not entered into the original itinerary at all. The reason we were bumping along in the dark now was that Ike, who had no more idea of time than an Oriental, had pushed off from Gerome an hour late, wasted another unnecessary hour in Lincoln yarning across the sugar barrel at the general store, and, as a consequence, had been overtaken by night ten miles above the point he wanted to make. As there was no fast water intervening, and as Earl had shown no signs of dissent, Ike had simply gone right on ahead regardless. When I asked him if it wasn’t a bit risky, he said he thought not very; adding comfortingly that he had floated down on rafts a lot of times before, and hadn’t “allus bumped.” If he could see to tighten up stringer pegs, he reckoned Earl ought to be able to see rocks, “’cose rocks was a sight bigger’n pegs.”
It was not long after Ike had nullified the effect of his reassuring philosophy by smearing the end of his thumb with a mallet that Earl’s night-owl eyesplayed him false to the extent of overlooking a rock. It may well have been a very small rock, and it was doubtless submerged a foot or more; so there was no use expecting a man to see the ripple above it when there wasn’t light enough to indicate the passage of his hand before his eyes. It was no fault of Earl’s at all, and even the optimistic Ike had claimed no more than that he hadn’t “allus bumped.” Nor was it a very serious matter at the worst. The raft merely hesitated a few seconds, swung part way round, slipped free again and, her head brought back at the pull of the launch, resumed her way. The jar of striking was not enough to throw a well-braced man off his feet. (The only reason Roos fell and pulped his ear was because he had failed to set himself at the right angle when the shock came.) The worst thing that happened was the loss of a dozen or so cords of wood which, being unsecurely stacked, toppled over when she struck. Luckily, the boat was parked on the opposite side, as was also Roos. It would have been hard to pick up either before morning, and Roos would hardly have lasted. The wood was a total loss to Ike, of course; but he was less concerned about that than he was over the fact that it reduced her “freeboard” on that quarter by three feet, so that she wouldn’t make so much of a “showin’ in the picters.” Hedidraise a howl the next morning, though. That was when he found that his old denim jacket had gone over with the cordwood. It wasn’t the “wamus” itself he minded so much, he said, but the fact that in one of that garment’s pockets had been stored the milk chocolate which he was using to alienate the affections of the Dutchman’s collie. “It’s all in gettin’ a jump on a pup’s feelin’s at the fust offsta’t,” he philosophied bitterly; “an’ naow I’ll be losin’ mah jump.” Rather keen on the psychology of alienation, that observation of old Ike, it struck me.
It was along toward nine o’clock, and shortly after the abrupt walls of the canyon began to fall away somewhat, that a light appeared on the left bank. Making a wide circle just above what had now become a glowing window-square, Earl brought the raft’s head up-stream and swung her in against the bank. The place was marked Creston on the maps, but appeared to be spoken of locally as Halberson’s Ferry. We spent the night with the hospitable Halbersons, who ran the ferry across to the Colville Reservation side and operated a small sawmill when logs were available. Earl slept at his ranch, a few miles away on themesa.
The night was intensely cold, and I was not surprised to find icicles over a foot long on the flume behind the house in the morning. The frozen ground returned a metallic clank to the tread of my hob-nailed boots as I stepped outside the door. Then I gave a gasp of amazement, for what did I see but Ike running—with a light, springing step—right along the surface of the river? At my exclamation one of the Halbersons left off toweling and came over to join me. “What’s wrong?” he asked, swinging his arms to keep warm. “Wrong!” I ejaculated; “look at that! I know this isn’t Galilee; but you don’t mean to tell me the Columbia has frozen over duringthe night!” “Hardly that,” was the laughing answer. “Ike’s not running on either the ice or the water; he’s just riding a water-soaked log to save walking. It’s an old trick of his. Not many can do it like he can.” And that was all there was to it. Ike had spotted a drift-log stranded a short distance up-river, and was simply bringing it down the easiest way so as to lash it to the raft and take it to market. But I should have hated to have seen a thing like that “water-walking” effect in those long ago days on the Canadian Big Bend, when we used to prime our breakfast coffee with a couple of fingers of “thirty per over-proof.”
We cast off at nine-thirty, after Ike had laid in some more “component parts” of his mighty sweep at the little sawmill. Although less deeply encanyoned than through the stretch down which we passed the previous night, there were still enormously high cliffs on both sides of the river. Trees and brush were scarcer and scrubbier than above, and the general aspect was becoming more and more like the semi-arid parts of the Colorado Desert. The colouring was somewhat less vivid than the riot in the canyon above, but was almost equally varied. The colour-effect was diversified along this part of the river by the appearance of great patches of rock-growing lichen, shading through half a dozen reds and browns to the most delicate amethyst and sage-green. At places it was impossible to tell from the river where the mineral pigments left off and the vegetable coating began.
The river was broad and widening, with a comparatively slow current and only occasional stretches of white water. I took the occasion to launch the skiff and paddle about for an hour, trying to get some line on the speed at which the raft was towing. In smooth water I found I had the legs of her about three-to-one, and in rapids of about two-to-one. From this I figured that she did not derive more than from a mile and a half to two miles an hour of her speed from the launch. I only raced her through one bit of rapid, and she was such a poor sport about the course that I refused to repeat the stunt. Just as I began to spurt past her down through the jumping white caps she did a sort of a side-slip and crowded me out of the channel and into a rather messy souse-hole. The outragedImshallahgulped a big mouthful, but floundered through right-side up, as she always seemed able to do in that sort of stuff. But I pulled into an eddy and let the hulking old wood-pile have the right-of-way, declining Earl’s tooted challenge for a brush in the riffle immediately following. A monster that could eat whirlpools alive wasn’t anything for a skiff to monkey with the business end of. I boarded her respectfully by the stern and pulledImshallahup after me.
The great bald dome of White Rock, towering a thousand feet above the left bank of the river, signalled our approach to Hell Gate. Towing across a broad reach of quiet water, Earl laid the raft against the left bank about half a mile above where a pair of black rock jaws, froth-flecked and savage, seemed closing together in an attempt to bite the river in two.That was as close as it was safe to stop the raft, Earl explained as we made fast the mooring lines, for the current began to accelerate rapidly almost immediately below. There were some shacks and an ancient apple orchard on the bench above, and Ike came over to whisper that they used to make some mighty kicky cider there once upon a time, and perhaps.... I did not need the prompting of Earl’s admonitory head-shake. “Get a jump on you with the sweep,” I said, “while Earl and I go down and help Roos set up. There’ll be time enough to talk about cider below Hell Gate.” I saw a somewhat (to judge from a distance) Bacchantic ciderette picking her way down the bench bank to the raft as the launch sped off down stream, but if Ike realized dividends from the visit there was never anything to indicate it.
Although Hell Gate is a long ways from being the worst rapid on the Columbia, it comes pretty near to qualifying as theworst lookingrapid. A long black reef, jutting out from the left bank, chokes the river into a narrow channel and forces it over against the rocky wall on the right. It shoots between these obstructions with great velocity, only to split itself in two against a big rock island a hundred yards farther down. The more direct channel is to the right, but it is too narrow to be of use. The main river, writhing like a wounded snake after being bounced off the sheer wall of the island, zigzags on through the black basaltic barrier in a course shaped a good deal like an elongated letter “Z.” Hell Gate is very much like either the Great or Little Dalleswould be if a jog were put into it by an earthquake—a rapid shaped like a flash of lightning, and with just as much kick in it.