Part 9 (1/2)
We were now close to the historic Boat Encampment, where at last our course would join with that followed by the early _voyageurs_ and explorers. No point in the whole length of the Columbia, not even Astoria, has a.s.sociations more calculated to stir the imagination than this tiny patch of silt-covered overflow flat which has been formed by the erosive action of three torrential rivers tearing at the hearts of three great mountain ranges. Sand and soil of the Rockies, Selkirks and the Gold Range, carried by the Columbia, Canoe and Wood rivers, meet and mingle to form the remarkable halting place, where the east and westbound pioneering traffic of a century stopped to gather breath for the next stage of its journey.
Before pus.h.i.+ng off from the Ferry on the morning of October seventh I dug out from my luggage a copy of a report written in 1881 by Lieutenant Thomas W. Symons, U. S. A., on the navigation of the Upper Columbia.
This was chiefly concerned with that part of the river between the International Boundary and the mouth of the Snake, but Lieutenant Symons had made a long and exhaustive study of the whole Columbia Basin, and his geographical description of the three rivers which unite at Boat Encampment is so succinct and yet so comprehensive that I am impelled to make a liberal quotation from it here. Of the great a.s.sistance I had from Lieutenant Symons' invaluable report when I came to the pa.s.sage of that part of the river covered by his remarkable voyage of forty years ago I shall write later.
”Amid the universal gloom and midnight silence of the north, a little above the fifty-second parallel of lat.i.tude, seemingly surrounded on all sides by cloud-piercing snow-clad mountains, and nestled down among the lower and nearer cedar-mantled hills, there lies a narrow valley where three streams meet and blend their waters, one coming from the southeast, one from the northwest, and one from the east. The princ.i.p.al one of these streams is the one from the southeast ... and is the headwater stream, and bears the name of the Columbia.
”The northwestern stream is the extreme northern branch of the Columbia, rising beyond the fifty-third parallel of lat.i.tude, and is known among the traders and _voyageurs_ as Canoe River, from the excellence of the barks obtained on its banks for canoe building. This is a small river, forty yards wide at its mouth, flowing through a densely timbered valley in which the trees overhang the stream to such an extent as almost to shut it out from the light of heaven....
”Portage River, the third of the trio of streams, the smallest and the most remarkable of them, is the one which enters from the east. It has its source in the very heart of the Rocky Mountains and flows through a tremendous cleft in the main range between two of its loftiest peaks, Mounts Brown and Hooker. Just underneath these giant mountains, on the divide known as 'The Height of Land,' lie two small lakes, each about thirty yards in diameter, and which are only a few yards from each other. One has its outlet to the west, Portage River, flowing to the Columbia; the other has its outlet to the east, Whirlpool River, a branch of the Athabaska, which joins the Mackenzie and flows to the Arctic Ocean.
”The elevated valley in which these lakes are situated is called 'The Committee's Punchbowl,' and the nabobs of the fur trade always treated their companions to a bucket of punch when this point was reached, if they had the ingredients from which to make it, and they usually had.
”The pa.s.s across the mountains by the Portage River, 'The Committee's Punchbowl' and Whirlpool River, known as the Athabaska Pa.s.s, was for many years the route of the British fur traders in going from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other. This route is far from being an easy one, and a description of the difficulties, dangers and discomforts of a trip over it will certainly deter any one from making the journey for pleasure. A great part of the way the traveller has to wade up to his middle in the icy waters of Portage River. The journey had to be made in the spring before the summer thaws and rains set in, or in the autumn after severe cold weather had locked up the mountain drainage. During the summer the stream becomes an impetuous impa.s.sable mountain torrent.”
Considering that Lieutenant Symons had never traversed the Big Bend nor the Athabaska Pa.s.s, this description (which must have been written from his careful readings of the diaries of the old _voyageurs_) is a remarkable one. It is not only accurate topographically and geographically, but it has an ”atmosphere” which one who _does_ know this region at first hand will be quick to appreciate. How and when the stream which he and the men before him called Portage River came to have its name changed to Wood, I have not been able to learn.
A mile below the Ferry Blackmore called my attention to a sharp wedge of brown-black mountain which appeared to form the left wall of the river a short way ahead. That lofty out-thrust of rock, he said, was the extreme northern end of the Selkirk Range. The Columbia, after receiving the waters of Wood and Canoe rivers, looped right round this cape and started flowing south, but with the _ma.s.sif_ of the Selkirks still forming its left bank. But the Rockies, which had formed its right bank all the way from its source, were now left behind, and their place was taken by the almost equally lofty Gold Range, which drained east to the Columbia and west to the Thompson.
The Columbia doubles back from north to south at an astonis.h.i.+ngly sharp angle,--as river bends go, that is. Picture mentally Madison Square, New York. Now suppose the Columbia to flow north on Broadway, bend round the Flatiron Building (which represents the Selkirks), and then flow south down Fifth Avenue. Then East Twenty-Third Street would represent Wood River, and North Broadway, Canoe River. Now forget all the other streets and imagine the buildings of Madison Square as ten to twelve thousand-feet-high mountains. And there you have a model of the apex of the Big Bend of the Columbia.
A milky grey-green flood--straight glacier water if there ever was such--staining the clear stream of the Columbia marked the mouth of Wood River, and we pulled in for a brief glimpse in pa.s.sing of what had once been Boat Encampment. I had broken my thermometer at Kinbasket Lake, so I could not take the temperatures here; but Wood River was beyond all doubt the coldest stream I had ever dabbled a finger-tip in. What the ascent to Athabaska Pa.s.s must have been may be judged from this description by Alexander Ross--one of the original Astoria party--written over a hundred years ago.
”Picture in the mind a dark, narrow defile, skirted on one side by a chain of inaccessible mountains rising to a great height, covered with snow, and slippery with ice from their tops down to the water's edge; and on the other a beach comparatively low, but studded in an irregular manner with standing and fallen trees, rocks and ice, and full of driftwood, over which the torrent everywhere rushes with such irresistible impetuosity that very few would dare to adventure themselves in the stream. Let him again imagine a rapid river descending from some great height, filling up the whole channel between the rocky precipices on the south, and the no less dangerous barrier on the north; and, lastly, let him suppose that we were obliged to make our way on foot against such a torrent, by crossing and recrossing it in all its turns and windings, from morning till night, up to the middle in water, and he will understand the difficulties to be overcome in crossing the Rocky Mountains.”
I have been able to learn nothing of records which would indicate that any of the early explorers or _voyageurs_ traversed that portion of the Columbia down which we had just come. David Thompson, who is credited with being the first man to travel the Columbia to the sea, although he spent one winter at the foot of Lake Windermere, appears to have made his down-river push-off from Boat Encampment. Mr. Basil G. Hamilton, of Invermere, sends me an authoritative note on this point, based on Thompson's own journal. From this it appears that the great astronomer-explorer crossed the Rockies by Athabaska Pa.s.s and came down to what has since been known by the name of Boat Encampment in March, 1811. Having built himself a hut, he made preparation for a trip down the Columbia, by which he hoped to reach the mouth in advance of either of the Astor parties, and thus be able to lay claim to the whole region traversed in the name of the Northwest Company. He writes: ”We first tried to get birch rind wherewith to make our trip to the Pacific Ocean, but without finding any even thick enough to make a dish. So we split out thin boards of cedar wood, about six inches in breadth, and built a canoe twenty-five feet in length and fifty inches in breadth, of the same form as a common canoe. As we had no nails we sewed the boards to each other round the timbers, making use of the fine roots of the pine which we split.”
This ingeniously constructed but precarious craft was finished on the sixteenth of April, and Thompson's party embarked in it on the seventeenth. Mr. Hamilton doubts if this was the same craft in which they finally reached Astoria. From my own knowledge of what lies between I am very much inclined to agree with him. Certainly no boat of the construction described could have lasted even to the Arrow Lakes without much patching, and if a boat seeming on the lines of the original really reached the Pacific, it must have been many times renewed in the course of the voyage. I shall hardly need to add that Thompson's remarkable journey, so far as its original object was concerned, was a failure. He reached the mouth of the Columbia well in advance of Astor's land party, but only to find the New Yorker fur-trader's expedition by way of Cape Horn and Hawaii already in occupation.
Boat Encampment of to-day is neither picturesque nor interesting; indeed, there are several camp-sites at the Bend that one would choose in preference to that rather damp patch of brush-covered, treeless clearing. All that I found in the way of relics of the past were some huge cedar stumps, almost covered with silt, and the remains of a demolished _batteau_. I salved a crude oar-lock from the latter to carry as a mascot for my down-river trip. As a mascot it served me very well, everything considered; though it _did_ get me in rather bad once when I tried to use it for an oar-lock.
Before the sparkling jade-green stream of the Columbia had entirely quenched the milky flow of Wood River, the chocolate-brown torrent of Canoe River came pouring in to mess things up anew. The swift northern affluent, greatly swelled by the recent rains, was in flood, and at the moment appeared to be discharging a flow almost if not quite equal to that of the main river. For a considerable distance the waters of the right side of the augmented river retained their rich cinnamon tint, and it was not until a brisk stretch of rapid a mile below the Bend got in its c.o.c.ktail-shaker action that the two streams became thoroughly blended. Then the former crystalline clearness of the Columbia was a thing of the past. It was still far from being a muddy river. There was still more of green than of brown in its waters, but they were dully translucent where they had been brilliantly transparent. Not until the hundred-mile-long settling-basin of the Arrow Lakes allowed the sediment to deposit did the old emerald-bright sparkle come back again.
A couple of quick rifle shots from the left bank set the echoes ringing just after we had pa.s.sed Canoe River, and Blackmore turned in to where a man and dog were standing in front of an extremely picturesquely located log cabin. It proved to be a French-Canadian half-breed trapper called Alphonse Edmunds. His interest in us was purely social, and after a five minutes' yarn we pulled on. Blackmore said the chap lived in Golden, and that to avoid the dreaded run down through Surprise and Kinbasket rapids, he was in the habit of going a couple of hundred miles by the C.
P. R. to Kamloops, thence north for a hundred miles or more by the Canadian Northern, thence by packtrain a considerable distance over the divide to the head of Canoe River, and finally down the latter by boat to the Bend, where he did his winter trapping. This was about four times the distance as by the direct route down the Columbia, and probably at least quadrupled time and expense. It threw an illuminative side-light on the way some of the natives regarded the upper half of the Big Bend.
The river was deeper now, but still plugged along at near to the ten-miles-an-hour it had averaged from the foot of Kinbasket Rapids. As the western slopes of the Selkirks were considerably more extensive than the eastern, the drainage to the Columbia from that side was proportionately greater. Cascades and cataracts came tumbling in every few hundred yards, and every mile or two, from one side or the other, a considerable creek would pour down over its spreading boulder ”fan.” We landed at twelve-thirty and cooked our lunch on the stove of a perfect beauty of a trapper's cabin near the mouth of Mica Creek. The trapper had already begun getting in his winter grub, but was away at the moment. The whole place was as clean as a Dutch kitchen. A recent s.h.i.+ft of channel by the fickle-minded Mica Creek had undermined almost to the door of this snug little home, and Andy reckoned it would go down river on the next spring rise.
[Ill.u.s.tration: TRAPPER'S CABIN BEING UNDERMINED BY STREAM]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CAMP ABOVE TWELVE-MILE]
[Ill.u.s.tration: LANDING AT SUNSET ABOVE CANOE RIVER (_above_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: ANDY AND BLACKMORE SWINGING THE BOAT INTO THE HEAD OF ROCK SLIDE RAPIDS (_centre_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BIG ROLLERS, FROM 15 TO 20 FEET FROM HOLLOW TO CREST, AT HEAD OF DEATH RAPIDS (_below_)]
We ran the next eighteen miles in less than two hours, tying up for the night at a well-built Government cabin three miles below Big Mouth Creek. It was occupied for the winter by a Swede trapper named Johnston.
He was out running his trap-lines when we arrived, but came back in time to be our guest for dinner. He made one rather important contribution to the menu--a ”mulligan,” the _piece de resistance_ of which, so he claimed, was a mud-hen he had winged with his revolver that morning.
There were six or seven ingredients in that confounded Irish stew already, and--much to the disgust of Roos and myself, who didn't fancy eating mud-hen--Andy dumped into it just about everything he had been cooking except the prunes. That's the proper caper with ”mulligans,” and they are very good, too, unless some one of the makings chances to be out of your line. And such most decidedly was mud-hen--fish-eating mud-hen! As we were sort of company, Roos and I put on the best faces we could and filled up on prunes and marmalade. It was only after the other three had cleaned out the ”mulligan” can that Andy chanced to mention that ”mud-hen” was the popularly accepted euphemism for grouse shot out of season!
Andy and Blackmore and Johnston talked ”trapper stuff” all evening--tricks for tempting marten, how to prevent the pesky wolverine from robbing traps, ”stink-baits,” prices, and the prospects for beaver when it again became lawful to take them. Johnston was a typical Swede, with little apparent regard for his physical strength if money could be made by drawing upon it. The previous season he had had to sleep out in his blankets many nights while covering his lines, and he counted himself lucky that this year he had two or three rough cabins for shelter. He was a terrific worker and ate sparingly of the grub that cost him twenty cents a pound to bring in. He was already looking a bit drawn, and Blackmore said the next morning that he would be more or less of a physical wreck by spring, just as he had been the previous season.