Part 12 (1/2)

The site of the historic post was in an extremely aged apple orchard immediately above. It was one of those ”inevitable” spots, where the _voyageurs_ of all time pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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, the _Shoshone_, 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 old _Shoshone_,” 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 the _Shoshone_ are 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 back northward 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-Canadian _voyageurs_ to apply the appropriately descriptive name of _Chaudiere_ to 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 a.s.set 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 the _batteau_ for 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. During the 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 a.s.sistance 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 built _batteau_, and had his a.s.sistance in selecting a crew of Indians for the journey. The _batteau_ was 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 Bay _voyageurs_ now 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 a.s.sistant, 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 compa.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly little change in the 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, s.h.i.+ft 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 fis.h.i.+ng for salmon--the crooked-nosed ”dogs” of the final run. If they were 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 her foot, 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 emanc.i.p.ative 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 octup.u.s.s.es would only give the young 'uns mo' ahms to find troubl'

with.” Now _did_ she 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, took us 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 I brought 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.