Chapter IX: Revelstoke to the Spokane (1)

The voyage round the Big Bend, in spite of the atrocious weather, had gone so well that I had just about made up my mind to continue on down river by the time we reached Revelstoke. A letter which awaited me at the hotel there from Captain Armstrong, stating that he would be free to join me for my first week or ten days south from the foot of the lakes, was all that was needed to bring me to a decision. I wired him that I would pick him up in Nelson as soon as I had cleaned up a pile of correspondence which had pursued me in spite of all directions to the contrary, and in the meantime for him to endeavour to find a suitable boat. Nelson, as the metropolis of western British Columbia, appeared to be the only place where we would have a chance of finding what was needed in the boat line on short notice. While I wrote letters, Roos got his exposed film off to Los Angeles, laid in a new stock, and received additional instructions from Chester in connection with the new picture--the one for which the opening shots had already been made at Windermere, and which we called "The Farmer Who Would See the Sea."

As there was no swift water whatever between Revelstoke and Kootenay Rapids, I had no hesitation in deciding to make the voyage down the Arrow Lakes by steamer. Both on the score of water-stage and weather, it was now a good month to six weeks later than the most favourable time for a through down-river voyage. Any time saved now, therefore, might be the means of avoiding so many days of winter further along. I was hoping that, with decreasing altitude and a less humid region ahead, I would at least be keeping ahead of the snows nearly if not quite all the way to Portland. I may mention here that, all in all, I played in very good luck on the score of weather. There were to be, however, a few _geesly_ cold days on the river along about Wenatchee, and two or three mighty blustery blows in the Cascades.

The Arrow Lakes are merely enlargements of the Columbia, keeping throughout their lengths the same general north-to-south direction of this part of the river. The upper lake is thirty-three miles in length, and has an average width of about three miles. Sixteen miles of comparatively swift river runs from the upper to the lower lake. The latter, which is forty-two miles long and two and a half wide, is somewhat less precipitously walled than the upper lake, and there are considerable patches of cultivation here and there along its banks--mostly apple orchards. There is a steamer channel all the way up the Columbia to Revelstoke, but the present service, maintained by the Canadian Pacific at its usual high standard, starts at the head of the upper lake and finishes at West Robson, some miles down the Columbia from the foot of the lower lake. This is one of the very finest lake trips anywhere in the world; I found it an unending source of delight, even after a fortnight of the superlative scenery of the Big Bend.

There is a stock story they tell of the Arrow Lakes, and which appears intended to convey to the simple tourist a graphic idea of the precipitousness of their rocky walls. The skipper of my steamer told it while we were ploughing down the upper lake. Seeing a man struggling in the water near the bank one day, he ran some distance off his course to throw the chap a line. Disdaining all aid, the fellow kept right on swimming toward the shore. "Don't worry about me," he shouted back; "this is only the third time I've fallen off my ranch to-day."

I told the Captain that the story sounded all right to me except in one particular--that even my glass failed to reveal any ranches for a man to fall off of. "Oh, that's all right," was the unperturbed reply; "there _was_ one when that yarn was started, but I guess it fell into the lake too. But mebbe I _had_ ought to keep it for the lower lake, though," he added; "there is still some un-slid ranches down there."

Nelson is a fine little city that hangs to a rocky mountainside right at the point where Kootenay Lake spills over and discharges its surplus water into a wild, white torrent that seems to be trying to atone at the last for its long delay in making up its mind to join the Columbia. Nelson was made by the rich silver-lead mines of the Kootenay district, but it was so well made that, even now with the first fine frenzy of the mining excitement over, it is still able to carry on strongly as a commercial distributing and fruit shipping centre. It is peopled by the same fine, out-door loving folk that one finds through all of western Canada, and is especially noted for its aquatic sports. I am only sorry that I was not able to see more of both Nelson and its people.

As soon as I saw Captain Armstrong I made a clean breast to him about my failure to unearth the treasure at the Bend. He was a good sport and bore up better than one would expect a man to under the circumstances. "I wish that matter of K---- and his D. T.'s had come up before you left," was his only comment.

"Why?" I asked. "I can't see what difference that would have made. We didn't waste a lot of time digging."

"That's just it," said the Captain with a wry grin. "Wouldn't you have gone right on digging if you had known that the spell of jim-jams that finished K---- came from some stuff he got from a section-hand at Beavermouth? Now I suppose I'll have to watch my chance and run down and salvage that keg of old Scotch myself." It shows the stuff that Armstrong was made of when I say that, even after the way I had betrayed the trust he had reposed in me, he was still game to go on with the Columbia trip. That's the sort of man he was.

Boats of anywhere near the design we would need for the river were scarce, the Captain reported, but there was one which he thought might do. This proved to be a sixteen-foot, clinker-built skiff that had been constructed especially to carry an out-board motor. She had ample beam, a fair freeboard and a considerable sheer. The principal thing against her was the square stern, and that was of less moment running down river than if we had been working up. It _did_ seem just a bit like asking for trouble, tackling the Columbia in a boat built entirely for lake use; but Captain Armstrong's approval of her was quite good enough for me. Save for her amiable weakness of yielding somewhat overreadily to the seductive embraces of whirlpools--a trait common to all square-sterned craft of inconsiderable length--she proved more than equal to the task set for her. We paid fifty-five dollars for her--about half what she had cost--and there was a charge of ten dollars for expressing her to West Robson, on the Columbia.

We left Nelson by train for Castlegar, on the Columbia just below West Robson, the afternoon of October nineteenth. The track runs in sight of the Kootenay practically all of the way. There is a drop of three hundred and fifty feet in the twenty-eight miles of river between the outlet of the lake and the Columbia, with no considerable stretch that it would be safe to run with a boat. A large part of the drop occurs in two fine cataracts called Bonnington Falls, where there is an important hydro-electric plant, serving Nelson and Trail with power; but most of the rest of the way the river is one continuous series of foam-white cascades with short quiet stretches between. The last two or three miles to the river the railway runs through the remarkable colony of Russian Doukobours, with a station at Brilliant, where their big co-operative jam factory and administrative offices are located. We had a more intimate glimpse of this interesting colony from the river the following day.

We found the express car with the boat on the siding at West Robson, and the three of us--Armstrong, Roos and myself--had little difficulty in sliding her down the quay and launching her in the Columbia. Pulling a mile down the quiet current, we tied her up for the night at the Castlegar Ferry. Then we cut across the bend through the woods for a look at Kootenay Rapids, the first stretch of fast water we were to encounter. After the rough-and-rowdy rapids of the Big Bend, this quarter-mile of white riffle looked like comparatively easy running. It was a very different sort of a craft we had now, however, and Armstrong took the occasion to give the channel a careful study. There were a lot of big black rocks cropping up all the way across, but he thought that, by keeping well in toward the right bank, we could make it without much trouble.

On the way back to the hotel at Castlegar, the Captain was hailed from the doorway of a cabin set in the midst of a fresh bit of clearing. It turned out to be a boatman who had accompanied him and Mr. Forde, of the Canadian Department of Public Works, on a part of their voyage down the Columbia in 1915. They reminisced for half an hour in the gathering twilight, talking mostly of the occasion when a whirlpool had stood their Peterboro on end in the Little Dalles. I found this just a bit disturbing, for Armstrong had already confided to me that he intended running the Little Dalles.

The boat trimmed well when we came to stow the load the next morning, but when the three of us took our places she was rather lower in the water than we had expected she was going to be. She seemed very small after Blackmore's big thirty-footer, and the water uncomfortably close at hand. She was buoyant enough out in the current, however, and responded very smartly to paddle and oars when Armstrong and I tried a few practice manoeuvres. The Captain sat on his bedding roll in the stern, plying his long paddle, and I pulled a pair of oars from the forward thwart. Roos sat on the after thwart, facing Armstrong, with his tripod, camera and most of the luggage stowed between them. She was loaded to ride high by the head, as it was white water rather than whirlpools that was in immediate prospect. With a small boat and a consequent comparatively small margin of safety, one has to make his trim a sort of a compromise. For rough, sloppy rapids it is well to have the bows just about as high in the air as you can get them. On the other hand, it is likely to be fatal to get into a bad whirlpool with her too much down by the stern. As the one succeeds the other as a general rule, about the best you can do is to strike a comfortable mean based on what you know of the water ahead.

I found it very awkward for a while pulling with two oars after having worked for so long with one, and this difficulty--especially in bad water--I never quite overcame. In a really rough rapid one oar is all a man can handle properly, and he does well if he manages that. Your stroke is largely determined by the sort of stuff the blade is going into, and--as on the verge of an eddy--with the water to port running in one direction, and that to starboard running another, it is obviously impossible for a man handling two oars to do full justice to the situation. He simply has to do the best he can and leave the rest to the man with the paddle in the stern. When the latter is an expert with the experience of Captain Armstrong there is little likelihood of serious trouble.

The matter of keeping a lookout is also much more difficult in a small boat. In a craft with only a few inches of freeboard it is obviously out of the question for a steersman to keep his feet through a rapid, as he may do without risk in a _batteau_ or canoe large enough to give him a chance to brace his knees against the sides. Armstrong effected the best compromise possible by standing and getting a good "look-see" while he could, and then settling back into a securer position when the boat struck the rough water. The three or four feet less of vantage from which to con the channel imposes a good deal of a handicap, but there is no help for it.

We ran both pitches of Kootenay Rapids easily and smartly. Her bows slapped down pretty hard when she tumbled off the tops of some of the bigger rollers, but into not the softest of the souse-holes would she put her high-held head. We took in plenty of spray, but nothing green--nothing that couldn't be bailed without stopping. It was a lot better performance than one was entitled to expect of a lake boat running her maiden rapid.

"She'll do!" chuckled the Captain with a satisfied grin, resting on his paddle as we slid easily out of the final run of swirls; "you ought to take her right through without a lot of trouble." "_Imshallah!_" I interjected piously, anxious not to offend the River God with a display of overmuch confidence. I began to call her "_Imshallah_" in my mind from that time on, and "_Imshallah_"--"God willing"--she remained until I tied her up for her well-earned rest in a Portland boat-house. It was in the course of the next day or two that I made a propitiatory offering to the River God in the form of the remnants of the _jodpurs_ he had tried so hard to snatch from me at Rock Slide Rapids. I've always had a sneaking feeling offerings of that kind are "good medicine;" that the old Greeks knew what they were doing when they squared things with the Gods in advance on venturing forth into unknown waters.

Big and Little Tin Cup Rapids, which are due to the obstruction caused by boulders washed down by the torrential Kootenay River, gave us little trouble. There is a channel of good depth right down the middle of both, and we splashed through this without getting into much besides flying foam. Just below we pulled up to the left bank and landed for a look at one of the Doukobour villages.

The Doukobours are a strange Russian religious sect, with beliefs and observances quite at variance with those of the Greek Church. Indeed, it was the persecutions of the Orthodox Russians that were responsible for driving considerable numbers of them to Canada. They are best known in America, not for their indefatigable industry and many other good traits, but for their highly original form of protesting when they have fancied that certain of their rights were being restricted by Canadian law. On repeated occasions of this kind whole colonies of them--men, women and children--have thrown aside their every rag of clothing and started off marching about the country. Perhaps it is not strange that more has been written about these strange pilgrimages than of the fact that the Doukobours have cleared and brought to a high state of productivity many square miles of land that, but for their unflagging energy, would still be worthless. In spite of their somewhat unconventional habits, these simple people have been an incalculably valuable economic asset to western Canada.

On the off chance that there might be an incipient "protest" brewing, Roos took his movie outfit ashore with him. He met with no luck. Indeed, we found the women of the astonishingly clean little village of plastered and whitewashed cabins extremely shy of even our hand cameras. The Captain thought that this was probably due to the fact that they had been a good deal pestered by kodak fiends while Godivaing round the country on some of their protest marches. "The people were very indignant about it," he said; "but I never heard of any one pulling down their blinds." Coventry was really very "Victorian" in its attitude toward Lady Godiva's "protest."

There was good swift water all the way from Castlegar to Trail, and we averaged close to nine miles an hour during the time we were on the river. At China Bar the river was a good deal spread out, running in channels between low gravel islands. Any one of these was runnable for a small boat, and we did not need to keep to the main channel that had once been maintained for steamers. Sixteen miles below Castlegar, and about half a mile below the mouth of Sullivan Creek, there was a long black reef of basaltic rock stretching a third of the way across the river. We shot past it without difficulty by keeping near the left bank. The sulphurous fumes of the big smelter blotching the southern sky with saffron and coppery red clouds indicated that we were nearing Trail. The stacks, with the town below and beyond, came into view just as we hit the head of a fast-running riffle. We ran the last half mile at a swift clip, pulling up into about the only place that looked like an eddy on the Trail side of the river. That this proved to be the slack water behind the crumbling city dump could not be helped. He who rides the running road cannot be too particular about his landing places.

We reached Trail before noon, and, so far as time was concerned, could just as well have run right on across the American line to Northport that afternoon. However, October twenty-first turned out to be a date of considerable importance to British Columbians, for it was the day of the election to determine whether that province should continue dry or, as the proponents of wetness euphemized it, return to "moderation." As there was a special provision by which voters absent from their place of registration could cast their ballots wherever they chanced to be, Captain Armstrong was anxious to stop over and do his bit for "moderation." Indeed, I was a bit worried at first for fear, by way of compensating in a measure for the injury we had done him in failing to come through with the treasure from the Big Bend, he would expect Roos and me to put in a few absentee ballots for "moderation." There was a rumour about that a vote for "moderation" would be later redeemable--in case "moderation" carried, of course--in the voter's weight of the old familiar juice. I never got further than a pencilled computation on the "temperance" bar of the Crown Point Hotel that two hundred and thirty-five pounds (I was down to that by now) would work out to something like one hundred seventeen and a half quarts. This on the rule that "A pint's a pound, the world round." That was as far as I got, I say, for there seemed rather too much of a chance of international complications sooner or later. But I am still wondering just what _is_ the law covering the case of a man who sells his vote in a foreign country--and for his weight in whisky that he would probably never have delivered to him. I doubt very much if there is any precedent to go by.

Between votes--or rather before Captain Armstrong voted--we took the occasion to go over the smelter of the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. It is one of the most modern plants of its kind in the world, and treats ore from all over western Canada. We were greatly interested in the recently installed zinc-leaching plant for the handling of an especially refractory ore from the company's own mine in the Kootenays. This ore had resisted for years every attempt to extract its zinc at a profit, and the perfection of the intricate process through which it is now put at Trail has made a mine, which would otherwise have remained practically valueless, worth untold millions. The two thousand and more employes of the smelter are the main factor in the prosperity of this live and by no means unattractive little town.

We had two very emphatic warnings before leaving Trail the next morning--one was on no account to attempt to take any drinkables across the line by the river, and the other was to keep a weather eye lifting in running the rapids at the Rock Islands, two miles below town. As we reached the latter before we did the International Boundary Line, we started 'wareing the rapids first. This was by no means as empty a warning as many I was to have later. The islands proved to be two enormous granite rocks, between which the river rushed with great velocity. The Captain headed the boat into the deep, swift channel to the right, avoiding by a couple of yards a walloping whale of a whirlpool that came spinning right past the bow. I didn't see it, of course, until it passed astern; but it looked to me then as though its whirling centre was depressed a good three feet below the surface of the river, and with a black, bottomless funnel opening out of that. I was just about to register "nonchalance" by getting off my "all-day-sucker" joke, when I suddenly felt the thwart beneath me begin to push upwards like the floor of a jerkily-started elevator, only with a rotary action. Fanning empty air with both oars, I was saved from falling backwards by the forty-five degree up-tilt of the boat. Way beneath me--down below the surface of the river--Armstrong, pop-eyed, was leaning sharply forward to keep from being dumped out over the stern. Roos, with a death-grip on either gunwale, was trying to keep from falling into the Captain's lap. Round we went like a prancing horse, and just as the boat had completed the hundred and eighty degrees that headed her momentarily up-river, something seemed to drop away beneath her bottom, and as she sunk into the hole there came a great snorting "ku-whouf!" and about a barrel of water came pouring its solid green flood over the stern and, incidentally, the Captain. A couple of seconds later the boat had completed her round and settled back on a comparatively even keel as hard-plied oars and paddle wrenched her out of the grip of the Thing that had held her in its clutch. I saw it plainly as it did its dervish dance of disappointment as we drew away. It looked to me not over half as large as that first one which the Captain had so cleverly avoided.

"That was about the way we got caught in the Little Dalles," observed Armstrong when we were in quieter water again. "Only it was a worse whirlpool than that one that did it. This square stern gives the water more of a grip than it can get on a canoe. We'll have to watch out for it."

Save over a broad, shallow bar across the current at the mouth of the Salmon, there was deep, swift water all the way to Waneta, the Canadian Customs station. Here we landed Roos to await the morning train from Nelson to Spokane and go through to Northport to arrange the American Customs formalities. At a final conference we decided to heed the warning about not attempting to carry any drinkables openly into the United States. Stowing what little there was left where not the most lynx-eyed or ferret-nosed Customs Officer could ever get at it, we pushed off.

There is a fairly fast current all the way to Northport, but from the fact that we made the eleven miles in about three-quarters of an hour, it seems likely that, between paddle and oars, the boat was driven somewhat faster than the Columbia. Just below Waneta and immediately above the International Boundary Line, the Pend d'Oreille or Clark's Fork flows, or rather falls into the Columbia. This really magnificent stream comes tumbling down a sheer-walled gorge in fall after fall, several of which can be seen in narrowing perspective from the Columbia itself. Its final leap is over a ten-feet-high ledge which extends all the way across its two-hundred-feet-wide mouth. Above this fine cataract it is the Pend d'Oreille, below it, the Columbia. I know of no place where two such rivers come together with such fine spectacular effect, in a way so fitting to the character of each.

The Pend d'Oreille is generally rated as the principal tributary of the upper Columbia. Although the Kootenay--because it flows through a region of considerably greater annual rainfall--carries rather the more water of the two, the Pend d'Oreille is longer and drains a far more extensive watershed--that lying between the main chain of the Rockies and the Bitter Root and Coeur d'Alene ranges. Great as is the combined discharge of these two fine rivers, their effect on the Columbia is not apparent to the eye. If anything, the latter looks a bigger stream where it flows out of the lower Arrow Lake, above the Kootenay, than it does where it crosses the American Line below the Pend d'Oreille. As a matter of fact, its flow must be nearly doubled at the latter point, but the swifter current reduces its apparent volume. Nothing but the most careful computations, based on speed of current and area of cross-section, will give anything approximating the real discharge of a river.

I was a good deal interested in the Pend d'Oreille, because it was on one of its upper tributaries, the Flathead in Montana, that I had made my first timid effort at rapid-running a good many years previously. It hadn't been a brilliant success--for two logs tied together with ropes hardly make the ideal of a raft; but the glamour of the hare-brained stunt had survived the wetting. I should dearly have loved to explore that wonderful black-walled canyon, with its unending succession of cataracts and cascades, but lack of time forbade. The drizzling rain made it impossible even to get a good photograph of the fine frenzy of that final mad leap into the Columbia.

It was funny the way that rain acted. For something like a month now there had been only two or three days of reasonably fair weather, and for the last fortnight the sun had hardly been glimpsed at all. Pulling up to Waneta in a clammy drizzle, Captain Armstrong remarked, as he drew the collar of his waterproof closer to decrease the drainage down the back of his neck, that he reckoned they wouldn't stand for weather of that kind over in "God's Country." As there was nothing but sodden clouds to the southward, I didn't feel like giving him any definite assurance on the point at the moment. However, when we crossed the Line an hour later the rain had ceased. A couple of miles farther down the clouds were breaking up, and at Northport the sun was shining. I did not have another rainy day, nor even one more than slightly overcast, until I was almost at the Cascades. I trust my good Canadian friend was as deeply impressed as he claimed to be.

Beyond a sharp riffle between jagged rock islands above Deadman's Eddy, and one or two shallow boulder bars where the channels were a bit obscure, it was good open-and-above-board water all the way to Northport. The "Eddy" is a whirling back-sweep of water at a bend of the river, and is supposed to hold up for inspection everything floatable that the Columbia brings down from Canada. "Funny they never thought of calling it 'Customs Eddy,'" Armstrong said. From the condition of its littered banks, it looked to be almost as prolific of "pickings" as the great drift pile of Kinbasket Lake. Being near a town, however, it is doubtless much more thoroughly gone over.

We tied up below the Ferry at Northport, which was the rendezvous to which Roos was to bring the Customs Inspector. The ferry-man, who had once seen Captain Armstrong run the rapids of the upper Kootenay with one of his steamers, was greatly elated over having such a notable walking the quarterdeck of his own humble craft. Armstrong, in turn, was scarcely less excited over an automatic pumping contrivance which the ferry-man had rigged up to keep his pontoons dry. After waiting for an hour, we took our bags and walked up to the hotel on the main street at the top of the bluff. We found Roos in the office reading a last year's haberdashery catalogue. He said he had not expected us for a couple of hours yet, and that he had arranged for inspection at three o'clock. That gave us time for a bath and lunch ourselves. As our bags were now well beyond the tentacles of the Customs, we did a little figuring on the table-cloth between courses. By this we proved that, had we had the nerve to disregard the warnings of well-meaning friends in Trail and filled our hand-bags with Scotch instead of personal effects, Armstrong would now have had fourteen quarts up in his room, and I eighteen quarts. Then the waitress gave us current local quotations, and we started to figure values. I shall never know whether or not there would have been room on the corner of that gravy and egg broidered napery for my stupendous total. Just as I was beginning to run over the edge, the Inspector came in and asked if we would mind letting him see those two suit-cases we had brought to the hotel with us! Many and various are the joys of virtue, but none of the others comparable to that one which sets you aglow as you say "Search me!" when, by the special intervention of the providence which watches over fools and drunks, you haven't got goods.

The inspection, both at the hotel and at the ferry, was _fairly_ perfunctory, though I did notice that the Customs man assumed a rather springy step when he trod the light inner bottom of the skiff. Roos filmed the operation as a part of the picture, I acting as much as I could like I thought a farmer would act at his first Customs inspection. Roos, complaining that I didn't "do it natural," wanted to shoot over again. The Customs man was willing, but Armstrong and I, trudging purposefully off up the road, refused to return. Roos followed us to the hotel in considerable dudgeon. "Why wouldn't you let me make that shot over?" he asked. "It was an 'oil-can'--rotten!" "Because," I replied evenly, looking him straight in the eye, "I was afraid the Inspector might try that jig-a-jig step of his on the false bottom in the bow if we put him through the show a second time. I don't believe in tempting providence. We can get a street-car conductor and make that Inspection shot again in Portland. This isn't...." "You're right," cut in Roos, with a dawning grin of comprehension. "I beg your pardon. You're a deeper bird than I gave you credit for. Or perhaps it was the Captain...."

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 by the 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 big _batteau_, 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 longitudinally _across_ the 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, probably _could_ be 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 railroad track, 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 French _chef_ and 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 hope of 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?" "_This_ is 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 lived there 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 Great Northern. 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 the _voyageurs_ of 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, 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 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 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 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 built
_batteau_, and had his assistance 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 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."

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 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, 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.