DOWN THE COLUMBIA

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
MT. SIR DONALD, WHICH DRAINS FROM ALL SIDES TO THE COLUMBIA

DOWN THE COLUMBIA
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN

AUTHOR OF “IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES,”
“HELL’S HATCHES,” ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1921

Copyright 1921
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

The Quinn & Boden Company

BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY      NEW JERSEY

TO
C. L. CHESTER

Hoping he will find in these pages some compensation for the fun he missed in not being along.

[Pg vi]
[Pg vii]

INTRODUCTION

The day on which I first conceived the idea of a boat trip down the Columbia hangs in a frame all its own in the corridors of my memory. It was a number of years ago—more than a dozen, I should say. Just previously I had contrived somehow to induce the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to grant me permission to attempt a winter journey on ski around this most beautiful of America’s great playgrounds. He had even sent a Government scout along to keep, or help, me out of trouble. We were a week out from the post at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Putting the rainbow revel of the incomparable Canyon behind, we had crossed Yellowstone Lake on the ice and fared onward and upward until we came at last to the long climb where the road under its ten feet of snow wound up to the crest of the Continental Divide. It was so dry and cold that the powdery snow overlying the crust rustled under our ski like autumn leaves. The air was diamond clear, so transparent that distant mountain peaks, juggled in the wizardry of the lens of the light, seemed fairly to float upon the eyeball.

At the summit, where we paused for breath, an old Sergeant of the Game Patrol, letting down a tin can on a string, brought up drinks from an air-hole which he claimed was teetering giddily upon the very ridge-pole of North America.

“If I dip to the left,” he said, suiting the action to the word, “it’s the Pacific I’ll be robbing of a pint of Rocky Mountain dew; while if I dip to the right it’s the Atlantic that’ll have to settle back a notch. And if I had a string long enough, and a wing strong enough, to cast my can over there beyond Jackson’s Hole,” he went on, pointing southeasterly to the serrated peaks of the Wind River Mountains, “I could dip from the fount of the Green River and keep it from feeding the Colorado and the Gulf of California by so much.”

That led me to raise the question of boating by river from the Great Divide to the sea, and the Scout, who knew something of the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin to the east, and of the Salmon, Clearwater and Snake to the west, said he reckoned the thing could be done in either direction provided a man had lots of time and no dependent family to think of and shake his nerve in the pinches.

The old Sergeant agreed heartily. River boating was good, he said, because it was not opposed to Nature, like climbing mountains, for instance, where you were bucking the law of gravity from start to finish. With a river it was all easy and natural. You just got into your boat and let it go. Sooner or later, without any especial effort on your part, you reached your objective. You might not be in a condition to appreciate the fact, of course, but just the same you got there, and with a minimum of hard work. Some rivers were better for boating than others for the reason that you got there quicker. The Snake and the Missouri were all very well in their way, but for him, he’d take the Columbia. There was a river that started in mountains and finished in mountains. It ran in mountains all the way to the sea. No slack water in all its course. It was going somewhere all the time. He had lived as a kid on the lower Columbia and had trapped as a man on the upper Columbia; so he ought to know. There was a “he” river if there ever was one. If a man really wanted to travel from snowflake to brine and not be troubled with “on-wee” on the way, there was no stream that ran one-two-three with the Columbia as a means of doing it.

That night, where we steamed in the black depths of a snow-submerged Government “Emergency” cabin, the Sergeant’s old Columbia memories thawed with the hunk of frosted beef he was toasting over the sheet-iron stove. He told of climbing for sheep and goat in the high Kootenay, of trailing moose and caribou in the valleys of the Rockies, and finally of his years of trapping on the creeks and in the canyons that run down to the Big Bend of the Columbia; of how he used to go down to Kinbasket Lake in the Fall, portaging or lining the three miles of tumbling cascades at Surprise Rapids, trap all winter on Sullivan Creek or Middle River, and then come out in the Spring to Revelstoke, playing ducks-and-drakes with his life and his scarcely less valuable catch of marten, mink and beaver running the riffles at Rock Slide, Twelve Mile and the terrible Dalles des Morts. He declared that there were a hundred miles of the Big Bend of the Columbia that had buffaloed to a fare-ye-well any equal stretch on any of the great rivers of North America for fall, rocks and wild rip-rarin’ water generally. But the dread Rapids of Death and the treacherous swirls and eddies of Revelstoke Canyon were not the last of swift water by a long shot. Just below the defile of the Arrow Lakes the white caps began to rear their heads again, and from there right on down through the seven hundred miles and more to tide-water below the Cascade Locks in Oregon there was hardly a stretch of ten miles without its tumble of rapids, and mostly they averaged not more than three or four miles apart.

“She’s sure some ‘he’ river,” the old chap concluded as he began to unroll his blankets, “going somewhere all the time, tumbling over itself all the way trying to beat itself to the finish.”

Confusing as the Sergeant was with his “he” and “she” and “it” as to the gender of the mighty Oregon, there was no question of the fascination of the pictures conjured up by his descriptions of that so-well-called “Achilles of Rivers.” Before I closed my eyes that night I had promised myself that I should take the first opportunity to boat the length of the Columbia, to follow its tumultuous course from its glacial founts to the salt sea brine, to share with it, to jostle it in its “tumble to get there first.”

I held by that resolve for more than a dozen years, although, by a strange run of chance, I was destined to have some experience of almost every one of