tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">355

DOWN THE COLUMBIA

CHAPTER I

PREPARING FOR THE BIG BEND

The itinerary of our Columbia trip as originally planned in Los Angeles called, first, for an expedition to the source of the river, next, a voyage by boat around the Big Bend from Beavermouth to Revelstoke, and, finally, if there was time and good weather held, a voyage of indefinite length on toward the sea. As the trip to the glaciers was largely a matter of engaging a good packer well in advance, while there was no certainty of getting any one who would undertake the passage of the Big Bend, it was to the latter that we first directed our attention. Chester wired the Publicity Department of the Canadian Pacific and I wrote friends in various parts of British Columbia. The C. P. R. replied that they had requested their Sub-Divisional Superintendent at Revelstoke to institute inquiries for boatmen in our behalf. The only one of my friends who contributed anything tangible stated that “while the Columbia above Golden and below Revelstoke was admirably suited to pleasure boating, any attempt to run the Big Bend between those points would result in almost certain disaster.”

As this appeared to be about the extent of what we were likely to learn from a distance, I decided to start north at once to see what could be arranged on the ground. Victoria yielded little save some large scale maps, and even these, they assured me in the Geographic Department of the B. C. Government where I secured them, were very inaccurate as to detail. The Big Bend region, it appeared, had never been surveyed north of the comparatively narrow zone of the C. P. R. grant. Several old hunting friends whom I met at the Club, although they had ranged the wildernesses of the Northwest from the Barren Lands to Alaska, spoke of the Big Bend as a veritable terra incognita.

“It’s said to be a great country for grizzly,” one of them volunteered, “but too hard to get at. Only way to get in and out is the Columbia, and that is more likely to land you in Kingdom Come than back in Civilization. Best forget about the Big Bend and go after sheep and goat and moose in the Kootenays.”

At Kamloops I was told of an Indian who had gone round the Big Bend the previous May, before the Spring rise, and come out not only with his own skin, but with those of seven grizzlies. I was unable to locate the Indian, but did find a white man who had made the trip with him. This chap spent half an hour apparently endeavouring to persuade me to give up the trip on account of the prohibitive risk (my experience on other rivers, he declared, would be worse than useless in such water as was to be encountered at Surprise, Kinbasket and Death Rapids) and about an equal amount of time trying to convince me that my life would be perfectly safe if only I would engage him and his Indian and confide it to their care. As the consideration suggested in return for this immunity figured out at between two and three times the rate we had been expecting to pay for boatmen, I had to decline to take advantage of it.

Finally, in Revelstoke, through the efforts of T. C. McNab of the Canadian Pacific, who had been at considerable trouble to line up possible candidates for a Big Bend trip, I met Bob Blackmore. After that things began moving toward a definite end.

“You won’t find old Bob Blackmore an active church-worker,” I was told in Revelstoke, “and at one time he had the reputation of being the smoothest thing in the way of a boot-legger in this part of B. C. But he drinks little himself, is a past-master of woodcraft, a dead shot, and has twice the experience of swift-water boating of any man on the upper Columbia. In spite of the fact that he has undergone no end of hardship in his thirty years of packing, hunting, prospecting, trapping and boating all over the West, he’s as hard to-day at fifty odd as most men are at thirty. Because he dished a boatload of freight last year somewhere up river, there are a few who are saying that old Bob Blackmore is losing his grip. Don’t believe it. He was never better in his life than he is right now, and if you can persuade him to run your show round the Big Bend you’re in luck. Once you start, you’ll come right on round to Revelstoke all right. No fear on that score. But if you have old Bob Blackmore you’ll stand a jolly lot better chance of arriving on top of the water.”

I found Bob Blackmore at his river-side home in the old town—what had been the metropolitan centre of Revelstoke in the days when it was the head of navigation of steamers from below the Arrow Lakes, and before the railway had come to drag settlement a mile northeastward and away from the Columbia. He was picking apples with one hand and slapping mosquitoes with the other—a grey-haired, grey-eyed man of middle height, with a muscular torso, a steady stare, and a grip that I had to meet half way to save my fingers. He might have passed for a well-to-do Middle Western farmer except for his iron-grey moustaches, which were long and drooping, like those affected by cowboy-town sheriffs in the movies.

I knew at once that this was the man I wanted, and my only doubt was as to whether or not he felt the same way about me. They had told me in town that Blackmore, having some means and being more or less independent, never went out with a man or an outfit he did not like. I felt that it was I who was on approval, not he. I need not have worried, however. In this instance, at least, Bob Blackmore’s mind was made up in advance. It was the movies that had done it.

“The C. P. R. people wrote me that you might be wanting me for the Bend,” he said genially after I had introduced myself, “and on the chance that we would be hitching up I have put my big boat in the water to give her a good soaking. I’ve figured that she’s the only boat on the upper river that will do for what you want. I reckon I know them all. She’ll carry three or four times as much as the biggest Peterboro. Besides, if you tried to go round in canoes, you’d be portaging or lining in a dozen places where I would drive this one straight through. With any luck, and if the water doesn’t go down too fast, I’d figure on going the whole way without taking her out of the river at more’n one place, and maybe not there.”

“So you’re willing to go ahead and see us through,” I exclaimed delightedly. “They told me in the town that you’d probably need a lot of persuading, especially as you’ve been saying for the last two or three years that you were through with the Bend for good and all.”

Blackmore grinned broadly and somewhat