My preparations, the next day, were few. I had included a sleeping bag with my baggage. It would come in equally handy whether I went down on the Colorado or up into the Coast Range. A frying-pan, a coffee-pot a few metal dishes and provisions for a week were all I needed. Some one suggested some bent poles, and a cover, such as are used on wagons to keep off the sun. This seemed like a good idea; and I hunted up a carpenter who did odd jobs. He did not have such a one, but he did have an old wagon-seat cover, which could be raised or dropped at will. This was even better, for sometimes hard winds sweep up the river. The cover was fastened to the sides of the boat. The boat, meanwhile, had been thoroughly scrubbed. It looked clean before, but I was not going to take any chances at carrying Indian live-stock along with his boat. My surplus baggage was sent on to Los Angeles, and twenty-four hours after I had landed in Needles, I was ready to embark.
My experience in camping trips of various sorts has been that the start from headquarters occupies more time than any similar preparation. Once on the road, things naturally arrange themselves into some kind of a system, and an hour on the road in the evening means several hours gained the next morning. Added to this, there are always a number of loafers about railroad towns, and small things have a way of disappearing. With this in mind, I determined to make my start that evening, and at 7 P.M. on the 23d of May, 1913, I embarked on a six to eight mile an hour current, paced by cottonwood logs, carried down by the flood from the head waters in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado.
When sailing on the unruffled current one did not notice its swiftness—it sped so quietly yet at the same time with such deadly intent—until some half submerged cottonwood snags appeared, their jagged, broken limbs ploughing the stream exactly like the bow of a motor-driven boat, throwing two diverging lines of waves far down the stream. One would almost think the boat was motionless, it raced so smoothly,—and that the snags were tearing upstream as a river man had said, the day before, "like a dog with a bone in his teeth." A sunken stone-boat, with a cabin half submerged, seemed propelled by some unseen power and rapidly dwindled in the distance.
So fascinating were these things that I forgot the approaching night. I first noticed it when the stream slackened its mad pace and spread over its banks into great wide marshes, in divided and subdivided channels and over submerged islands, with nothing but willow and fuzzy cattail tops to indicate that there was a bottom underneath. Here there was no place to camp had I wished to do so. Once I missed the main channel and had a difficult time in finding my way back in the dark. After two or three miles of this quiet current, the streams began to unite again, and the river regained its former speed. I was growing weary after the first excitement, and began to wish myself well out of it all and safely anchored to the shore. But I knew there was a level bank above the river close to the bridge, which would make a good camping place; so I rested on my oars facing down the stream with eyes and ears alert for the treacherous snags. Then the stars began to appear, one by one, lighting up the cloudless sky; a moist, tropical-like breeze moved up the stream, the channel narrowed and deepened, the snags vanished, and the stream increased its swiftness.
And with eyes wide open, but unseeing, I dozed. It was the lights of a passenger train crossing the bridge, just a short distance away, that made me realize where I was. The train thundered into the darkness; but louder than the roar of the train was that of the water directly ahead, and hidden in the impenetrable shadow over on the right shore was a noise much like that made by a Grand Canyon rapid.
Wide awake now, I pulled for the left, and after one or two attempts to land, I caught some willow tops and guided the boat to the raised bank. Beyond the willows was a higher ground, covered with a mesquite thicket, with cattle trails winding under the thorny trees. Here I unrolled my sleeping bag, then went up to interview the operator and the watchman, and to get a drink of clear water, for I had no desire to drink the liquid mud of the Colorado until it was necessary. In answer to a question I told them of my little ride. One of the men exclaimed, "You don't mean to say that you came down on the flood after dark!" On being informed that I had just arrived, he exclaimed: "Well I reckon you don't know what the Colorado is. It's a wonder this whirlpool didn't break you against the pier. You ought to have brought some one with you to see you drown!"
CHAPTER XXV
FOUR DAYS TO YUMA
Before sunrise the following morning, I had completed my few camp duties, finished my breakfast and dropped my boat into the whirlpool above the bridge. My two friends watched the manoeuvre as I pulled clear of the logs and the piers which caused the water to make such alarming sounds the night before; then they gave me a final word of caution, and the information that the Parker Bridge was sixty miles away and that Yuma was two hundred and fifty miles down the stream. They thought that I should reach Yuma in a week. It seemed but a few minutes until the bridge was a mile up the stream. Now I was truly embarked for the gulf.
By the time I had reached the spire-like mountainous rocks a few miles below the bridge, which gave the town of Needles its name, the sun was well up and I was beginning to learn what desert heat was, although I had little time to think of it as I was kept so busy with my boat. Here, the stream which was spread a mile wide above, had choked down to two hundred feet; small violent whirlpools formed at the abrupt turns in this so-called canyon and the water tore from side to side. In one whirl my boat was twice carried around the circle into which I had allowed it to be caught, then shot out on the pounding flood. Soon the slag-like mountains were passed and the country began to spread, first in a high barren land, then with a bottom land running back from the river. The willow bushes changed to willow trees, tall and spindly, crowded in a thicket down to the river's edge. The Chemehuevi Indians have their reservation here. On rounding an abrupt turn I surprised two little naked children, fat as butterballs, dabbling in a mud puddle close to the stream. The sight, coupled with the tropical-like heat and the jungle, could well make one imagine he was in Africa or India, and that the little brown bodies were the "alligator bait" of which we read. Only the 'gators were missing. The unexpected sight of a boat and a white man trying to photograph them started them both into a frightened squall. Then an indignant mother appeared, staring at me as though she would like to know what I had done to her offspring. Farther along were other squaws, with red and blue lines pencilled on their childlike, contented faces, seated under the willows. Their cotton garments, of red and blue bandanna handkerchiefs sewed together, added a gay bit of colour to the scene.