Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

That was about the most restricted space I can recall ever having camped in. The great boulders of the high-water channel extended right up to the foot of the mountain wall and neither the one nor the other afforded enough level space to set a doll’s house. A four-by-six patch of sand was the most extensive area that seemed to offer, and, doubling this in size by cutting away a rotting spruce stump and a section of fallen birch, there was just enough room for the little shed-tent. It was a snug and comfortable camp, though, and highly picturesque, perched as it was almost in the spray of the cascade. The noise was the worst thing, and we would have had to stay there even longer than we did to become quite used to it. All of us were shouting in each other’s ears for days afterwards, and even trying to converse in signs in the idyllic quietude of Kinbasket Lake.

The storm which Blackmore’s seer-like vision had descried in the blue-green auroral flutters of a couple of nights previously arrived quite on schedule. Although the western sky had glowed for half an hour after sunset with that supposedly optimistic tinge of primrose and terra-cotta, it was pouring before midnight, and the next morning there was truly almost as much water in the air as in the river. Pictures were out of the question, so there was nothing to do but hang on until the weather cleared. Leaving Roos whittling and Andy struggling to divert a swelling young river that was trying to sluice away the sand on which the tent was pitched, Blackmore and I pulled on our waterproofs and clambered a mile through the woods to a camp of C. P. R. engineers. Blackmore wanted to get an extra axe; I to get some further data on the fall of the river. We found a crude cable-ferry thrown across just below the foot of the big fall, and a rough, boggy path from the eastern end of it took us to the camp of three or four comfortable cabins.

The Canadian Pacific, I learned—both on account of the high and increasing cost of its oil fuel and because of the trouble experienced in clearing their tunnels from smoke—was contemplating the electrification of all of its mountain divisions. There were numerous high falls along the line where power could be economically developed, but it was not considered desirable that the scenic beauty of these should be marred by diversion. Besides the Columbia, in a hundred miles of the Big Bend, offered the opportunity for developing more hydro-electric energy than all the west of Canada could use in the next twenty years. The Surprise Rapids project alone would provide far more power than the Canadian Pacific could use for traction, and it was expected that there would be a large surplus for municipal and industrial uses along the line. “All this, of course,” the engineer at the camp explained, “in the event the company decides to go ahead with the development. Raising the money will probably be the greatest difficulty, and in the present state of the financial market it is hard to see how much can be done for two or three years. In the meantime we are measuring the flow of the river every day, and will have accurate data to go by when the time for construction comes.”

I learned that the total length of Surprise Rapids was three and a third miles, in which distance there was a fall of nearly one hundred feet. The greatest drop was in that stretch which we were waiting to “line,” where there was a fall of twenty-one feet in seven hundred and fifty. At the second cascade there was a fall of fifteen feet in twelve hundred, and at the third, twenty-five feet in twenty-five hundred. It was planned to build the dam across the very narrow canyon near the foot of the lower fall, making it of such a height that a lake would be backed up as far as Beavermouth, incidentally, of course, wiping out the whole of Surprise Rapids. “They can’t wipe it out any too soon to suit me,” Blackmore commented on hearing this. “It’d have saved me a lot of work and many a wetting if they’d wiped it out twenty year ago. And that’s saying nothing of the men drownded there. It was that big whirlpool down through the trees there that did for Walter Steinhoff.”

We had left the camp now and were picking our way down the narrow trail to the foot of the second fall. I had been waiting to hear Blackmore speak of Steinhoff for two reasons: first, because I was curious to know how much truth there was in those dramatic versions of his death I had heard in Golden, and also because the subject would lead up naturally to that of the buried whisky. This latter was rather too delicate a matter to broach offhand, and I had therefore been carefully watching for a favourable opening. Now that it had come, I was quick to take advantage of it.

“Tell me about Steinhoff,” I said. “He was on some kind of a boot-legging stunt, wasn’t he?” I was just a bit diffident about bringing up that drink-running business, for although I had been told that Blackmore was a smooth hand at the game himself, I had a sort of sneaking idea that it was the kind of a thing a man ought to be sensitive about, like having had smallpox or a sister in the movies. I need not have worried, however. “You bet he was boot-legging,” Blackmore replied; “and so was I. Both outfits heading for Tete Jaune Cache on the Grand Trunk, and racing to get there first. That was what got him into trouble—trying to catch up with me after I had passed him by running and lining the first fall (the one we are doing the same way now) while he had portaged. I reckon it was his first intention to portage all the way to the foot of the second fall, but when he saw me slip by in the water he put in his canoes at the foot of the first fall and came after me.”

We had come out above the river now, and I saw a savage stretch of foam-white water falling in a roaring cascade to a mighty whirlpool that filled all of the bottom of the steeply-walled amphitheatre formed by a right-angling bend of the Columbia. Thirty feet or more above the present level of the whirlpool were the marks of its swirling scour at mid-summer high-water. Awesome enough now (and it was not any the less so to me since we still had to take the boat through it), I could see at once that, with the power of the floods driving it round and round at turbine speed, it must indeed be a veritable thing of terror. It was into this whirlpool, as well as others at Revelstoke Canyon and Death Rapids, that whole uprooted pines were said to be sucked in flood-time, to reappear only as battered logs many miles below. There seemed hardly enough water there at the present to make this possible; but the story was at least credible to me now, which was more than it had been previously.

“So this is your ‘All Day Sucker,’” I remarked carelessly, in a studied attempt to keep Blackmore from noting how greatly the savage maelstrom had impressed me. Seeing through the bluff, he grinned indulgently and resumed his story of Steinhoff as soon as we had moved far enough round the whirlpool to make his voice comfortably heard above the roar of the cascade. A line had parted—sawed through in working round a rocky point a few hundred yards above—and Steinhoff’s big Peterboro was swept out into the current. Striking a rock, it turned over and threw him into the water. He made a brave effort to swim out, keeping his head above water most of the way down the cascade. The whirlpool had been too much for him, however. He was fighting hard to keep up when he was carried into the vortex and sucked under. Blackmore took no stock in the story of the dramatic gesture of farewell. “A man don’t pull that grand opry stuff with the cold of the Columbia biting into his spine,” was the way he put it.

Then I told him about the whisky—spoke to him as a son to his father. And he, meeting me point for point in all seriousness of spirit, answered as father to son. He thought there was little chance of finding anything along the river. He had not done so himself for a number of years—and he hadn’t been overlooking any bets, either. There was, of course, still much good stuff buried in the drift below Middle River, but it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find it. But the cache above Canoe River—ah, that was another matter! Captain Armstrong could be absolutely depended upon in a matter of that kind, and the directions sounded right as rain. Yes, he quite understood that I should want to take it all to California with me. He would want to do the same thing if he were in my place. It would be easy as picking pippins getting it over the line. He could tell me three different ways, all of them dead sure. He would not think of taking any of it for himself. The rum we had would be ample for the trip, except in extreme emergency. That “thirty over-proof” went a long way. And I need not worry in the least about Andy. He wasn’t a teetotaler exactly, but he never took too much under any provocation. Yes, I could depend upon the both of them to nose out that stuff at the old ferry. Put it there! We looked each other square in the eye, and shook hands solemnly there above the big whirlpool which was originally responsible for the good fortune that had come to us—or rather to me. Men have clasped hands and sworn to stand by each other in lesser things. At least that was the way it seemed to me at the moment. I could have embraced the fine old woodsman for his loyalty and generosity of spirit. I always called him Bob after that.

The rain thinned down and became a light Scotch mist as we picked our way back to camp. That struck me as being a good omen—it’s being “Scotch,” I mean. Later it cleared up entirely, and there was a glorious fairweather sunset of glowing saffron and flaming poppy red. To the northwest—Canoe River-ward—there poured a wonderful light of pale liquescent amber. I had never seen such a light on land or sea, I told myself; or anywhere else, for that matter—except when holding a glass of Scotch up against the sun. That was another good omen. Funny thing, but I can still recall the date offhand, so indelibly had the promise of that day impressed itself on my mind. It was the first of October.