CHAPTER VIII
III. RUNNING THE BEND
Boat Encampment to Revelstoke
We were now close to the historic Boat Encampment, where at last our course would join with that followed by the early voyageurs and explorers. No point in the whole length of the Columbia, not even Astoria, has associations more calculated to stir the imagination than this tiny patch of silt-covered overflow flat which has been formed by the erosive action of three torrential rivers tearing at the hearts of three great mountain ranges. Sand and soil of the Rockies, Selkirks and the Gold Range, carried by the Columbia, Canoe and Wood rivers, meet and mingle to form the remarkable halting place, where the east and westbound pioneering traffic of a century stopped to gather breath for the next stage of its journey.
Before pushing off from the Ferry on the morning of October seventh I dug out from my luggage a copy of a report written in 1881 by Lieutenant Thomas W. Symons, U. S. A., on the navigation of the Upper Columbia. This was chiefly concerned with that part of the river between the International Boundary and the mouth of the Snake, but Lieutenant Symons had made a long and exhaustive study of the whole Columbia Basin, and his geographical description of the three rivers which unite at Boat Encampment is so succinct and yet so comprehensive that I am impelled to make a liberal quotation from it here. Of the great assistance I had from Lieutenant Symons’ invaluable report when I came to the passage of that part of the river covered by his remarkable voyage of forty years ago I shall write later.
“Amid the universal gloom and midnight silence of the north, a little above the fifty-second parallel of latitude, seemingly surrounded on all sides by cloud-piercing snow-clad mountains, and nestled down among the lower and nearer cedar-mantled hills, there lies a narrow valley where three streams meet and blend their waters, one coming from the southeast, one from the northwest, and one from the east. The principal one of these streams is the one from the southeast ... and is the headwater stream, and bears the name of the Columbia.
“The northwestern stream is the extreme northern branch of the Columbia, rising beyond the fifty-third parallel of latitude, and is known among the traders and voyageurs as Canoe River, from the excellence of the barks obtained on its banks for canoe building. This is a small river, forty yards wide at its mouth, flowing through a densely timbered valley in which the trees overhang the stream to such an extent as almost to shut it out from the light of heaven....
“Portage River, the third of the trio of streams, the smallest and the most remarkable of them, is the one which enters from the east. It has its source in the very heart of the Rocky Mountains and flows through a tremendous cleft in the main range between two of its loftiest peaks, Mounts Brown and Hooker. Just underneath these giant mountains, on the divide known as ‘The Height of Land,’ lie two small lakes, each about thirty yards in diameter, and which are only a few yards from each other. One has its outlet to the west, Portage River, flowing to the Columbia; the other has its outlet to the east, Whirlpool River, a branch of the Athabaska, which joins the Mackenzie and flows to the Arctic Ocean.
“The elevated valley in which these lakes are situated is called ‘The Committee’s Punchbowl,’ and the nabobs of the fur trade always treated their companions to a bucket of punch when this point was reached, if they had the ingredients from which to make it, and they usually had.
“The pass across the mountains by the Portage River, ‘The Committee’s Punchbowl’ and Whirlpool River, known as the Athabaska Pass, was for many years the route of the British fur traders in going from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other. This route is far from being an easy one, and a description of the difficulties, dangers and discomforts of a trip over it will certainly deter any one from making the journey for pleasure. A great part of the way the traveller has to wade up to his middle in the icy waters of Portage River. The journey had to be made in the spring before the summer thaws and rains set in, or in the autumn after severe cold weather had locked up the mountain drainage. During the summer the stream becomes an impetuous impassable mountain torrent.”
Considering that Lieutenant Symons had never traversed the Big Bend nor the Athabaska Pass, this description (which must have been written from his careful readings of the diaries of the old voyageurs) is a remarkable one. It is not only accurate topographically and geographically, but it has an “atmosphere” which one who does know this region at first hand will be quick to appreciate. How and when the stream which he and the men before him called Portage River came to have its name changed to Wood, I have not been able to learn.
A mile below the Ferry Blackmore called my attention to a sharp wedge of brown-black mountain which appeared to form the left wall of the river a short way ahead. That lofty out-thrust of rock, he said, was the extreme northern end of the Selkirk Range. The Columbia, after receiving the waters of Wood and Canoe rivers, looped right round this cape and started flowing south, but with the massif of the Selkirks still forming its left bank. But the Rockies, which had formed its right bank all the way from its source, were now left behind, and their place was taken by the almost equally lofty Gold Range, which drained east to the Columbia and west to the Thompson.
The Columbia doubles back from north to south at an astonishingly sharp angle,—as river bends go, that is. Picture mentally Madison Square, New York. Now suppose the Columbia to flow north on Broadway, bend round the Flatiron Building (which represents the Selkirks), and then flow south down Fifth Avenue. Then East Twenty-Third Street would represent Wood River, and North Broadway, Canoe River. Now forget all the other streets and imagine the buildings of Madison Square as ten to twelve thousand-feet-high mountains. And there you have a model of the apex of the Big Bend of the Columbia.
A milky grey-green flood—straight glacier water if there ever was such—staining the clear stream of the Columbia marked the mouth of Wood River, and we pulled in for a brief glimpse in passing of what had once been Boat Encampment. I had broken my thermometer at Kinbasket Lake, so I could not take the temperatures here; but Wood River was beyond all doubt the coldest stream I had ever dabbled a finger-tip in. What the ascent to Athabaska Pass must have been may be judged from this description by Alexander Ross—one of the original Astoria party—written over a hundred years ago.