This was one of the earliest, and certainly the most terrible, of all the tragedies originating at the Dalles des Morts. There are a number of graves in the vicinity, but more numerous still are the inscriptions on the cliffs in memory of the victims whose bodies were never recovered for burial.
Compared to what we had been having, lining down Death Rapids was comparatively simple. It was only when one got right down beside them that the terrible power of the great rolling waves became evident. From crest to trough they must have been from twelve to fifteen feet high, with the water—on account of the steep declivity and the lack of resistance from rocks—running at race-horse speed. We had become so used to expecting big boulders to underlie heavy waves that it was difficult to realize that there was all of a hundred feet of green water between these giant rollers and the great reefs of bedrock which were responsible for them.
For a quarter of a mile below where the rolling waves ceased to comb there was a green-white chaos of whirlpools and the great geyser-like up-boils where the sucked-down water was ejected again to the surface. This was another of the places where the river was said to “eat up” whole pine trees at high water, and it was not hard to believe. Even now the voracious vortices were wolfing very considerable pieces of driftwood, and one had to keep a very sharp lookout to see the spewed-forth fragments reappear at all. This was no water for a small boat or canoe. It would, for instance, have engulfed the sixteen-foot skiff which I used on the lower river as an elephant gulps a tossed peanut. But our big double-ended thirty-footer was more of a mouthful. Blackmore pushed off without hesitation as soon as we had lined below the rollers, but not without reiterating the old warning about not dipping too deep, and being quick about throwing the oar free from its oar-lock if a whirlpool started to drag down the blade. We had a lively five minutes of it, what with the whirlpools trying to suck her stern under and the geysers trying to toss her bow on high; but they never had us in serious trouble. They did spin her all the way round, though, in spite of all the three of us could do to hold her, and as for our course—a chart of it would make the track of an earthquake on a seismograph look as if drawn with a straight-edge!
Another mile took us to the head of Priest Rapids, so named because two French-Canadian priests had been drowned there. This was to be our great rapid-running picture. Bad light had prevented our getting anything of the kind in Surprise and Kinbasket rapids, and “Twelve-Mile,” though white and fast, was hardly the real thing. But Priest Rapids was reputed the fastest on the whole river—certainly over twenty miles an hour, Blackmore reckoned. It had almost as much of a pitch as the upper part of the first drop of Surprise Rapids down to the abrupt fall. But, being straight as a city street and with plenty of water over the rocks, running it was simply a matter of having a large enough boat and being willing to take the soaking. Blackmore had the boat, and, for the sake of a real rip-snorting picture, he said he was willing to take the soaking. So were Andy and I.
LOOKING ACROSS TO BOAT ENCAMPMENT (above)
“WOOD SMOKE AT TWILIGHT” ABOVE TWELVE-MILE (below)
