Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

Save over a broad, shallow bar across the current at the mouth of the Salmon, there was deep, swift water all the way to Waneta, the Canadian Customs station. Here we landed Roos to await the morning train from Nelson to Spokane and go through to Northport to arrange the American Customs formalities. At a final conference we decided to heed the warning about not attempting to carry any drinkables openly into the United States. Stowing what little there was left where not the most lynx-eyed or ferret-nosed Customs Officer could ever get at it, we pushed off.

There is a fairly fast current all the way to Northport, but from the fact that we made the eleven miles in about three-quarters of an hour, it seems likely that, between paddle and oars, the boat was driven somewhat faster than the Columbia. Just below Waneta and immediately above the International Boundary Line, the Pend d’Oreille or Clark’s Fork flows, or rather falls into the Columbia. This really magnificent stream comes tumbling down a sheer-walled gorge in fall after fall, several of which can be seen in narrowing perspective from the Columbia itself. Its final leap is over a ten-feet-high ledge which extends all the way across its two-hundred-feet-wide mouth. Above this fine cataract it is the Pend d’Oreille, below it, the Columbia. I know of no place where two such rivers come together with such fine spectacular effect, in a way so fitting to the character of each.

The Pend d’Oreille is generally rated as the principal tributary of the upper Columbia. Although the Kootenay—because it flows through a region of considerably greater annual rainfall—carries rather the more water of the two, the Pend d’Oreille is longer and drains a far more extensive watershed—that lying between the main chain of the Rockies and the Bitter Root and Cœur d’Alene ranges. Great as is the combined discharge of these two fine rivers, their effect on the Columbia is not apparent to the eye. If anything, the latter looks a bigger stream where it flows out of the lower Arrow Lake, above the Kootenay, than it does where it crosses the American Line below the Pend d’Oreille. As a matter of fact, its flow must be nearly doubled at the latter point, but the swifter current reduces its apparent volume. Nothing but the most careful computations, based on speed of current and area of cross-section, will give anything approximating the real discharge of a river.

I was a good deal interested in the Pend d’Oreille, because it was on one of its upper tributaries, the Flathead in Montana, that I had made my first timid effort at rapid-running a good many years previously. It hadn’t been a brilliant success—for two logs tied together with ropes hardly make the ideal of a raft; but the glamour of the hare-brained stunt had survived the wetting. I should dearly have loved to explore that wonderful black-walled canyon, with its unending succession of cataracts and cascades, but lack of time forbade. The drizzling rain made it impossible even to get a good photograph of the fine frenzy of that final mad leap into the Columbia.

It was funny the way that rain acted. For something like a month now there had been only two or three days of reasonably fair weather, and for the last fortnight the sun had hardly been glimpsed at all. Pulling up to Waneta in a clammy drizzle, Captain Armstrong remarked, as he drew the collar of his waterproof closer to decrease the drainage down the back of his neck, that he reckoned they wouldn’t stand for weather of that kind over in “God’s Country.” As there was nothing but sodden clouds to the southward, I didn’t feel like giving him any definite assurance on the point at the moment. However, when we crossed the Line an hour later the rain had ceased. A couple of miles farther down the clouds were breaking up, and at Northport the sun was shining. I did not have another rainy day, nor even one more than slightly overcast, until I was almost at the Cascades. I trust my good Canadian friend was as deeply impressed as he claimed to be.

Beyond a sharp riffle between jagged rock islands above Deadman’s Eddy, and one or two shallow boulder bars where the channels were a bit obscure, it was good open-and-above-board water all the way to Northport. The “Eddy” is a whirling back-sweep of water at a bend of the river, and is supposed to hold up for inspection everything floatable that the Columbia brings down from Canada. “Funny they never thought of calling it ‘Customs Eddy,’” Armstrong said. From the condition of its littered banks, it looked to be almost as prolific of “pickings” as the great drift pile of Kinbasket Lake. Being near a town, however, it is doubtless much more thoroughly gone over.

We tied up below the Ferry at Northport, which was the rendezvous to which Roos was to bring the Customs Inspector. The ferry-man, who had once seen Captain Armstrong run the rapids of the upper Kootenay with one of his steamers, was greatly elated over having such a notable walking the quarterdeck of his own humble craft. Armstrong, in turn, was scarcely less excited over an automatic pumping contrivance which the ferry-man had rigged up to keep his pontoons dry. After waiting for an hour, we took our bags and walked up to the hotel on the main street at the top of the bluff. We found Roos in the office reading a last year’s haberdashery catalogue. He said he had not expected us for a couple of hours yet, and that he had arranged for inspection at three o’clock. That gave us time for a bath and lunch ourselves. As our bags were now well beyond the tentacles of the Customs, we did a little figuring on the table-cloth between courses. By this we proved that, had we had the nerve to disregard the warnings of well-meaning friends in Trail and filled our hand-bags with Scotch instead of personal effects, Armstrong would now have had fourteen quarts up in his room, and I eighteen quarts. Then the waitress gave us current local quotations, and we started to figure values. I shall never know whether or not there would have been room on the corner of that gravy and egg broidered napery for my stupendous total. Just as I was beginning to run over the edge, the Inspector came in and asked if we would mind letting him see those two suit-cases we had brought to the hotel with us! Many and various are the joys of virtue, but none of the others comparable to that one which sets you aglow as you say “Search me!” when, by the special intervention of the providence which watches over fools and drunks, you haven’t got goods.

The inspection, both at the hotel and at the ferry, was fairly perfunctory, though I did notice that the Customs man assumed a rather springy step when he trod the light inner bottom of the skiff. Roos filmed the operation as a part of the picture, I acting as much as I could like I thought a farmer would act at his first Customs inspection. Roos, complaining that I didn’t “do it natural,” wanted to shoot over again. The Customs man was willing, but Armstrong and I, trudging purposefully off up the road, refused to return. Roos followed us to the hotel in considerable dudgeon. “Why wouldn’t you let me make that shot over?” he asked. “It was an ‘oil-can’—rotten!” “Because,” I replied evenly, looking him straight in the eye, “I was afraid the Inspector might try that jig-a-jig step of his on the false bottom in the bow if we put him through the show a second time. I don’t believe in tempting providence. We can get a street-car conductor and make that Inspection shot again in Portland. This isn’t....” “You’re right,” cut in Roos, with a dawning grin of comprehension. “I beg your pardon. You’re a deeper bird than I gave you credit for. Or perhaps it was the Captain....”