Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

“I’m sorry not to celebrate the victory of ‘moderation,’” said the Captain finally, with another regretful shake of his head; “but ‘moderation’ begins at home. It would be immoderately foolish to put the skiff into that line of whirlpools, the way they’re running now.” Roos was the only one who was inclined to dispute that decision, and as his part would have been to stand out on the brink of the cliff and turn the crank, it was only natural that he should take the “artistic” rather than the “humanitarian” view.

As a last resort before portaging, we tried lining down, starting at the head of the narrow left-hand channel. We gave it up at the end of a hundred feet. A monkey at one end of the line and a log of wood at the other would have made the only combination calculated to get by that way. It was no job for a shaky-kneed man and a sinkable boat. There was nothing to do but look up a team or truck. What appeared to be the remains of the ancient portage road ran down from an abandoned farm to the river, and it seemed likely some kind of vehicle could be brought over it.

As the highway ran along the bench, four or five hundred feet above the river, I set off by the railroad track, which was comparatively close at hand. At the end of a couple of miles I reached a small station called Marble, the shipping point for a large apple orchard project financed by the J. G. White Company of New York. Mr. Reed, the resident manager, immediately ordered a powerful team and wagon placed at my disposal, and with that I returned northward over the highway. We had a rough time getting down through brush and dead-falls to the river, but finally made it without an upset. Roos having finished what pictures he wanted—including one of the Captain standing on the brink of the cliff and registering “surprise-cum-disappointment-cum-disgust,”—we loaded the skiff and our outfit onto the wagon and started the long climb up to the top of the bench. The discovery of an overgrown but still passable road offered a better route than that followed in coming down, and we made the highway, and on to the village, in good time. Mr. Reed dangled the bait of a French chef and rooms in the company’s hotel as an inducement to spend the night with him, but we had not the time to accept the kind invitation. His ready courtesy was of the kind which I learned later I could expect as a matter of course all along the river. Never did I have trouble in getting help when I needed it, and when it was charged for, it was almost invariably an under rather than an over-charge. The running road is the one place left where the people have not been spoiled as have those on the highways frequented by motor tourists.

Launching the boat from the Marble Ferry at four o’clock, we pulled off in a good current in the hope of reaching Bossburg before dark. Between the windings of the river and several considerable stretches of slack water, however, our progress was less than anticipated. Shut in by high hills on both sides, night descended early upon the river, and at five-thirty I found myself pulling in Stygian blackness. Knowing there was no really bad water ahead, the Captain let her slide through a couple of easy riffles, the white-topped waves barely guessed as they flagged us with ghostly signals. But a deepening growl, borne on the wings of the slight up-river night-breeze, demanded more consideration. No one but a lunatic goes into a strange rapid in a poor light, to say nothing of complete darkness. Pulling into an eddy by the left bank, we stopped and listened. The roar, though distant, was unmistakable. Water was tumbling among rocks at a fairly good rate, certainly too fast to warrant going into it in the dark.

While we were debating what to do, a black figure silhouetted itself against the star-gleams at the top of the low bank. “Hello, there!” hailed the Captain. “Can you tell us how far it is to Bossburg?” “This is Bossburg,” was the surprising but gratifying response. “You’re there—that is, you’re here.” It proved to be the local ferry-man, and Columbia ferry-men are always obliging and always intelligent, at least in matters relating to the river. Tying up the boat, we left our stuff in his nearby house and sought the hotel with our hand-bags. It was not a promising looking hotel when we found it, for Bossburg was that saddest of living things, an all-but-extinguished boom-town; but the very kindly old couple who lived there and catered to the occasional wayfarer bustled about and got us a corking good meal—fried chicken and biscuits as light as the whipped cream we had on the candied peaches—and our beds were clean and comfortable.

As we were now but a few miles above Kettle Falls, the most complete obstruction in the whole length of the Columbia, I took the occasion to telephone ahead for a truck with which to make the very considerable portage. There would be two or three miles at the falls in any case, Captain Armstrong said, and he was also inclined to think it would be advisable to extend the portage to the foot of Grand Rapids, and thus save a day’s hard lining. It was arranged that the truck should meet us at the ruins of the old Hudson Bay post, on the east bank some distance above the upper fall.

We pushed off from Bossburg at eight o’clock on the morning of October twenty-third. The water was slack for several hundred yards, which was found to be due to a reef extending all of the way across the river and forming the rapid which we had heard growling in the dark. This was called “Six Mile,” and while it would have been an uncomfortable place to tangle up with in the night, it was simple running with the light of day. “Five Mile,” a bit farther down, was studded with big black rocks, but none of them hard to avoid. As we were running rather ahead of the time of our rendezvous with the truck, we stretched our legs the length and back of the main street of Marcus, a growing little town which is the junction point for the Boundary Branch of the Great Northern. We passed the mouth of the Kettle River shortly after running under the railway bridge, and a pull across a big eddy carried us to the lake-like stretch of water backed up by the rocky obstructions responsible for Kettle Falls. The roar of the latter filled the air as we headed into a shallow, mud-bottomed lagoon widening riverward from the mouth of a small creek and beached the skiff under a yellowing fringe of willows. The site of the historic post was in an extremely aged apple orchard immediately above. It was one of those “inevitable” spots, where the voyageurs of all time passing up or down the river must have begun or ended their portages. I was trying to conjure up pictures of a few of these in my mind, when the chug-chugging of an engine somewhere among the pines of the distant hillside recalled me to a realization of the fact that it was time to get ready for my own portage. Before we had our stuff out of the boat the truck had come to a throbbing standstill beyond the fringe of the willows. It promised to be an easier portage than some of our predecessors had had, in any event.

To maintain his “continuity,” Roos filmed the skiff being taken out of the water and loaded upon the truck, the truck passing down the main street of the town of Kettle Falls, and a final launching in the river seven miles below. Half way into town we passed an old Indian mission that must have been about contemporaneous with Hudson Bay operations. Although no nails had been used in its construction, the ancient building, with its high-pitched roof, still survived in a comparatively good state of preservation. The town is some little distance below the Falls, and quite out of sight of the river, which flows here between very high banks. We stopped at the hotel for lunch before completing the portage.

After talking the situation over with Captain Armstrong, I decided to fall in with his suggestion to pass Grand Rapids as well as Kettle Falls in the portage. There were only about five miles of boatable water between the foot of the latter and the head of the former, and then an arduous three-quarters of a mile of lining that would have entailed the loss of another day. There is a drop of twelve feet in about twelve hundred yards in Grand Rapids, with nothing approaching a clear channel among the huge black basaltic rocks that have been scattered about through them as from a big pepper shaker. As far as I could learn, there is no record of any kind of a man-propelled craft of whatever size ever having run through and survived, but a small stern-wheeler, the Shoshone, was run down several years ago at high water. She reached the foot a good deal of a hulk, but still right side up. This is rated as one of the maddest things ever done with a steamer on the Columbia, and the fact that it did not end in complete disaster is reckoned by old river men as having been due in about equal parts to the inflexible nerve of her skipper and the intervention of the special providence that makes a point of watching over mortals who do things like that. I met Captain McDermid a fortnight later in Potaris. He told me then, what I hadn’t heard before, that he took his wife and children with him. “Nellie thought a lot of both me and the little old Shoshone,” he said with a wistful smile, “and she reckoned that, if we went, she wouldn’t exactly like to be left here alone. And so—I never could refuse Nellie anything—I took her along. And now she and the Shoshone are both gone.” He was a wonderful chap—McDermid. All old Columbia River skippers are. They wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t been.

There was a low bench on the left bank, about a mile below the foot of Grand Rapids, which could be reached by a rough road, and from which the boat could be slid down over the rocks to the river. Running to this point with the truck, we left our heavier outfit at a road camp and dropped the boat at the water’s edge, ready for launching the following morning. Returning to the town, we were driven up to the Falls by Dr. Baldwin, a prominent member of this live and attractive little community, where Roos made a number of shots. The upper or main fall has a vertical drop of fifteen feet at low water, while the lower fall is really a rough tumbling cascade with a drop of ten feet in a quarter of a mile. The river is divided at the head of the Falls by an arrow-shaped rock island, the main channel being the one to the right. The left-hand channel loops in a broad “V” around the island and, running between precipitous walls, accomplishes in a beautiful rapid the same drop that the main channel does by the upper fall. A rocky peninsula, extending squarely across the course of the left-hand channel, forces the rolling current of the latter practically to turn a somersault before accepting the dictum that it must double back northward for five or six hundred feet before uniting with the main river. It was the savage swirling of water in that rock-walled elbow where the “somersault” takes place that prompted the imaginative French-Canadian voyageurs to apply the appropriately descriptive name of Chaudière to the boiling maelstrom.