Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

Up to the present the development of the enormous power running to waste over Kettle Falls has gone little further than the dreams of the brave community of optimists who have been attracted there in the belief that a material asset of such incalculable value cannot always be ignored in a growing country like our own. And they are right, of course, but a few years ahead of time. It is only the children and grandchildren of the living pioneers of the Columbia who will see more than the beginning of its untold millions of horse-power broken to harness. And in the meantime the optimists of Kettle Falls are turning their attention to agriculture and horticulture. Never have I seen finer apple orchards than those through which we drove on the way to resume our down-river voyage.

The point from which we pushed off at ten o’clock on the morning of October twenty-fourth must have been only a little below that at which Lieutenant Symons launched the batteau for his historic voyage to the mouth of the Snake in 1881. Forty years have gone by since that memorable undertaking, yet Symons’ report is to-day not only the most accurate description of an upper Columbia voyage that has ever been written, but also the most readable. During the time I was running the three hundred and fifty miles of river surveyed by Lieutenant Symons, I found his admirable report only less fascinating on the human side than it was of material assistance on the practical.

Of his preparations for the voyage Lieutenant Symons writes:

“I was fortunate enough to procure from John Rickey, a settler and trader, who lives at the Grand Rapids, a strongly built batteau, and had his assistance in selecting a crew of Indians for the journey. The batteau was about thirty feet long, four feet wide at the gunwales, and two feet deep, and is as small a boat as the voyage should ever be attempted in, if it is contemplated to go through all the rapids. My first lookout had been to secure the services of ‘Old Pierre Agare’ as steersman, and I had to carry on negotiations with him for several days before he finally consented to go. Old Pierre is the only one of the old Hudson Bay voyageurs now left who knows the river thoroughly at all stages of water, from Colville to its mouth.... The old man is seventy years of age, and hale and hearty, although his eyesight is somewhat defective.... The other Indians engaged were Pen-waw, Big Pierre, Little Pierre, and Joseph. They had never made the trip all the way down the river, and their minds were full of the dangers and terrors of the great rapids below, and it was a long time before we could prevail upon them to go, by promising them a high price and stipulating for their return by rail and stage. Old Pierre and John Rickey laboured and talked with them long and faithfully, to gain their consent, and I am sure that they started off with as many misgivings about getting safely through as we did who had to trust our lives to their skill, confidence and obedience.”

Lieutenant Symons does not state whether any confusion ever arose as a consequence of the fact that three of his five Indians bore the inevitable French-Canadian name of “Pierre.” Of the method of work followed by himself and his topographical assistant, Downing, throughout the voyage, he writes:

“Mr. Downing and myself worked independently in getting as thorough knowledge of the river as possible, he taking the courses with a prismatic compass, and estimating distances by the eye, and sketching in the topographical features of the surrounding country, while I estimated also the distances to marked points, and paid particular attention to the bed of the river, sounding wherever there were any indications of shallowness. Each evening we compared notes as to distances, and we found them to come out very well together, the greatest difference being six and three-fourths miles in a day’s run of sixty-four miles. Some days they were identical. The total distance from our starting point ... to the mouth of the Snake River was estimated by Mr. Downing to be three hundred and sixty-three miles, and by myself to be three hundred and fifty. His distances were obtained by estimating how far it was to some marked point ahead, and correcting it when the point was reached; mine by the time required to pass over the distances, in which the elements considered were the swiftness of the current and the labour of the oarsmen.”

I may state that it was only rarely that we found the distances arrived at by Lieutenant Symons and Mr. Downing to be greatly at variance with those established by later surveys. In the matter of bars, rapids, currents, channels and similar things, there appeared to have been astonishingly little change in the four decades that had elapsed since he had made his observations. Where he advised, for instance, taking the right-hand in preference to the middle or left-hand channels, it was not often that we went far wrong in heeding the direction. Bars of gravel, of course, shift from season to season, but reefs and projections of the native rock are rarely altered by more than a negligible erosion. The prominent topographical features—cliffs, headlands, coulees, mountains—are immutable, and for mile after mile, bend after bend, we picked them up just as Symons reported them.

The river is broad and slow for a few miles below Grand Rapids (they are called Rickey’s Rapids locally), with steep-sided benches rising on either hand, and the green of apple orchards showing in bright fringes along their brinks. There had been the usual warnings in Kettle Falls of a bad rapid to be encountered “somewhere below,” but the data available on this part of the river made us practically certain that nothing worse than minor riffles existed until the swift run of Spokane Rapids was reached. Seven miles below Grand Rapids several islands of black basalt contracted the river considerably, but any one of two or three channels offered an easy way through them. The highest of them had a driftwood crown that was not less than fifty feet above the present stage of the river, showing graphically the great rise and fall at this point.

At the shallow San Poil bar we saw some Indians from the Colville Reservation fishing for salmon—the crooked-nosed “dogs” of the final run. If they were of the tribe from which the bar must have been named, civilization had brought them its blessing in the form of hair-restorer. They were as hirsute a lot of ruffians as one could expect to find out of Bolshevia—and as dirty.

Turtle Rapid was the worst looking place we found during the day, but the menace was more apparent than real. The riffle took its name from a number of turtle-backed outcroppings of bedrock pushing up all the way across the river. The current was swift and deep, making it just the sort of place one would have expected to encounter bad swirls. These were, indeed, making a good deal of a stir at the foot of several of the narrow side runs, but by the broader middle channel which we followed the going was comparatively smooth. We finished an easy day by tying up at four o’clock where the road to the Colville Reservation comes down to the boulder-bordered bank at Hunter’s Ferry.