There was plainly something on Ike’s mind all through breakfast, but what it was didn’t transpire until I asked him what time he would be ready to push off. Then, like a man who blurts out an unpalatable truth, he gave the free end of his “toga” a fling back over his shoulder and announced that he had come to the conclusion that the raft was too big and too loosely constructed to run Box Canyon; in fact, we could count ourselves lucky that we got through Hell Gate without smashing up. What he proposed to do was to take the biggest and straightest logs from both the rafts and make a small, solid one that would stand any amount of banging from the rocks. He never gave a thought to his life when working on the river, he declared, but it would be a shame to run an almost certain risk of losing so big a lot of logs and cordwood. The wreckage would be sure to be salvaged by farmers who would otherwise have to buy wood from him, so he would be a double loser in case the raft went to pieces. I told him that I quite appreciated his feelings (about the wood and logs, I mean), and asked how long he figured it would take to get the logs out of the old rafts and build a new one. He reckoned it could be done in two or three days, if we hustled. As I had already learned that any of Ike’s estimates of time had to be multiplied by at least two to approximate accuracy, I realized at once that our rafting voyage was at an end. We already had some very good raft pictures, and as a few hundred yards of the run through Box Canyon would be all that could be added to these, it did not seem worth anything like the delay building the new raft would impose. As far as the sale of the wood and logs was concerned, Ike said he would rather have the stuff where it was than in Bridgeport.
So, quite unexpectedly but in all good feeling, we prepared to abandon the raft and have the motor-boat take the skiff in tow as far as Chelan. This would make up a part of the time we had lost in waiting for the raft in the first place, and also save the portage round Box Canyon. It was quite out of the question venturing into that gorge in our small boat, Earl said, but he had made it before with his launch, and reckoned he could do it again. We settled with Ike on a basis of twenty dollars a day for his time, out of which he would pay for the launch. As his big raft of logs and firewood was brought to its destination for nothing by this arrangement, he was that much ahead. For the further use of the launch, we were to pay Earl ten dollars a day and buy the gasoline.
We helped Ike get the raft securely moored, had an early lunch on the rocks, and pushed off at a little after noon, the skiff in tow of the launch on a short painter. A few miles along Ike pointed out a depression, high above the river on the left side, which he said was the mouth of the Grand Coulee, the ancient bed of the Columbia. I have already mentioned a project which contemplates bringing water from the Pend d’Oreille to irrigate nearly two million acres of semi-arid land of the Columbia basin. A project that some engineers consider will bring water to the same land more directly and at a much less cost per acre is to build a dam all the way across the Columbia below the mouth of the Grand Coulee, and use the power thus available to pump sixteen thousand second-feet into the old channel of that river. Mr. James O’Sullivan, a contractor of Port Huron, Michigan, who has made an exhaustive study of this latter project, writes me as follows:
“A dam at this point could be built 300 feet high above low water, and it would form a lake 150 miles long all the way to the Canadian boundary. It is estimated that one million dollars would pay all the flooding damages. A dam 300 feet high would be 4,300 feet long on the crest, and would require about 5,000,000 cubic yards of concrete. It would cost, assuming bedrock not to exceed 100 feet below water, about forty million dollars. It is estimated that the power-house, direct connected pumps, turbines and discharge pipes would cost fifteen million dollars.... From the Columbia River to the arid lands, a distance of less than forty miles, there is a natural channel less than one mile wide, flanked by rock walls on both sides, so that the cost of getting water to the land would be primarily confined to the dam and power. Such a dam would require about five years to build, and it would create out of a worthless desert a national estate of four hundred and fifty million dollars, and the land would produce annually in crops two hundred and seventy-five million.... An irrigation district is now being formed in Central Washington, and it is proposed to proceed at once with the core drilling of the dam-site, to determine the nature and depth of bedrock, which seems to be the only question left unsettled which affects the feasibility of the project. The Northwestern states are all in a league for securing the reclamation of this vast area, and there is no doubt that, if bedrock conditions prove to be favourable, that in the near future the money will be raised to construct this great project, which will reclaim an area equal to the combined irrigation projects undertaken by the U. S. Government to-day.... It is considered now that where power is free, a pumping lift as high as 300 feet is perfectly feasible.”
Which of these two great projects for the reclamation of the desert of the Columbia Basin has the most to recommend is not a question upon which a mere river voyageur, who is not an engineer, can offer an intelligent opinion. That the possibilities of such reclamation, if it can be economically effected, are incalculably immense, however, has been amply demonstrated. From source to mouth, the Columbia to-day is almost useless for power, irrigation and even transportation. The experience of those who, lured on by abnormal rainfalls of a decade or more ago, tried dry farming in this region border closely on the tragic. And the tragedy has been all the more poignant from the fact that the disaster of drought has overtaken them year after year with the Columbia running half a million second-feet of water to waste right before their eyes. I subsequently met a rancher in Wenatchee who said the only good the Columbia ever was to a man who tried to farm along it in the dry belt was as a place to drown himself in when he went broke.
THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE AT CHELAN FALLS (above)
OLD RIVER VETERANS ON THE LANDING AT POTARIS. (CAPT. McDERMID ON LEFT, IKE EMERSON ON RIGHT) (below)