After the exchange of a wire or two, Roos obtained permission from Chester to suspend the “farmer” picture, and was ordered on to New York to report. We were both a good deal disappointed not to have a pictorial record of the “farmer” actually seeing the sea; in fact, we did some hours of “location” scouting in the hope of finding a substitute Pacific in the vicinity of Pasco. If that Beverly sand-storm had only made itself felt seventy-five miles farther down river I honestly believe we would have accomplished our worthy end. There was a pretty bit of white beach below the N. P. bridge. If the sand had been blowing thick enough to obscure the farther shore, and if the wind had blown in the right direction to throw up a line or two of surf, I could have stood with one foot on that beach, the other on Imshallah’s bow, elbow on knee, chin in hand, and registered “fulfilment,” and none could have told it from the real Pacific. Indeed, that bit of backwash from Pasco’s outfall sewer, with the sand-barrage and surf I have postulated, would have “shot” more like the Pacific than many spots I can think of looking off to the Columbia bar.
CHAPTER XIII
PASCO TO THE DALLES
The only lone-hand river voyage I had ever taken previous to the one on which I was about to embark was down the lower Colorado River, from Needles to the head of the Gulf of California. This had been in comparatively quiet water all the way, with nothing much to look out for save the tidal bore at the lower end. As I had never been above the Dalles on the lower Columbia, I had very little idea of what I would encounter in the way of rapids. I knew that there were locks by which the Dalles and Cascades could be passed, but as the combined fall at these points accounted for only about a quarter of that between the Snake and tide-water, it was certain there must still be some very swift rapids to run. That there had at times been a steamer service maintained from the Snake down meant that there must be some sort of a rock-free channel through all of the riffles; but it did not necessarily mean that these were runnable in a small boat. A properly handled stern-wheeler can be drifted down and (by means of line and capstan) hauled up rapids where not even a high-powered launch can live. I had a list of about a score of the principal rapids between the Snake and Celilo Falls, with their distances from the Canadian Boundary by river. This would enable me to know approximately where I was going to find them. That was all. Information on fall, channel and the best means of running them I would have to pick up as I went along.
I shoved off from Pasco Ferry at nine o’clock in the morning of Sunday, November fourteenth. With Roos and his blanket-roll, camera and tripod out of the stern, I found that the skiff trimmed better when I rowed from the after thwart. She pulled easier and handled a lot more smartly now. It was evident, however, that her increased freeboard was going to make her harder to hold to her course with head winds, but these I hoped to have little trouble with until I reached the gorge of the Cascades. The ferry-man assured me that I would encounter no really bad water until I came to the last pitch of Umatilla Rapids, about thirty-five miles below. He advised me to take a good look at that before putting into it, as an unbroken reef ran almost directly across the current and the channel was not easy to locate. It was the most troublesome bar to navigation on the lower Columbia, and steamers were repeatedly getting in trouble there. I would see the latest wreck a couple of miles below the foot of the rapids.
I passed the mouth of the Snake about three miles below the ferry. Here was no such spectacular meeting of waters as occurs when the Pend d’Oreille and Columbia spring together, for the country is low and level, and the mouth of the Snake broad and shallow. The discharge was through two channels, and the water greenish-grey in colour; but where that blend in the swift tributaries of the upper river suggests the intense coldness of glacial origin, here the picture conjured up was of desert and alkali plains. Its mouth is the least interesting part of the Snake. It has some magnificent canyons in its upper and middle waters—as have also its two fine tributaries, the Salmon and Clearwater,—and its Shoshone Falls are second only to Niagara on the North American continent.
Lieutenant Symons, who concluded his exploration of the upper Columbia at the Snake, characterizes the region as a “bleak, dreary waste, in which for many miles around sage-brush and sand predominate ... one of the most abominable places in the country to live in.” Alexander Ross, on the other hand, writing seventy years earlier, describes it as one of the loveliest lands imaginable. The fact that the one reached the Snake in the fall and the other in the spring may have had something to do with these diametrically opposed impressions. Irrigation and cultivation have gone far to redeem this land from the desert Symons found it, but it is still far from being quite the Paradise Ross seemed to think it was. As the only considerable plain touching the Columbia at any point in its course, this region of the Snake can never make the scenic appeal of the hundreds of miles of cliff-walled gorges above and below; but it is a land of great potential richness. With water and power available from the two greatest rivers of the West, there can be no question of its future, both agriculturally and industrially. Pasco will yet more than fulfil the promises made for that mushroom town in its early boom days. “KEEP YOUR EYE ON PASCO!” was a byword from one end of the country to the other in the nineties, and this hustling rail and agricultural centre at the junction of the Columbia and the Snake should not be lost sight of even to-day.
The lighter-hued water of the Snake was pretty well churned into the flood of the Columbia at the end of a mile, leaving a faint suggestion of cloudiness in the transparent green that the latter had preserved all the way from the Arrow Lakes. The long bridge of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway spanned the Columbia just below the Snake, and from there on paralleled the river closely right down to the Willamette. After the Oregon-Washington Railway and Navigation Company tracks appeared on the south bank below the Walla Walla, it was only at rare intervals that I was out of sight of a grade, or out of sound of a train, for the remainder of my voyage. In a day or two the trainmen, running back and forth between divisional points, came to recognize the bright green skiff plugging on down the dark green river (mighty small she must have looked to them from the banks) and never failed to give her a hail or a wave in passing. On a certain memorable occasion one of them (doubtless in direct defiance of rules) ventured even further in the way of a warning ... but I will tell of that in its place.
Homley Rapids, seven miles below Pasco ferry, are formed by a rough reef of bedrock running half way across the river from the right bank. Approached from the right side of the long gravel island that divides the river just above them, one might get badly tangled up before he got through; by the left-hand channel the going is easy if one keeps an eye on the shallowing water at the bars. A sky-line of brown mountains, with a double-turreted butte as their most conspicuous feature, marks the point where the Columbia finally turns west for its assault on the Cascades and its plunge to the Pacific. That bend is the boundary of the fertile plains extending from the Yakima to the Walla Walla, and the beginning of a new series of gorges, in some respects the grandest of all. The matchless panorama of the Cascade gorges is a fitting finale to the stupendous scenic pageant that has been staged all the way from the glacial sources of the Columbia.