Down the Columbia

by Lewis R. Freeman

The whirlpool was spinning from right to left, and one quick stroke with my left oar—against the current of the “spin,” that is—was enough to shoot her clear. Bad swirls and two or three smaller “twisters” made her course a devious one for the next hundred yards, but she never swung in a complete revolution again. I pulled into smooth water just as the first drops of the storm began to patter on the back of my neck.

The first riffle of John Day Rapids sent its warning growl on the up-river wind before I was a quarter of a mile below the whirlpool, and ahead loomed a barrier of rock islands, rising out of the white foam churned up as the Columbia raced between them. I had to run the first riffle—an easy one—to make the mouth of the John Day, but that was as far as I went. I reckoned there had been quite enough excitement for one afternoon without poking into any more rough water against a rain and head wind. Dropping below the gravel bar off the mouth of the Day, I pulled fifty yards up-stream in a quiet current and moored Imshallah under the railway bridge. I camped for the night with a couple of motor tourists in a shack near the upper end of the bridge. My hosts were two genial souls, father and son, enjoying an indefinite spell of fishing, hunting and trapping on a stake the former had made in the sale of one of his “prospects” in southern Oregon. They were bluff, big-hearted, genuine chaps, both of them, and we had a highly delightful evening of yarning.

It was clear again the next morning, but with the barometer of my confidence jolted down several notches by what had occurred the previous afternoon. I pulled across the river and sought a quieter way through the second riffle of John Day Rapids than that promised by the boisterous steamer channel. By devious ways and sinuous, I wound this way and that among the black rock islands, until a shallow channel along the right bank let me out of the maze at the lower end. This waste of time and effort was largely due to funkiness on my part, and there was no necessity for it. The steamer channel is white and rough, with something of a whirlpool on the left side at the lower end, but nothing that there is any real excuse for avoiding. The third riffle was nothing to bother about; nor did Schofield’s Rapids, two miles below, offer any difficulties. As a matter of fact, Adventure, having had its innings, was taking a day off, leaving me to follow the Golden Trail of Romance. To-day was “Ladies’ Day” on the Columbia.

Romance first showed her bright eyes at a little farm on the right bank, three miles below Schofield’s Rapids. Landing here to ask about the channel through a rather noisy rapid beginning to boom ahead, I found a delectable apple-cheeked miss of about twelve in charge, her father and mother having gone across to Biggs for the day. She was in sore trouble at the moment of my advent because her newly-born brindle bull calf—her really-truly very own—wouldn’t take nourishment properly. Now as luck would have it, teaching a calf table-manners chanced to be one of the few things I knew about stock-farming. So I showed her how to start in by letting Cultus (that was merely a temporary name, she said, because he was so bad) munch her own finger for a spell, from which, by slow degrees, the lacteal liaison with “Old Mooley” was established. It took us half an hour to get Cultus functioning on all fours, and rather longer than that to teach her collie, tabby cat, and the latter’s three kittens to sit in a row and have their mouths milked into. It didn’t take us long to exhaust “Old Mooley’s” milk supply at that game, and when I finally climbed over the barnyard fence on the way down to my boat, poor Cultus was left butting captiously at an empty udder. “Apple Cheek” rather wanted me to stay until her father came back, saying that he had gone to Biggs to get a ’breed for a hired man, and that, if he didn’t get the ’breed, maybe I would do. She almost burst into tears with shame when I told her I was a moving picture actor seeking rest and local colour on the Columbia. “You a actor, and I made you milk ‘Old Mooley!’” she sobbed; and it took all my lunch ration of milk chocolate to bring back her smile. Then, like the Scotch bride at Windermere, she asked me if I was Bill Hart. Somehow, I wasn’t quite base enough to tell her a concrete lie like that; so I compromised with a comparative abstraction. I was a rising star in the movie firmament, I said; an eclectic, taking the best of all the risen stars, of whom much would be heard later. She was still pondering “eclectic” when I pushed off into the current. Bless your heart, little “Apple Cheek,” I hope you didn’t get a spanking for wasting all of Cultus’ dinner on the dogs and cats and the side of the barn! You were about the first person I met on the Columbia who didn’t accuse me of being a boot-legger, and the only one who believed me hot off the bat when I said I was a movie star.

The rapid ahead became noisier as I drew nearer, and when I saw it came from a reef which reached four-fifths of the way across the river from the left bank, I pulled in and landed at Biggs to inquire about the channel. The first man I spoke to called a second, and the latter a third, and so on ad infinitum. Pretty near to half the town must have been gathered at the railway station giving me advice at the end of a quarter of an hour. Each of them had a different suggestion to make, ranging from dragging through a half-empty back channel just below the town to taking the boat out and running it down the track on a push-cart. As they all were agreed that the steamers used to go down the opposite side, I finally decided that would be the best way through. Not to run too much risk of being carried down onto the reef in pulling across, I lined and poled a half mile up-stream before pushing off. Once over near the right bank, I found a channel broad and deep enough to have run at night.

A couple of miles below Biggs the Columbia is divided by a long narrow rocky island. The deep, direct channel is that to the right, and is called Hell Gate—the third gorge of that hackneyed name I had encountered since pushing off from Beavermouth. Possibly it was because I was fed-up with the name and all it connoted that I avoided this channel; more likely it was because Romance was at the tow-line. At any rate, I headed into the broad shallow channel that flows by the mouth of the River Des Chutes. It was up this tumultuous stream that Frémont, after camping at the Dalles and making a short boat voyage below, started south over the mountains in search of the mythical river that was supposed to drain from the Utah basin to the Pacific in the vicinity of San Francisco—one of the indomitable “Pathfinder’s” hardest journeys.

Just beyond where the River of the Falls, true to name to the last, came cascading into the Columbia, Romance again raised her golden head—this time out of the steam rising above an Indian “Turkish-bath.” The first time I had found her in the guise of a twelve-year-old; this time it was more like a hundred and twelve. One can’t make certain within a year or two about a lady in a Turkish-bath; it wouldn’t be seemly even to try to do so. Pulling in close to the left bank to look at some queer mud-plastered Indian wickiups, a rush of steam suddenly burst from the side of the nearest one, and out of that spreading white cloud, rising like Aphrodite from the sea-foam, emerged the head and shoulders of an ancient squaw. She was horribly old—literally at the sans eyes, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything (including clothes) stage. Cackling and gesticulating in the rolling steam, she was the belle ideal of the witch of one’s fancy, muttering incantations above her boiling cauldron.

Frémont, in somewhat humorous vein, tells of visiting an Indian camp in this vicinity on the Columbia, and of how one of the squaws who had rushed forth in complete déshabille on hearing the voices of strangers, “properized” herself at the last moment by using her papoose—as far as it would go—as a shield. But this old “Aphrodite” I had flushed from cover was so old that, if her youngest child had been ready to hand, and that latter had had one of her own children within reach, and this third one had had a child available, I am certain that still another generation or two would have had to be descended before a papoose sufficiently young enough to make “properization” prop“r would have been found. I trust I make that clear. And when you have visualized it, isn’t it a funny pyramid?

With two or three more “Aphrodites” beginning to bubble up through the steam, it is just possible that some such an ocular barrage actually was in process of formation; but I think not. My hard-plied oars had hardly lengthened my interval to much over fifty yards, when the whole lot of them trooped down to the river—steaming amazingly they were at the touch of the sharp early winter air—and plunged into the icy water. I learned later that this “sweat-bath” treatment is the favourite cure-all with the Indians of that part of the Columbia Basin.

Where the left-hand channel returned to the main Columbia a mile or more below the mouth of the River Des Chutes I encountered an extensive series of rock-reefs which, until I drew near them, seemed to block the way completely. It was a sinuous course I wound in threading my way through the ugly basaltic outcroppings, but the comparatively slow water robbed it of any menace. Once clear of the rocks, I found myself at the head of the long, lake-like stretch of water backed up above Celilo Falls. The low rumble of the greatest cataract of the lower Columbia was already pulsing in the air, while a floating cloud of “water-smoke,” white against the encroaching cliffs, marked its approximate location. I was at last approaching the famous “long portage” of the old voyageurs, a place noted (in those days) for the worst water and the most treacherous Indians on the river. Now, however, the Indians no longer blocked the way and exacted toll, while the portage had been bridged by a Government canal. I caught the loom of the head-gate of the latter about the same time that the bridge of the “North-Bank” branch line, which spans the gorge below the falls, began rearing its blurred fret-work above the mists. Then, once again, Romance. “Ladies’ Day” was not yet over. As I pulled in toward the entrance to the canal, at the left of the head of the falls, I observed a very gaily-blanketed dame dancing up and down on the bank and gesticulating toward the opposite side of the river. As I landed and started to pull the skiff up on the gravelly beach, she came trotting down to entreat, in her best “Anglo-Chinook,” that I ferry her to the opposite bank, where her home was, and, where, apparently, she was long overdue. She wasn’t a beggar, she assured me, but—jingling her beaded bag under my nose—was quite willing to pay me “hiyu chickamon” for my services. Nor was she unduly persistent. No sooner had I told her that I was in a “hiyu rush” and hadn’t the time just then to be a squire of dames, than she bowed her head in stoical acquiescence and went back to her waving and croaking. It was that futile old croak (with not enough power behind it to send it a hundred yards across a mile-wide river) that caved my resolution. Shoving Imshallah back into the water, I told her to pile in.