Down the Yellowstone

by Lewis R. Freeman

"YANKEE JIM" WITH A TROUT FROM HIS CANYON

JUST ABOVE THE FIRST DROP IN "YANKEE JIM'S" CANYON

Sticking to my oar I came up quickly and went bobbing down the undulating stream of the rapid, kissing off a rock now and then but never with sharp impact. I had gone perhaps a hundred yards when the lightened boat broke loose above and started to follow me. Right down the middle of the riffle she came, wallowing mightily but shipping very little additional water. Holding my oar under one arm and paddling lightly against the current with my other, I waited till the Mule floundered abreast of me and clambered aboard. She was about a third full of water, but as the weight of it hardly compensated for the rocks dumped overboard she was riding considerably higher than before, though much less steadily.

Looking back up-stream as the reeling Mule swung in the current, I saw Jim, with the Gingham Girl in his wake, ambling down the bank at a broken-kneed trot in an apparent endeavour to head me to the next fall as per schedule. Poor old chap! He was never a hundred-to-one shot in that race now that the Mule had regained her head and was running away down mid-channel regardless of obstacles. He stumbled and went down even as I watched him with the tail of my eye. The Gingham Girl pulled him to his feet and he seemed to be leaning heavily against her fine shoulder as the Mule whisked me out of sight around the next bend. That was the last I ever saw of either of them. Jim, I understand, died some years ago, and the Gingham Girl.... Dear me, she must be forty herself by now and the mother of not less than eight. Even ten is considered a conservative family up that way. They are not race suicidists on the upper Yellowstone.

With the steering oar permanently unshipped there was more difficulty than ever in exercising any control over the balkiness of the stubborn Mule. After a few ineffectual attempts I gave up trying to do anything with the oar and confined my navigation to fending off with a cottonwood pike-pole. This really helped no more than the oar, so it was rather by good luck than anything else that the Mule hit the next pitch head-on and galloped down it with considerable smartness. When she reeled through another rapid beam-on without shipping more than a bucket or two of green water I concluded she was quite able to take care of herself, and so sat down to enjoy the scenery. I was still lounging at ease when we came to a sharp right-angling notch of a bend where the full force of the current was exerted to push a sheer wall of red-brown cliff out of the way. Not unnaturally, the Mule tried to do the same thing. That was where I discovered I had over-rated her strength of construction.

I have said that she impressed me at first sight as being quite capable of nosing the Rock of Gibraltar out of her way. This optimistic estimate was not borne out. That little patch of cliff was not high enough to make a respectable footstool for the guardian of the Mediterranean, but it must have been quite as firmly socketed in the earth. So far as I could see it budged never the breadth of a hair when the Mule, driving at all of fifteen miles an hour, crashed into it with the shattering force of a battering-ram. Indeed, everything considered, it speaks a lot for her construction that she simply telescoped instead of resolving into cosmic star-dust. Even the telescoping was not quite complete. Although there were a number of loose planks and timbers floating in her wake, the hashed mass of wood that backed soddenly away from the cliff and off into the middle of the current again had still a certain seeming of a boat—that is, to one who knew what it was intended for in the first place. With every plank started or missing, however, water had entered at a score of places, so that all the buoyancy she retained was that of floating wood.

The Mule had ceased to be a boat and become a raft, but not a raft constructed on scientific principles. The one most desirable characteristic of a properly built raft of logs is its stability. It is almost impossible to upset. The remains of the Mule had about as much stability as a toe-dancer, and all of the capriciousness. She kept more or less right side up on to the head of the next riffle and then laid down and negotiated the undulating waves by rolling.

It was not until some years later, if I remember aright, that stout women adopted the expedient of rolling to reduce weight. The Mule was evidently well in advance of the times, for she reduced both weight and bulk by all of a quarter in that one series of rolls. I myself, after she had spilled me out at the head of the riffle, rode through on one of her planks, but it was a railroad tie, with a big spike in it, that rasped me over the ear in the whirlpool at the foot.

And so I went on through to the foot of "Yankee Jim's Canyon." In the smoother water I clung to a tie, plank or the thinning remnants of the Mule herself. At the riffles, to avoid another clout on the head from the spike-fanged flotsam, I found it best to swim ahead and flounder through on my own. I was not in serious trouble at any time, for much the worst of the rapids had been those at the head of the Canyon. Had I been really hard put for it, there were a dozen places at which I could have crawled out. As that would have made overtaking the Mule again somewhat problematical, I was reluctant to do it. Also, no doubt, I was influenced by the fear that Jim and the Gingham Girl might call me a quitter.

Courtesy Northern Pacific R. R. FOOT OF "YANKEE JIM'S" CANYON