DOWN THE COLUMBIA

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
MT. SIR DONALD, WHICH DRAINS FROM ALL SIDES TO THE COLUMBIA

DOWN THE COLUMBIA
BY
LEWIS R. FREEMAN

AUTHOR OF “IN THE TRACKS OF THE TRADES,”
“HELL’S HATCHES,” ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1921

Copyright 1921
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

The Quinn & Boden Company

BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY NEW JERSEY

TO
C. L. CHESTER

Hoping he will find in these pages some compensation for the fun he missed in not being along.

INTRODUCTION

The day on which I first conceived the idea of a boat trip down the Columbia hangs in a frame all its own in the corridors of my memory. It was a number of years ago—more than a dozen, I should say. Just previously I had contrived somehow to induce the Superintendent of the Yellowstone National Park to grant me permission to attempt a winter journey on ski around this most beautiful of America’s great playgrounds. He had even sent a Government scout along to keep, or help, me out of trouble. We were a week out from the post at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Putting the rainbow revel of the incomparable Canyon behind, we had crossed Yellowstone Lake on the ice and fared onward and upward until we came at last to the long climb where the road under its ten feet of snow wound up to the crest of the Continental Divide. It was so dry and cold that the powdery snow overlying the crust rustled under our ski like autumn leaves. The air was diamond clear, so transparent that distant mountain peaks, juggled in the wizardry of the lens of the light, seemed fairly to float upon the eyeball.

At the summit, where we paused for breath, an old Sergeant of the Game Patrol, letting down a tin can on a string, brought up drinks from an air-hole which he claimed was teetering giddily upon the very ridge-pole of North America.

“If I dip to the left,” he said, suiting the action to the word, “it’s the Pacific I’ll be robbing of a pint of Rocky Mountain dew; while if I dip to the right it’s the Atlantic that’ll have to settle back a notch. And if I had a string long enough, and a wing strong enough, to cast my can over there beyond Jackson’s Hole,” he went on, pointing southeasterly to the serrated peaks of the Wind River Mountains, “I could dip from the fount of the Green River and keep it from feeding the Colorado and the Gulf of California by so much.”

That led me to raise the question of boating by river from the Great Divide to the sea, and the Scout, who knew something of the Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin to the east, and of the Salmon, Clearwater and Snake to the west, said he reckoned the thing could be done in either direction provided a man had lots of time and no dependent family to think of and shake his nerve in the pinches.

The old Sergeant agreed heartily. River boating was good, he said, because it was not opposed to Nature, like climbing mountains, for instance, where you were bucking the law of gravity from start to finish. With a river it was all easy and natural. You just got into your boat and let it go. Sooner or later, without any especial effort on your part, you reached your objective. You might not be in a condition to appreciate the fact, of course, but just the same you got there, and with a minimum of hard work. Some rivers were better for boating than others for the reason that you got there quicker. The Snake and the Missouri were all very well in their way, but for him, he’d take the Columbia. There was a river that started in mountains and finished in mountains. It ran in mountains all the way to the sea. No slack water in all its course. It was going somewhere all the time. He had lived as a kid on the lower Columbia and had trapped as a man on the upper Columbia; so he ought to know. There was a “he” river if there ever was one. If a man really wanted to travel from snowflake to brine and not be troubled with “on-wee” on the way, there was no stream that ran one-two-three with the Columbia as a means of doing it.

That night, where we steamed in the black depths of a snow-submerged Government “Emergency” cabin, the Sergeant’s old Columbia memories thawed with the hunk of frosted beef he was toasting over the sheet-iron stove. He told of climbing for sheep and goat in the high Kootenay, of trailing moose and caribou in the valleys of the Rockies, and finally of his years of trapping on the creeks and in the canyons that run down to the Big Bend of the Columbia; of how he used to go down to Kinbasket Lake in the Fall, portaging or lining the three miles of tumbling cascades at Surprise Rapids, trap all winter on Sullivan Creek or Middle River, and then come out in the Spring to Revelstoke, playing ducks-and-drakes with his life and his scarcely less valuable catch of marten, mink and beaver running the riffles at Rock Slide, Twelve Mile and the terrible Dalles des Morts. He declared that there were a hundred miles of the Big Bend of the Columbia that had buffaloed to a fare-ye-well any equal stretch on any of the great rivers of North America for fall, rocks and wild rip-rarin’ water generally. But the dread Rapids of Death and the treacherous swirls and eddies of Revelstoke Canyon were not the last of swift water by a long shot. Just below the defile of the Arrow Lakes the white caps began to rear their heads again, and from there right on down through the seven hundred miles and more to tide-water below the Cascade Locks in Oregon there was hardly a stretch of ten miles without its tumble of rapids, and mostly they averaged not more than three or four miles apart.

“She’s sure some ‘he’ river,” the old chap concluded as he began to unroll his blankets, “going somewhere all the time, tumbling over itself all the way trying to beat itself to the finish.”

Confusing as the Sergeant was with his “he” and “she” and “it” as to the gender of the mighty Oregon, there was no question of the fascination of the pictures conjured up by his descriptions of that so-well-called “Achilles of Rivers.” Before I closed my eyes that night I had promised myself that I should take the first opportunity to boat the length of the Columbia, to follow its tumultuous course from its glacial founts to the salt sea brine, to share with it, to jostle it in its “tumble to get there first.”

I held by that resolve for more than a dozen years, although, by a strange run of chance, I was destined to have some experience of almost every one of the great rivers of the world before I launched a boat upon the Columbia. My appetite for swift water boating had grown by what it fed on. I had come more and more to the way of thinking of my Yellowstone companion who held that boating down rivers was good because it was not opposed to Nature, “like mountain climbing, for instance, where you bucked the law of gravity all the way.” In odd craft and various, and of diverse degree of water worthiness, I had trusted to luck and the law of gravity to land me somewhere to seaward of numerous up-river points of vantage to which I had attained by means of travel that ranged all the way from foot and donkey-back to elephant and auto. The Ichang gorges of the Yangtze I had run in a sampan manned by a yelling crew of Szechuan coolies, and the Salween and Irawadi below the Yunnan boundary in weird Burmese canoes whose crews used their legs as well as their arms in plying their carved paddles. I had floated down the Tigris from Diarbekir to Mosul on a kalek of inflated sheepskins, and the Nile below the Nyanzas in a cranky craft of zebra hide, whose striped sides might have suggested the idea of modern marine camouflage. On the middle Niger I had used a condemned gunboat’s life-raft, and on the Zambesi a dugout of saffron-tinted wood so heavy that it sank like iron when capsized. And it had been in native dugouts of various crude types that I had boated greater or lesser lengths of the swifter upper stretches of the Orinoco, Amazon and Parana.

But through it all—whether I was floating in a reed-wrapped balsa on Titacaca or floundering in a pitch-smeared gufa on the Euphrates—pictures conjured up by remembered phrases of the old ex-trapper keep rising at the back of my brain. “The big eddy at the bend of Surprise Rapids, where you go to look for busted boats and dead bodies;” “the twenty-one mile of white water rolling all the way from Kinbasket Lake to Canoe River;” “the double googly intake at the head of Gordon Rapid;” “the black-mouthed whirlpool waiting like a wild cat at the foot of Dalles des Morts”—how many times had I seen all these in fancy! And at last the time came when those pictures were to be made real—galvanized into life.

It was well along toward the end of last summer that my friend C. L. Chester, whose work in filming the scenic beauties of out-of-the-way parts of the world has made the name Chester-Outing Pictures a byword on both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned that he was sending one of his cameramen to photograph the sources of the Columbia in the Selkirks and Rockies of western Canada. Also that he was thinking of taking his own holiday in that incomparably beautiful region. He supposed I knew that there were considerable areas here that had barely been explored, to saying nothing of photographed. This was notably so of the Big Bend country, where the Columbia had torn its channel between the Rockies and Selkirks and found a way down to the Arrow Lakes. He was especially anxious to take some kind of a boat round the hundred and fifty miles of canyon between Beavermouth and Revelstoke and bring out the first movies of what he had been assured was the roughest stretch of swift water on any of the important rivers of the world. Was there, by any chance, a possibility that my plans and commitments were such that I would be free to join him in the event that he made the trip personally?

As a matter of fact there were several things that should have prevented my breaking away for a trip to the upper Columbia in September, not the least among which was a somewhat similar trip I had already planned for the Grand Canyon of the Colorado that very month. But the mention of the Big Bend was decisive. “I’ll go,” I said promptly. “When do you start?”

It was finally arranged that I should go on ahead and engage men and boats for the Big Bend part of the trip, while Chester would endeavour to disentangle himself from business in Los Angeles and New York in time to join his cameraman and myself for a jaunt by packtrain to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. The latter is one of the high glacial sources of the Columbia in the Selkirks, and Chester, learning that it had never been photographed, desired especially to visit it in person. Returning from our visit to the source of the river, we planned to embark on the boating voyage around the Big Bend. It was not until business finally intervened to make it impossible for Chester to get away for even a portion of the trip which he had been at such trouble to plan, that I decided to attempt the voyage down the Columbia as I had always dreamed of it—all the way from the eternal snows to tide-water. At Chester’s suggestion, it was arranged that his cameraman should accompany me during such portion of the journey as the weather was favourable to moving picture work.

Our preliminary work and exploration among the sources of the river over (this was carried on either on foot or by packtrain, or in runs by canoe over short navigable stretches of the upper river), we pushed off from Beavermouth, at the head of the Big Bend. For this most arduous part of the voyage there were four in the party, with a big double-ended boat specially built for rough water. Further down, for a considerable stretch, we were three, in a skiff. Then, for a couple of hundred miles, there were four of us again, manning a raft and a towing launch. After that we were two—just the cameraman and myself, with the skiff. Him I finally dropped at the foot of Priest Rapids, fifty miles above Pasco, and the last two hundred and fifty miles down to Portland I rode alone. This “solo” run—though a one-man boat crew is kept rather too busy in swift water to have much time for enjoying the scenery—was far from proving the least interesting period of the journey.

So far as I have been able to learn, my arrival in Portland marked the end of the first complete journey that has been made from the glacial sources of the Columbia to tide-water. David Thompson, scientist and explorer for the Northwest Company, racing against the Astor sea expedition to be first to establish a post at the mouth of the Columbia, boated down a very large part of the navigable part of the river over a hundred years ago. I have found no evidence, however, that he penetrated to the glacial fields in the Selkirks above Windermere and Columbia Lake from which spring the main feeders of the upper river. Thompson’s, and all of the other voyages of the early days of which there is authentic record, started from Boat Encampment, where the road from the plains and Montreal led down to the Columbia by the icy waters of Portage River, or, as it is now called, Wood River. Thus all of the old Hudson Bay and Northwest voyageurs ran only the lower seventy-five miles of the Big Bend, and avoided what is by far its worst water—Surprise Rapids and the twenty-one miles of cascades below Kinbasket Lake. Ross Cox, Alexander Ross and Franchiere, whose diaries are the best commentaries extant upon early Columbia history, had no experience of the river above Boat Encampment. Lewis and Clark, and Hunt, with the remnants of the Astor transcontinental party, boated the river only below the Snake, and this was also true of Whitman and the other early missionaries and settlers. Frémont made only a few days’ journey down the river from the Dalles.

Of recent down-river passages, I have been able to learn of no voyageur who, having rounded the Big Bend, continued his trip down to the lower Columbia. The most notable voyage of the last three or four decades was that of Captain F. P. Armstrong and J. P. Forde, District Engineer of the Department of Public Works of Nelson, British Columbia, who, starting at the foot of the Lower Arrow Lake in a Peterboro canoe, made the run to Pasco, just above the mouth of the Snake, in ten days. As Captain Armstrong already knew the upper Columbia above the Arrow Lakes from many years of steamboating and prospecting, and as both he and Mr. Forde, after leaving their canoe at Pasco, continued on to Astoria by steamer, I am fully convinced that his knowledge of that river from source to mouth is more comprehensive than that of any one else of the present generation. This will be, perhaps, a fitting place to acknowledge my obligation to Captain Armstrong (who accompanied me in person from the mouth of the Kootenay to the mouth of the Spokane) for advice and encouragement which were very considerable factors in the ultimate success of my venture. To Mr. Forde I am scarcely less indebted for his courtesy in putting at my disposal a copy of his invaluable report to the Canadian Government on the proposal to open the Columbia to through navigation to the Pacific Ocean.

Compared to the arduous journeys of the old Astorian and Hudson Bay voyageurs on the Columbia, my own trip—even though a considerably greater length of river was covered than by any of my predecessors—was negligible as an achievement. Only in rounding the Big Bend in Canada does the voyageur of to-day encounter conditions comparable to those faced by those of a hundred, or even fifty years ago who set out to travel on any part of the Columbia. For a hundred miles or more of the Bend, now just as much as in years long gone by, an upset with the loss of an outfit is more likely than not to spell disaster and probably tragedy. But in my own passage of the Big Bend I can claim no personal credit that those miles of tumbling water were run successfully. I was entirely in the hands of a pair of seasoned old river hands, and merely pulled an oar in the boat and did a few other things when I was told.

But it is on the thousand miles of swiftly flowing water between the lower end of the Big Bend and the Pacific that conditions have changed the most in favour of the latter day voyageur. The rapids are, to be sure, much as they must have appeared to Thompson, Ross, Franchiere and their Indian contemporaries. The few rocks blasted here and there on the lower river in an attempt to improve steamer navigation have not greatly simplified the problems of the man in a rowboat or canoe. Nor is an upset in any part of the Columbia an experience lightly to be courted even to-day. Even below the Big Bend there are a score of places I could name offhand where the coolest kind of an old river hand, once in the water, would not have one chance in ten of swimming out. In half a hundred others he might reckon on an even break of crawling out alive. But if luck were with him and he did reach the bank with the breath in his body, then his troubles would be pretty well behind him. Below the Canadian border there is hardly ten miles of the river without a farm, a village, or even a town of fair size. Food, shelter and even medical attention are not, therefore, ever more than a few hours away, so that the man who survives the loss of his boat and outfit is rarely in serious straits.

But in the case of the pioneers, their troubles in like instance were only begun. What between hostile Indians and the loss of their only means of travel, the chances were all against their ever pulling out with their lives. The story of how the vicious cascade of the Dalles des Morts won its grisly name, which I will set down in its proper place, furnishes a telling instance in point.

It is a callous traveller who, in strange lands and seas, does not render heart homage to the better men that have gone before him. Just as you cannot sail the Pacific for long without fancying that Cook and Drake and Anson are sharing your night watches, so on the Columbia it is Thompson and Cox and Lewis and Clark who come to be your guiding spirits. At the head of every one of the major rapids you land just as you know they must have landed, and it is as through their eyes that you survey the work ahead. And when, rather against your better judgment, you decide to attempt to run a winding gorge where the sides are too steep to permit lining and where a portage would mean the loss of a day—you know that the best of the men who preceded you must have experienced the same hollowness under the belt when they were forced to the same decision, for were they not always gambling at longer odds than you are? And when, elate with the thrill of satisfaction and relief that come from knowing that what had been a menacing roar ahead has changed to a receding growl astern, you are inclined to credit yourself with smartness for having run a rapid where Thompson lined or Ross Cox portaged, that feeling will not persist for long. Sooner or later—and usually sooner—something or somebody will put you right. A broken oar and all but a mess-up in an inconsiderable riffle was all that was needed to quench the glow of pride that I felt over having won through the roughly tumbling left-hand channel of Rock Island Rapids with only a short length of lining. And it was a steady-eyed old river captain who brought me back to earth the night I told him—somewhat boastfully, I fear—that I had slashed my skiff straight down the middle of the final pitch of Umatilla Rapids, where Lewis and Clark had felt they had to portage.

“But you must not forget,” he said gently, with just the shadow of a smile softening the line of his firm lips, “that Lewis and Clark had something to lose besides their lives—that they had irreplaceable records in their care, and much work still to do. It was their duty to take as few chances as possible. But they never let the risk stop them when there wasn’t any safer way. When you are pulling through Celilo Canal a few days from now, and being eased down a hundred feet in the locks, just remember that Lewis and Clark put their whole outfit down the Tumwater and Five-Mile Rapids of the Dalles, in either of which that skiff of yours would be sucked under in half a minute.”

Bulking insignificantly as an achievement as does my trip in comparison with the many Columbia voyages, recorded and unrecorded, of early days, it still seems to me that the opportunity I had for a comprehensive survey of this grandest scenically of all the world’s great rivers gives me warrant for attempting to set down something of what I saw and experienced during those stirring weeks that intervened between that breathless moment when I let the whole stream of the Columbia trickle down my back in a glacial ice-cave in the high Selkirks, and that showery end-of-the-afternoon when I pushed out into tide-water at the foot of the Cascades.

It is scant enough justice that the most gifted of pens can do to Nature in endeavouring to picture in words the grandest of her manifestations, and my own quill, albeit it glides not untrippingly in writing of lighter things, is never so inclined to halt and sputter as when I try to drive it to its task of registering in black scrawls on white paper something of what the sight of a soaring mountain peak, the depth of a black gorge with a white stream roaring at the bottom, or the morning mists rising from a silently flowing river have registered on the sensitized sheets of my memory. Superlative in grandeur to the last degree as are the mountains, glaciers, gorges, waterfalls, cascades and cliffs of the Columbia, it is to my photographs rather than my pen that I trust to convey something of their real message.

If I can, however, pass on to my readers some suggestion of the keenness of my own enjoyment of what I experienced on the Columbia—of the sheer joie de vivre that is the lot of the man who rides the running road; it will have not been in vain that I have cramped my fingers and bent my back above a desk during several weeks of the best part of the California year. Robert Service has written something about

“Doing things just for the doing, Letting babblers tell the story....”

Shall I need to confess to my readers that the one cloud on the seaward horizon during all of my voyage down the Columbia was brooding there as a consequence of the presentiment that, sooner or later, I should have to do my own babbling?

Pasadena, July, 1921.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction[ vi]
I.Preparing for the Big Bend[1]
II.Up Horse Thief Creek[ 20]
III.At the Glacier[ 48]
IV.The Lake of the Hanging Glaciers[ 63]
V.Canal Flats to Beavermouth[ 77]
VI.Through Surprise Rapids[ 92]
VII.Kinbasket Lake and Rapids[134]
VIII.Boat Encampment to Revelstoke[160]
IX.Revelstoke to the Spokane[192]
X.Rafting Through Hell Gate[ 235]
XI.By Launch Through Box Canyon[ 267]
XII.Chelan to Pasco[ 286]
XIII.Pasco to the Dalles[ 323]
XIV.The Home Stretch[360]

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

DOWN THE COLUMBIA

CHAPTER I
PREPARING FOR THE BIG BEND

The itinerary of our Columbia trip as originally planned in Los Angeles called, first, for an expedition to the source of the river, next, a voyage by boat around the Big Bend from Beavermouth to Revelstoke, and, finally, if there was time and good weather held, a voyage of indefinite length on toward the sea. As the trip to the glaciers was largely a matter of engaging a good packer well in advance, while there was no certainty of getting any one who would undertake the passage of the Big Bend, it was to the latter that we first directed our attention. Chester wired the Publicity Department of the Canadian Pacific and I wrote friends in various parts of British Columbia. The C. P. R. replied that they had requested their Sub-Divisional Superintendent at Revelstoke to institute inquiries for boatmen in our behalf. The only one of my friends who contributed anything tangible stated that “while the Columbia above Golden and below Revelstoke was admirably suited to pleasure boating, any attempt to run the Big Bend between those points would result in almost certain disaster.”

As this appeared to be about the extent of what we were likely to learn from a distance, I decided to start north at once to see what could be arranged on the ground. Victoria yielded little save some large scale maps, and even these, they assured me in the Geographic Department of the B. C. Government where I secured them, were very inaccurate as to detail. The Big Bend region, it appeared, had never been surveyed north of the comparatively narrow zone of the C. P. R. grant. Several old hunting friends whom I met at the Club, although they had ranged the wildernesses of the Northwest from the Barren Lands to Alaska, spoke of the Big Bend as a veritable terra incognita.

“It’s said to be a great country for grizzly,” one of them volunteered, “but too hard to get at. Only way to get in and out is the Columbia, and that is more likely to land you in Kingdom Come than back in Civilization. Best forget about the Big Bend and go after sheep and goat and moose in the Kootenays.”

At Kamloops I was told of an Indian who had gone round the Big Bend the previous May, before the Spring rise, and come out not only with his own skin, but with those of seven grizzlies. I was unable to locate the Indian, but did find a white man who had made the trip with him. This chap spent half an hour apparently endeavouring to persuade me to give up the trip on account of the prohibitive risk (my experience on other rivers, he declared, would be worse than useless in such water as was to be encountered at Surprise, Kinbasket and Death Rapids) and about an equal amount of time trying to convince me that my life would be perfectly safe if only I would engage him and his Indian and confide it to their care. As the consideration suggested in return for this immunity figured out at between two and three times the rate we had been expecting to pay for boatmen, I had to decline to take advantage of it.

Finally, in Revelstoke, through the efforts of T. C. McNab of the Canadian Pacific, who had been at considerable trouble to line up possible candidates for a Big Bend trip, I met Bob Blackmore. After that things began moving toward a definite end.

“You won’t find old Bob Blackmore an active church-worker,” I was told in Revelstoke, “and at one time he had the reputation of being the smoothest thing in the way of a boot-legger in this part of B. C. But he drinks little himself, is a past-master of woodcraft, a dead shot, and has twice the experience of swift-water boating of any man on the upper Columbia. In spite of the fact that he has undergone no end of hardship in his thirty years of packing, hunting, prospecting, trapping and boating all over the West, he’s as hard to-day at fifty odd as most men are at thirty. Because he dished a boatload of freight last year somewhere up river, there are a few who are saying that old Bob Blackmore is losing his grip. Don’t believe it. He was never better in his life than he is right now, and if you can persuade him to run your show round the Big Bend you’re in luck. Once you start, you’ll come right on round to Revelstoke all right. No fear on that score. But if you have old Bob Blackmore you’ll stand a jolly lot better chance of arriving on top of the water.”

I found Bob Blackmore at his river-side home in the old town—what had been the metropolitan centre of Revelstoke in the days when it was the head of navigation of steamers from below the Arrow Lakes, and before the railway had come to drag settlement a mile northeastward and away from the Columbia. He was picking apples with one hand and slapping mosquitoes with the other—a grey-haired, grey-eyed man of middle height, with a muscular torso, a steady stare, and a grip that I had to meet half way to save my fingers. He might have passed for a well-to-do Middle Western farmer except for his iron-grey moustaches, which were long and drooping, like those affected by cowboy-town sheriffs in the movies.

I knew at once that this was the man I wanted, and my only doubt was as to whether or not he felt the same way about me. They had told me in town that Blackmore, having some means and being more or less independent, never went out with a man or an outfit he did not like. I felt that it was I who was on approval, not he. I need not have worried, however. In this instance, at least, Bob Blackmore’s mind was made up in advance. It was the movies that had done it.

“The C. P. R. people wrote me that you might be wanting me for the Bend,” he said genially after I had introduced myself, “and on the chance that we would be hitching up I have put my big boat in the water to give her a good soaking. I’ve figured that she’s the only boat on the upper river that will do for what you want. I reckon I know them all. She’ll carry three or four times as much as the biggest Peterboro. Besides, if you tried to go round in canoes, you’d be portaging or lining in a dozen places where I would drive this one straight through. With any luck, and if the water doesn’t go down too fast, I’d figure on going the whole way without taking her out of the river at more’n one place, and maybe not there.”

“So you’re willing to go ahead and see us through,” I exclaimed delightedly. “They told me in the town that you’d probably need a lot of persuading, especially as you’ve been saying for the last two or three years that you were through with the Bend for good and all.”

Blackmore grinned broadly and somewhat sheepishly. “So I have,” he said. “Fact is, I’ve never yet been round the Bend that I didn’t tell myself and everybody else that I’d never try it again. I really meant it the last time, which was three or four years ago. And I’ve really meant it every time I said it right up to a few days back, when I heard that you wanted to take a movie machine in there and try and get some pictures. If that was so, I said to myself, it was sure up to me to do what I could to help, for there’s scenery in there that is more worth picturing than any I’ve come across in thirty years of knocking around all over the mountain country of the West. So I’m your man if you want me. Of course you know something of what you’re going up against in bucking the Bend?”

“Yes,” I replied a bit wearily. “I’ve been hearing very little else for the last week. Let’s talk about the scenery.”

“So they’ve been trying to frighten you out of it,” he said with a sympathetic smile. “They always do that with strangers who come here to tackle the Bend. And mostly they succeed. There was one chap they couldn’t stop, though. He was a professor of some kind from Philadelphia. Fact is, he wasn’t enough frightened. That’s a bad thing with the Columbia, which isn’t to be taken liberties with. I buried him near the head of Kinbasket Lake. We’ll see his grave when we come down from Surprise Rapids. I’ll want to stop off for a bit and see if the cross I put up is still standing. He was....”

“Et tu Brute,” I muttered under my breath. Then, aloud: “Let’s look at the boat.”

Already this penchant of the natives for turning the pages of the Big Bend’s gruesome record of death and disaster was getting onto my nerves, and it was rather a shock to find even the quiet-spoken, steady-eyed Blackmore addicted to the habit. Afterwards, when I got used to it, I ceased to mind. As a matter of fact, the good souls could no more help expatiating on what the Big Bend had done to people who had taken liberties with it than an aviator who is about to take you for a flight can help leading you round back of the hangar and showing you the wreckage of his latest crash. It seems to be one of the inevitable promptings of the human animal to warn his brother animal of troubles ahead. This is doubtless the outgrowth of the bogies and the “don’ts” which are calculated to check the child’s explorative and investigative instincts in his nursery days. From the source to the mouth of the Columbia it was never (according to the solicitous volunteer advisers along the way) the really dangerous rapids that I had put behind me. These were always somewhere ahead—usually just around the next bend, where I would run into them the first thing in the morning. Luckily, I learned to discount these warnings very early in the game, and so saved much sleep which it would have been a real loss to be deprived of.

Blackmore led the way back through his apple orchard and down a stairway that descended the steeply-sloping river bank to his boat-house. The Columbia, a quarter of a mile wide and with just a shade of grey clouding its lucent greenness to reveal its glacial origin, slid swiftly but smoothly by with a purposeful current of six or seven miles an hour. A wing-dam of concrete, evidently built to protect the works of a sawmill a bit farther down stream, jutted out into the current just above, and the boat-house, set on a raft of huge logs, floated in the eddy below.

There were two boats in sight, both in the water. Blackmore indicated the larger one of the pair—a double-ender of about thirty feet in length and generous beam—as the craft recommended for the Big Bend trip. “I built her for the Bend more than fifteen years ago,” he said, tapping the heavy gunwale with the toe of his boot. “She’s the only boat I know that has been all the way round more than once, so you might say she knows the road. She’s had many a hard bump, but—with any luck—she ought to stand one or two more. Not that I’m asking for any more than can be helped, though. There’s no boat ever built that will stand a head-on crash ’gainst a rock in any such current as is driving it down Surprise or Kinbasket or Death Rapids, or a dozen other runs of swift water on the Bend. Of course, you’re going to hit once in a while, spite of all you can do; but, if you’re lucky, you’ll probably kiss off without staving in a side. If you’re not—well, if you’re not lucky, you have no business fooling with the Bend at all.

“Now what I like about this big boat of mine,” he continued, taking up the scope of the painter to bring her in out of the tug of the current, “is that she’s a lucky boat. Never lost a man out of her—that is, directly—and only one load of freight. Now with that one (indicating the smaller craft, a canoe-like double-ender of about twenty feet) it’s just the other way. If there’s trouble around she’ll have her nose into it. She’s as good a built boat as any on the river, easy to handle up stream and down—but unlucky. Why, only a few weeks ago a lad from the town borrowed her to have a bit of a lark running the ripple over that dam there. It’s covered at high water, and just enough of a pitch to give the youngsters a little excitement in dropping over. Safe enough stunt with any luck at all. But that boat’s not lucky. She drifted on sidewise, caught her keel and capsized. The lad and the two girls with him were all drowned. They found his body a week or two later. All his pockets were turned wrong-side-out and empty. The Columbia current most always plays that trick on a man—picks his pockets clean. The bodies of the girls never did show up. Probably the sand got into their clothes and held them down. That’s another little trick of the Columbia. She’s as full of tricks as a box of monkeys, that old stream there, and you’ve got to keep an eye lifting for ’em all the time if you’re going to steer clear of trouble.”

“It won’t be the first time I’ve had my pockets picked,” I broke in somewhat testily. “Besides, if you’re going to charge me at the rate that Indian I heard of in Kamloops demanded, there won’t be anything left for the Columbia to extract.”

That brought us down to business, and I had no complaint to make of the terms Blackmore suggested—twelve dollars a day for himself and boat, I to buy the provisions and make my own arrangements with any additional boatmen. I already had sensed enough of the character of the work ahead to know that a good boatman would be cheap at any price, and a poor one dear if working only for his grub. Blackmore was to get the big boat in shape and have it ready to ship by rail to Beavermouth (at the head of the Bend and the most convenient point to get a craft into the river) when I returned from the source of the Columbia above Windermere.

Going on to Golden by train from Revelstoke, I looked up Captain F. P. Armstrong, with whom I had already been in communication by wire. The Captain had navigated steamers between Golden and Windermere for many years, they told me at C. P. R. headquarters in Revelstoke, and had also some experience of the Bend. He would be unable to join me for the trip himself, but had spoken to one or two men who might be induced to do so. In any event his advice would be invaluable.

I shall have so much to say of Captain Armstrong in the account of a later part of my down-river voyage that the briefest introduction to a man who has been one of the most picturesque personalities in the pioneering history of British Columbia will suffice here. Short, compactly but cleanly built, with iron-grey hair, square, determined jaw and piercing black eyes, he has been well characterized as “the biggest little man on the upper Columbia.” Although he confessed to sixty-three years, he might well have passed for fifty, a circumstance which doubtless had much to do with the fact that he saw three years of active service in the transport service on the Tigris and Nile during the late war. Indeed, as became apparent later, he generally had as much reserve energy at the end of a long day’s paddling as another man I could mention who is rather loath to admit forty.

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
MT. ASSINIBOINE, NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE COLUMBIA

TWIN FALLS (left)
TAKAKAWA FALLS (right)
TWO GREAT CATARACTS OF THE COLUMBIA WATERSHED

Captain Armstrong explained that he was about to close the sale of one of his mines on a tributary of the upper Columbia, and for that reason would be unable to join us for the Big Bend trip, as much as he would have enjoyed doing so. In the event that I decided to continue on down the Columbia after circling the Bend, it was just possible he would be clear to go along for a way. He spoke highly of Blackmore’s ability as a river man, and mentioned one or two others in Golden whom he thought might be secured. Ten dollars a day was the customary pay for a boatman going all the way round the Bend. That was about twice the ordinary wage prevailing at the time in the sawmills and lumber camps. The extra five was partly insurance, and partly because the work was hard and really good river men very scarce. It was fair pay for an experienced hand. A poor boatman was worse than none at all, that is, in a pinch, while a good one might easily mean the difference between success and disaster. And of course I knew that disaster on the Bend—with perhaps fifty miles of trackless mountains between a wet man on the bank and the nearest human habitation—was spelt with a big D.

So far as I can remember, Captain Armstrong was the only one with whom I talked in Golden who did not try to dramatize the dangers and difficulties of the Big Bend. Seemingly taking it for granted that I knew all about them, or in any case would hear enough of them from the others, he turned his attention to forwarding practical plans for the trip. He even contributed a touch of romance to a venture that the rest seemed a unit in trying to make me believe was a sort of a cross between going over Niagara in barrel and a flight to one of the Poles.

“There was a deal of boot-legging on the river between Golden and Boat Encampment during the years the Grand Trunk was being built,” he said as we pored over an outspread map of the Big Bend, “for that was the first leg of the run into the western construction camps, where the sale of liquor was forbidden by law. Many and many a boatload of the stuff went wrong in the rapids. This would have been inevitable in any case, just in the ordinary course of working in such difficult water. But what made the losses worse was the fact that a good many of the bootleggers always started off with a load under their belts as well as in their boats. Few of the bodies were ever found, but with the casks of whisky it was different, doubtless because the latter would float longer and resist buffeting better. Cask after cask has kept turning up through the years, even down to the present, when B. C. is a comparative desert. They are found in the most unexpected places, and it’s very rare for a party to go all the way round the Bend without stumbling onto one. So bear well in mind you are not to go by anything that looks like a small barrel without looking to see if it has a head in both ends. If you have time, it will pay you to clamber for a few hours over the great patch of drift just below Middle River on Kinbasket Lake. That’s the one great catch-all for everything floatable that gets into the river below Golden. I’ve found just about everything there from a canary bird cage to a railway bridge. Failing there (which will only be because you don’t search long enough), dig sixteen paces northwest by compass from the foundation of the west tower of the abandoned cable ferry just above Boat Encampment.”

“How’s that again!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Sure you aren’t confusing the Big Bend with the Spanish Main?”

“If you follow my directions,” replied the Captain with a grin, “you’ll uncover more treasure for five minutes’ scratching than you’d be likely to find in turning over the Dry Tortugas for five years. You see, it was this way,” he went on, smiling the smile of a man who speaks of something which has strongly stirred his imagination. “It was only a few weeks after Walter Steinhoff was lost in Surprise Rapids that I made the trip round the Bend in a Peterboro to examine some silver-lead prospects I had word of. I had with me Pete Bergenham (a first-class river man; one you will do well to get yourself if you can) and another chap. This fellow was good enough with the paddle, but—though I didn’t know it when I engaged him—badly addicted to drink. That’s a fatal weakness for a man who is going to work in swift water, and especially such water as you strike at Surprise and the long run of Kinbasket Rapids. The wreckage of Steinhoff’s disaster (Blackmore will spin you the straightest yarn about that) was scattered all the way from the big whirlpool in Surprise Rapids down to Middle River, where they finally found his body. We might easily have picked up more than the one ten-gallon cask we bumped into, floating just submerged, in the shallows of the mud island at the head of Kinbasket Lake.

“I didn’t feel quite right about having so much whisky along; but the stuff had its value even in those days, and I would have felt still worse about leaving it to fall into the hands of some one who would be less moderate in its use than would I. I knew Pete Bergenham was all right, and counted on being able to keep an eye on the other man. That was just where I fell down. I should have taken the cask to bed with me instead of leaving it in the canoe.

“When the fellow got to the whisky I never knew, but it was probably well along toward morning. He was already up when I awoke, and displayed unwonted energy in getting breakfast and breaking camp. If I had known how heavily he had been tippling I would have given him another drink before pushing off to steady his nerve. That might have held him all right. As it was, reaction in mind and body set in just as we headed into that first sharp dip below the lake—the beginning of the twenty-one miles of Kinbasket Rapids. At the place where the bottom has dropped out from under and left the channel blocked by jagged rocks with no place to run through, he collapsed as if kicked in the stomach, and slithered down into the bottom of the canoe, blubbering like a baby. We just did manage to make our landing above the cascade. With a less skilful man than Bergenham at the stern paddle we would have failed, and that would have meant that we should probably not have stopped for good before we settled into the mud at the bottom of the Arrow Lakes.

“Even after that I could not find it in my heart to dish for good and all so much prime whisky. So I compromised by burying it that night, after we had come through the rapids without further mishap, at the spot I have told you of. That it was the best thing to do under the circumstances I am quite convinced. The mere thought that it was still in the world has cheered me in many a thirsty interval—yes, even out on the Tigris and the Nile, when there was no certainty I would ever come back to get it again.

“And now I’m going to tell you how to find it, for there’s no knowing if I shall ever have a chance to go for it myself. If you bring it out to Revelstoke safely, we’ll split it fifty-fifty, as they say on your side of the line. All I shall want to know is who your other boatmen are going to be. Blackmore is all right, but if any one of the men whom he takes with him is a real drinker, you’d best forget the whole thing. If it’s an ‘all-sober’ crew, I’ll give you a map, marked so plainly that you can’t go wrong. It will be a grand haul, for it was Number One Scotch even when we planted it there, and since then it has been ageing in wood for something like ten years. I suppose you’ll be keen to smuggle your dividend right on down into the ‘The Great American Desert’?” he concluded with a grin.

“Trust me for that,” I replied with a knowing shake of my head. “I didn’t spend six months writing up opium smuggling on the China Coast for nothing.” Then I told him the story of the Eurasian lady who was fat in Amoy and thin in Hongkong, and who finally confessed to having smuggled forty pounds of opium, three times a week for five years, in oiled silk hip- and bust-pads.

“You must have a lot of prime ideas,” said the Captain admiringly. “You ought to make it easy, especially if you cross the line by boat. How would a false bottom ... but perhaps it would be safer to float it down submerged, with an old shingle-bolt for a buoy, and pick it up afterwards.”

“Or inside my pneumatic mattress,” I suggested. “But perhaps it would taste from the rubber.” By midnight we had evolved a plan which could not fail, and which was almost without risk. “The stuff’s as good as in California,” I told myself before I went to sleep—“and enough to pay all the expenses of my trip in case I should care to boot-leg it, which I won’t.”

Captain Armstrong’s mention of the Steinhoff disaster was not the first I had heard of it. The chap with whom I had talked in Kamloops had shown me a photograph of a rude cross that he and his Indian companion had erected over Steinhoff’s grave, and in Revelstoke nearly every one who spoke of the Bend made some reference to the tragic affair. But here in Golden, which had been his home, the spectacularity of his passing seemed to have had an even more profound effect. As with everything else connected with the Big Bend, however, there was a very evident tendency to dramatize, to “play up,” the incident. I heard many different versions of the story, but there was one part, the tragic finale, in which they all were in practical agreement. When his canoe broke loose from its line, they said, and shot down toward the big whirlpool at the foot of the second cataract of Surprise Rapids, Steinhoff, realizing that there was no chance of the light craft surviving the maelstrom, coolly turned round, waved farewell to his companions on the bank, and, folding his arms, went down to his death. Canoe and man were sucked completely out of sight, never to be seen again until the fragments of the one and the battered body of the other were cast up, weeks later, many miles below.

It was an extremely effective story, especially as told by the local member in the B. C. Provincial Assembly, who had real histrionic talent. But somehow I couldn’t quite reconcile the Nirvanic resignation implied by the farewell wave and the folded arms with the never-say-die, cat-with-nine-lives spirit I had come to associate with your true swift-water boatman the world over. I was quite ready to grant that the big sockdolager of a whirlpool below the second pitch of Surprise Rapids was a real all-day and all-night sucker, but the old river hand who gave up to it like the Kentucky coons at the sight of Davy Crockett’s squirrel-gun wasn’t quite convincing. That, and the iterated statement that Steinhoff’s canoe-mate, who was thrown into the water at the same time, won his way to the bank by walking along the bottom beneath the surface, had a decidedly steadying effect on the erratic flights to which my fancy had been launched by Big Bend yarns generally. There had been something strangely familiar in them all, and finally it came to me—Chinese feng-shui generally, and particularly the legends of the sampan men of the portage villages along the Ichang gorges of the Yangtze. The things the giant dragon lurking in the whirlpools at the foot of the rapids would do to the luckless ones he got his back-curving teeth into were just a slightly different way of telling what the good folk of Golden claimed the Big Bend would do to the hapless wights who ventured down its darksome depths.

Now that I thought of it in this clarifying light, there had been “dragon stuff” bobbing up about almost every stretch of rough water I had boated. Mostly it was native superstition, but partly it was small town pride—pride in the things their “Dragon” had done, and would do. Human nature—yes, and river rapids, too—are very much the same the world over, whether on the Yangtze, Brahmaputra or upper Columbia.

That brought the Big Bend into its proper perspective. I realized that it was only water running down hill after all. Possibly it was faster than anything I had boated previously, and certainly—excepting the Yukon perhaps—colder. A great many men had been drowned in trying to run it; but so had men been drowned in duck-ponds. But many men had gone round without disaster, and that would I do, Imshallah. I always liked that pious Arab qualification when speaking of futurities. Later I applied the name—in fancy—to the skiff in which I made the voyage down the lower river.

Yes, undoubtedly the most of the yarns and the warnings were “dragon stuff” pure and simple, but Romance remained. A hundred miles of river with possible treasure lurking in every eddy, and one place where it had to be! I felt as I did the first time I read “Treasure Island,” only more so. For that I had only read, and now I was going to search for myself—yes, and I was going to find, too. It was a golden sunset in more ways than one the evening before I was to leave for the upper river. Barred and spangled and fluted with liquid, lucent gold was the sky above hills that were themselves golden with the tints of early autumn. And in the Northwest there was a flush of rose, old rose that deepened and glowed in lambent crimson where a notch between the Selkirks and Rockies marked the approximate location of historic Boat Encampment. “Great things have happened at Boat Encampment,” I told myself, “and its history is not all written.” Then: “Sixteen paces northwest by compass from the foundation of the west tower of the abandoned cable ferry....” Several times during dinner that evening I had to check myself from humming an ancient song. “What’s that about, ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum’?” queried the mackinaw drummer from Winnipeg who sat next me. “I thought you were from the States. I don’t quite see the point.”

“It’s just as well you don’t,” I replied, and was content to let it go at that.

CHAPTER II
UP HORSE THIEF CREEK

When I started north from Los Angeles toward the end of August Chester, held up for the moment by business, was hoping to be able to shake free so as to arrive on the upper Columbia by the time I had arrangements for the Big Bend voyage complete. We would then go together to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers before embarking on the Bend venture. Luck was not with him, however. The day I was ready to start on up river from Golden I received a wire stating that he was still indefinitely delayed, and that the best that there was now any chance of his doing would be to join me for the Bend. He had ordered his cameraman to Windermere, where full directions for the trip to the glaciers awaited him. He hoped I would see fit to go along and help with the picture, as some “central figure” besides the guides and packers would be needed to give the “story” continuity. I replied that I would be glad to do the best I could, and left for Lake Windermere by the next train. Few movie stars have ever been called to twinkle upon shorter notice.

One is usually told that the source of the Columbia is in Canal Flats, a hundred and fifty miles above Golden, and immediately south of a wonderfully lovely mountain-begirt lake that bears the same name as the river. This is true in a sense, although, strictly speaking, the real source of the river—the one rising at the point the greatest distance from its mouth—would be the longest of the many mountain creeks which converge upon Columbia Lake from the encompassing amphitheatre of the Rockies and Selkirks. This is probably Dutch Creek, which rises in the perpetual snow of the Selkirks and sends down a roaring torrent of grey-green glacier water into the western side of Columbia Lake. Scarcely less distant from the mouth of the Columbia are the heads of Toby and Horse Thief creeks, both of which bring splendid volumes of water to the mother river just below Lake Windermere.

It was the presence of the almost totally unknown Lake of the Hanging Glaciers near the head of the Horse Thief Creek watershed that was responsible for Chester’s determination to carry his preliminary explorations up to the latter source of the Columbia rather than to one slightly more remote above the upper lake. We had assurance that a trail, upon which work had been in progress all summer, would be completed by the middle of September, so that it would then be possible for the first time to take pack-horses and a full moving-picture outfit to one of the rarest scenic gems on the North American continent, the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. To get the first movies of what is claimed to be the only lake in the world outside of the polar regions that has icebergs perpetually floating upon its surface was the principal object of Chester in directing his outfit up Horse Thief Creek. My own object was to reach one of the several points where the Columbia took its rise in the glacial ice, there to do a right-about and start upon my long-dreamed-of journey from snowflake to brine.

It is a dozen years or more since one could travel the hundred miles of the Columbia between Golden and Lake Windermere by steamer. The comparatively sparse population in this rich but thinly settled region was not sufficient to support both rail and river transport, and with the coming of the former the latter could not long be maintained. Two or three rotting hulks on the mud by the old landing at Golden are all that remain of one of the most picturesque steamer services ever run, for those old stern-wheelers used to flounder up the Columbia to Windermere, on through Mud and Columbia Lakes to Canal Flats, through a log-built lock to the Kootenay watershed, and then down the winding canyons and tumbling rapids of that tempestuous stream to Jennings, Montana. Those were the bonanza days of the upper Columbia and Kootenay—such days as they have never seen since nor will ever see again. I was to hear much of them later from Captain Armstrong when we voyaged a stretch of the lower river together.

There is a train between Golden and Windermere only three times a week. It is an amiable, ambling “jerk-water,” whose conductor does everything from dandling babies to unloading lumber. At one station he held over for five minutes to let me run down to a point where I could get the best light on a “reflection” picture in the river, and at another he ran the whole train back to pick up a basket of eggs which had been overlooked in the rush of departure. The Canadian Pacific has the happy faculty of being all things to all men. Its main line has always impressed me as being the best-run road I have ever travelled on in any part of the world, including the United States. One would hardly characterize its little country feeders in the same words, but even these latter, as the instances I have noted will bear out, come about as near to being run for the accommodation of the travelling public as anything one will ever find. There is not the least need of hurrying this Golden-Windermere express. It stops over night at Invermere anyway, before continuing its leisurely progress southward the next morning.

Chester’s cameraman met me with a car at the station, and we rode a mile to the hotel at Invermere, on the heights above the lake. His name was Roos, he said—Len H. Roos of N. Y. C. It was his misfortune to have been born in Canada, he explained, but he had always had a great admiration for Americans, and had taken out his first papers for citizenship. He could manage to get on with Canadians in a pinch, he averred further; but as for Britishers—no “Lime-juicers” for him, with their “G’bly’me’s” and afternoon teas. I saw that this was going to be a difficult companion, and took the occasion to point out that, since he was going to be in Canada for some weeks, it might be just as well to bottle up his rancour against the land of his birth until he was back on the other side of the line and had completed the honour he intended to do Uncle Sam by becoming an American citizen. Maybe I was right, he admitted thoughtfully; but it would be a hard thing for him to do, as he was naturally very frank and outspoken and a great believer in saying just what he thought of people and things.

He was right about being outspoken. He had also rather a glittering line of dogma on the finer things of life. Jazz was the highest form of music (he ought to know, for had he not played both jazz and grand opera when he was head drummer of the Galt, Ontario, town band?); the Mack Sennett bathing comedy was his belle ideal of kinematic art; and the newspapers of William Hearst were the supreme development of journalism. This latter he knew, because he had done camera work for a Hearst syndicate himself. I could manage to make a few degrees of allowance for jazz and the Mack Sennett knockabouts under the circumstances, but the deification of Hearst created an unbridgeable gulf. I foresaw that “director” and “star” were going to have bumpy sledding, but also perceived the possibility of comedy elements which promised to go a long way toward redeeming the enforced partnership from irksomeness, that is, if the latter were not too prolonged. That it could run to six or seven weeks and the passage of near to a thousand miles of the Columbia without turning both “director” and “star” into actual assassins, I would never have believed. Indeed, I am not able to figure out even now how it could have worked out that way. I can’t explain it. I merely state the fact.

Walter Nixon, the packer who was to take us “up Horse Thief,” had been engaged by wire a week previously. His outfit had been ready for several days, and he called at the hotel the evening of my arrival to go over the grub list and make definite plans. As there were only two of us, he reckoned that ten horses and two packers would be sufficient to see us through. The horses would cost us two dollars a day a head, and the packers five dollars apiece. The provisions he would buy himself and endeavour to board us at a dollar and a half apiece a man. This footed up to between thirty-five and forty dollars a day for the outfit, exclusive of the movie end. It seemed a bit stiff offhand, but was really very reasonable considering present costs of doing that kind of a thing and the thoroughly first-class service Nixon gave us from beginning to end.

Nixon himself I was extremely well impressed with. He was a fine up-standing fellow of six feet or more, black-haired, black-eyed, broad-shouldered and a swell of biceps and thigh that even his loose-fitting mackinaws could not entirely conceal. I liked particularly his simple rig-out, in its pleasing contrast to the cross-between-a-movie-cowboy-and-a-Tyrolean-yodeler garb that has come to be so much affected by the so-called guides at Banff and Lake Louise. Like the best of his kind, Nixon was quiet-spoken and leisurely of movement, but with a suggestion of powerful reserves of both vocabulary and activity. I felt sure at first sight that he was the sort of a man who could be depended upon to see a thing through whatever the difficulties, and I never had reason to change my opinion on that score.

It was arranged that night that Nixon should get away with the pack outfit by noon of the next day, and make an easy stage of it to the Starbird Ranch, at the end of the wagon-road, nineteen miles out from Invermere. The following morning Roos and I would come out by motor and be ready to start by the time the horses were up and the packs on. That gave us an extra day for exploring Windermere and the more imminent sources of the Columbia.

Roos’ instructions from Chester called for a “Windermere Picture,” in which should be shown the scenic, camping, fishing and hunting life of that region. The scenic and camping shots he had already made; the fish and the game had eluded him. I arrived just in time to take part in the final scurry to complete the picture. The fish to be shown were trout, and the game mountain sheep and goat, or at least that was the way Roos planned it at breakfast time. When inquiry revealed that it would take a day to reach a trout stream, and three days to penetrate to the haunts of the sheep and goats, he modified the campaign somewhat to conform with the limited time at our disposal. Close at hand in the lake there was a fish called the squaw-fish, which, floundering at the end of a line, would photograph almost like a trout, or so the hotel proprietor thought. And the best of it was that any one could catch them. Indeed, at times one had to manœuvre to keep them from taking the bait that was meant for the more gamy and edible, but also far more elusive, ling or fresh-water cod. As for the game picture, said Roos, he would save time by having a deer rounded up and driven into the lake, where he would pursue it with a motor boat and shoot the required hunting pictures. He would like to have me dress like a tourist and do the hunting and fishing. That would break me in to adopting an easy and pleasing manner before the camera, so that a minimum of film would be spoiled when he got down to our regular work on the Hanging Glacier picture. It wouldn’t take long. That was the advantage of “news” training for a cameraman. You could do things in a rush when you had to.

Mr. Clelland, secretary of the Windermere Company, courteously found us tackle and drove us down to the outlet of the lake to catch the squaw-fish. Three hours later he drove us back to the hotel for lunch without one single fragment of our succulent salt-pork bait having been nuzzled on its hook. I lost my “easy and pleasing manner” at the end of the first hour, and Roos—who was under rather greater tension in standing by to crank—somewhat sooner. He said many unkind things about fish in general and squaw-fish in particular before we gave up the fight at noon, and I didn’t improve matters at all by suggesting that I cut out the picture on a salmon can label, fasten it to my hook, and have him shoot me catching that. There was no sense whatever in the idea, he said. You had to have studio lighting to get away with that sort of thing. He couldn’t see how I could advance such a thing seriously. As I had some doubts on that score myself, I didn’t start an argument.

In the afternoon no better success attended our effort to make the hunting picture,—this because no one seemed to know where a deer could be rounded up and driven into the lake. Again I discovered a way to save this situation. On the veranda of the country club there was a fine mounted specimen of Ovis Canadensis, the Canadian mountain sheep. By proper ballasting, I pointed out to Roos, this fine animal could be made to submerge to a natural swimming depth—say with the head and shoulders just above the water. Then a little Evinrude engine could be clamped to its hind quarters and set going. Forthwith the whole thing must start off ploughing across the lake just like a live mountain sheep. By a little manœuvring it ought to be possible to shoot at an angle that would interpose the body of the sheep between the eye and the pushing engine. If this proved to be impossible, perhaps it could be explained in a sub-title that the extraneous machinery was a fragment of mowing-machine or something of the kind that the sheep had collided with and picked up in his flight. Roos, while admitting that this showed a considerable advance over my salmon-label suggestion of the morning, said that there were a number of limiting considerations which would render it impracticable. I forget what all of these were, but one of them was that our quarry couldn’t be made to roll his eyes and register “consternation” and “mute reproach” in the close-ups. I began to see that there was a lot more to the movie game than I had ever dreamed. But what a stimulator of the imagination it was!

As there was nothing more to be done about the hunting and fishing shots for the present, we turned our attention to final preparations for what we had begun to call the “Hanging Glacier Picture.” Roos said it would be necessary to sketch a rough sort of scenario in advance—nothing elaborate like “Broken Blossoms” or “The Perils of Pauline” (we hadn’t the company for that kind of thing), but just the thread of a story to make the “continuity” ripple continuously. It would be enough, he thought, if I would enact the rôle of a gentleman-sportsman and allow the guides and packers to be just their normal selves. Then with these circulating in the foreground, he would film the various scenic features of the trip as they unrolled. All the lot of us would have to do would be to act naturally and stand or lounge gracefully in those parts of the picture where the presence of human beings would be best calculated to balance effectively and harmoniously the composition. I agreed cheerfully to the sportsman part of my rôle, but demurred as to “gentleman.” I might manage it for a scene, but for a sustained effort it was out of the question. A compromise along this line was finally effected. I engaged to act as much like a gentleman as I could for the opening shot, after which I was to be allowed to lapse into the seeming of a simple sportsman who loved scenery-gazing more than the pursuit and slaying of goat, sheep and bear. Roos observed shrewdly that it would be better to have the sportsman be more interested in scenery than game because, judging from our experience at Windermere, we would find more of the former than the latter. He was also encouragingly sympathetic about my transient appearance as a gentleman. “I only want about fifty feet of that,” he said as he gave me a propitiating pat on the back; “besides, it’s all a matter of clothes anyhow.”

Before we turned in that night it transpired that Chester’s hope of being the first to show moving pictures of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers to the world was probably doomed to disappointment, or, at the best, that this honour would have to be shared with an equally ambitious rival. Byron Harmon, of Banff, formerly official photographer for the Canadian Pacific, arrived at Invermere and announced that he was planning to go “up Horse Thief” and endeavour to film a number of the remarkable scenic features which he had hitherto tried to picture in vain. His schedule was temporarily upset by the fact that we had already engaged the best packtrain and guides available. Seasoned mountaineer that he was, however, this was of small moment. A few hours’ scurrying about had provided him with a light but ample outfit, consisting of four horses and two men, with which he planned to get away in the morning. He was not in the least perturbed by the fact that Roos had practically a day’s start of him. “There’s room for a hundred cameramen to work up there,” he told me genially; “and the more the world is shown of the wonders of the Rockies and the Selkirks, the more it will want to see. It will be good to have your company, and each of us ought to be of help to the other.”

I had some difficulty in bringing Roos to a similarly philosophical viewpoint. His “Hearst” training impelled him to brook no rivalry, to beat out the other man by any means that offered. He had the better packtrain, he said, to say nothing of a day’s start. Also, he had the only dynamite and caps available that side of Golden, so that he would have the inside track for starting avalanches and creating artificial icebergs in the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. I would like to think that it was my argument that, since it was not a “news” picture he was after, the man who took the most time to his work would be the one to get the best results, was what brought him round finally. I greatly fear, however, it was the knowledge that the generous Harmon had a number of flares that did the trick. He had neglected to provide flares himself, and without them work in the ice caves—second only in interest to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers itself—would be greatly circumscribed. At any rate, he finally agreed to a truce, and we took Harmon out to the end of the road in our car the following morning. Of the latter’s really notable work in picturing the mountains of western Canada I shall write later.

The horses were waiting, saddled and packed, as we drove up to the rendezvous. The packer was a powerfully built fellow, with his straight black hair and high cheek bones betokening a considerable mixture of Indian blood. His name was Buckman—Jim Buckman. He was the village blacksmith of Athalmere, Nixon explained. He was making plenty of money in his trade, but was willing to come along at a packer’s wage for the sake of the experience as an actor. The lure of the movies was also responsible for the presence of Nixon’s fourteen-year-old son, Gordon, who had threatened to run away from home if he wasn’t allowed to come along. He proved a useful acquisition—more than sufficiently so, it seemed to me, to compensate for what he did to the jam and honey.

Roos called us around him and gave instructions for the “business” of the opening shot. Nixon and Jim were to be “picked up” taking the last of the slack out of a “diamond hitch,” Gordon frolicking in the background with his dog. When the car drove up, Nixon was to take my saddle horse by the bridle, walk up and shake hands with me. Then, to make the transition from Civilization to the Primitive (movie people never miss a chance to use that word) with a click, I was to step directly from the car into my stirrups. “Get me!” admonished Roos; “straight from the running board to the saddle. Don’t touch the ground at all. Make it snappy, all of you. I don’t want any of you to grow into ‘foot-lice.’”

My saddle horse turned out to be a stockily-built grey of over 1200 pounds. He looked hard as nails and to have no end of endurance. But his shifty eye and back-laid ears indicated temperamentality, so that Nixon’s warning that he “warn’t exactly a lady’s hawss” was a bit superfluous. “When you told me you tipped the beam at two-forty,” he said, “I know’d ‘Grayback’ was the only hawss that’d carry you up these trails. So I brung him in, and stuffed him up with oats, and here he is. He may dance a leetle on his toes jest now, but he’ll gentle down a lot by the end of a week.”

Whether “Grayback” mastered all of the “business” of that shot or not is probably open to doubt, but that he took the “Make it snappy!” part to heart there was no question. He came alongside like a lamb, but the instant I started to make my transition from “Civilization to the Primitive with a click” he started climbing into the car. The only click I heard was when my ear hit the ground. Roos couldn’t have spoiled any more film than I did cuticle, but, being a “Director,” he made a good deal more noise about it. After barking his hocks on the fender, “Grayback” refused to be enticed within mounting distance of the car again, so finally, with a comparatively un-clicky transition from Civilization to the Primitive, I got aboard by the usual route from the ground.

The next shot was a quarter of a mile farther up the trail. Here Roos found a natural sylvan frame through which to shoot the whole outfit as it came stringing along. Unfortunately, the “Director” failed to tell the actors not to look at the camera—that, once and for all, the clicking box must be reckoned as a thing non-existent—and it all had to be done over again. The next time it was better, but the actors still had a wooden expression on their faces. They didn’t look at the camera, but the expression on their faces showed that they were conscious of it. Roos then instructed me to talk to my companions, or sing, or do anything that would take their minds off the camera and make them appear relaxed and natural. That time we did it famously. As each, in turn, cantered by the sylvan bower with its clicking camera he was up to his neck “doing something.” Nixon was declaiming Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech as he had learned it from his phonograph, Gordon was calling his dog, Jim was larruping a straggling pinto and cursing it in fluent local idiom, and I was singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers!” We never had any trouble about “being natural” after that; but I hope no lip reader ever sees the pictures.

After picking up Roos and his camera we made our real start. One pack-horse was reserved for the camera and tripod, and to prevent him from ranging from the trail and bumping the valuable apparatus against trees or rocks, his halter was tied to the tail of Nixon’s saddle animal. Except that the latter’s spinal column must have suffered some pretty severe snakings when the camera-carrier went through corduroy bridges or lost his footings in fords, the arrangement worked most successfully. The delicate instrument was not in the least injured in all of the many miles it was jogged over some of the roughest trails I have ever travelled.

The sunshine by which the last of the trail shots was made proved the parting glimmer of what had been a month or more of practically unbroken fair weather. Indeed, the weather had been rather too fine, for, toward the end of the summer, lack of rain in western Canada invariably means forest fires. As these had been raging intermittently for several weeks all over British Columbia, the air had become thick with smoke, and at many places it was impossible to see for more than a mile or two in any direction. Both Roos and Harmon had been greatly hampered in their work about Banff and Lake Louise by the smoke, and both were, therefore, exceedingly anxious for early and copious rains to clear the air. Otherwise, they said, there was no hope of a picture of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers that would be worth the film it was printed on. They must have rain. Their prayer was about to be answered, in full measure, pressed down and running over—and then some.

We had been encountering contending currents of hot and cold air all the way up the wagon-road from Invermere and the lower valley. Now, as we entered the mountains, these became more pronounced, taking the form of scurrying “dust-devils” that attacked from flank and van without method or premonitory signal. The narrowing gorge ahead was packed solid with a sullen phalanx of augmenting clouds, sombre-hued and sagging with moisture, and frequently illumined with forked lightning flashes discharged from their murky depths. Nixon, anxious to make camp before the storm broke, jogged the horses steadily all through the darkening afternoon. It was a point called “Sixteen-mile” he was driving for, the first place we would reach where there was room for the tent and feed for the horses. We were still four miles short of our destination when the first spatter of ranging drops opened up, and from there on the batteries of the storm concentrated on us all the way.

We made camp in a rain driving solidly enough to deflect the stroke of an axe. I shall not enlarge upon the acute discomfort of it. Those who have done it will understand; those who have not would never be able to. It was especially trying on the first day out, before the outfit had become shaken down and one had learned where to look for things. Nixon’s consummate woodcraftsmanship was put to a severe test, but emerged triumphant. So, too, Jim, who proved himself as impervious to rain as to ill-temper. The fir boughs for the tent floor came in dripping, of course, but there were enough dry tarpaulins and blankets to blot up the heaviest of the moisture, and the glowing little sheet-iron stove licked up the rest. A piping hot dinner drove out the last of the chill, and we spent a snug, comfy evening listening to Nixon yarn about his mountaineering exploits and of the queer birds from New York and London whom he had nursed through strange and various intervals of moose and sheep-hunting in the Kootenays and Rockies. We slept dry but rather cold, especially Roos, who ended up by curling round the stove and stoking between shivers. Nixon and Jim drew generously on their own blanket rolls to help the both of us confine our ebbing animal heat, and yet appeared to find not the least difficulty in sleeping comfortably under half the weight of cover that left us shaking. It was all a matter of what one was used to, of course, and in a few days we began to harden.

It was September tenth that we had started from Invermere, hoping at the time to be able to accomplish what we had set out to do in from four to six days. The rain which had come to break the long dry spell put a very different face on things, however. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth we were held in our first camp by an almost continuous downpour, which turned the mountain streams into torrents and raised Horse Thief till it lapped over the rim of the flat upon which our tent was pitched. The night of the thirteenth, with a sharp drop of the temperature, the rain turned to snow, and we crawled out on the fourteenth to find the valley under a light blanket of white. Then the clouds broke away and the sunshine and shadows began playing tag over the scarps and buttresses of the encompassing amphitheatre of mountains. For the first time there was a chance for a glimpse of the new world into which we had come. The transition from the cultivation and the gentle wooded slopes of Windermere was startling. Under the mask of the storm clouds we had penetrated from a smooth, rounded, pleasant country to one that was cliffy and pinnacled and bare—a country that was all on end, a land whose bones showed through. A towering Matterhorn reared its head six or eight thousand feet above us, and so near that slabs of rock cracked away from its scarred summit were lying just across the trail from the tent. The peaks walling in Horse Thief to the north were not so high but no less precipitous and barren, while to the west a jumble of splintered pinnacles whose bases barred the way were still lost in the witch-dance of the clouds. A tourist folder would have called it a “Land of Titans,” but Jim, leaning on his axe after nicking off a fresh back-log for the camp fire, merely opined it was “some skookum goat country. But not a patch,” he added, “to what we’ll be hittin’ to-night if we get them geesly hawsses rounded up in time fer a start ’fore noon.”

It appeared that the horses, with their grazing spoiled by the snow, had become restless, broken through the barrier Nixon had erected at a bridge just below camp, and started on the back trail for Invermere. As their tracks showed that they had broken into a trot immediately beyond the bridge, it looked like a long stern-chase, and Nixon did not reckon on being able to hit the trail for several hours. Roos grasped the occasion to make a couple of “camp life” shots his fertile brain had conceived the idea of during the long storm-bound days of enforced inaction. In one of these the “sportsman” was to go to bed in silhouette by candlelight. Ostensibly this was to be the shadow of a man crawling into his blankets inside of the tent, and taken from the outside. In reality, however, Roos set up his camera inside of the tent and shot the antics of the shadow the sunlight threw on the canvas when I went through the motions of turning in close against the outside of the wall. This went off smartly and snappily; but I would have given much for a translation of the voluble comments of a passing Indian who pulled up to watch the agile action of the retiring “sportsman.”

It was while Roos was rehearsing me for this shot that Gordon must have heard him iterating his invariable injunction that I should not be a “foot-hog,” meaning, I shall hardly need to explain, that I should be quick in my movements so as not to force him to use an undue footage of film. A little later I overheard the boy asking Jim what a “foot-hog” was. “I don’t quite kumtrux myself,” the sturdy blacksmith-packer replied, scratching his head. “It sounds as if it might be suthin like pig’s feet, but they want actin’ as if they wuz ready to eat anythin’, ’less it was each other.” Now that I think of it, I can see how the clash of the artistic temperaments of “Director” and “Star” over just about every one of the shots they made might have given Jim that impression.

THE “TURNING-IN” SCENE SHOT IN SILHOUETTE (above)
“REVERSE” OF THE “GOING-TO-BED” SHOT (below)

ON THE HORSE THIEF TRAIL (left)
A DEAD-FALL ON THE TRAIL (right)

The other shot we made that morning was one which Roos had labelled as “Berry Picking and Eating” in his tentative scenario. The “sportsman” was to fare forth, gather a bowlful of raspberries, bring them back to camp, put sugar and condensed milk on them, and finally eat them, all before the camera. I objected to appearing in this for two reasons: for one, because berry-picking was not a recognized out-door sport, and, for another, because I didn’t like raspberries. Roos admitted that berry-picking was not a sport, but insisted he had to have the scene to preserve his continuity. “Gathering and eating these products of Nature,” he explained, “shows how far the gentleman you were in the first scene has descended toward the Primitive. You will be getting more and more Primitive right along, but we must register each step on the film, see?” As for my distaste for raspberries, Roos was quite willing that, after displaying the berries heaped in the bowl in a close-up, I should do the real eating with strawberry jam. It was that last which overcame my spell of “temperament.” Both Roos and Gordon already had me several pots down in the matter of jam consumption, and I was glad of the chance to climb back a notch.

We found raspberry bushes by the acre but, thanks to the late storm, almost no berries. This didn’t matter seriously in the picking shot, for which I managed to convey a very realistic effect in pantomime, but for the heaped-high close-up of the bowl it was another matter. One scant handful was the best that the four of us, foraging for half an hour, could bring in. But I soon figured a way to make these do. Opening a couple of tins of strawberry jam into the bowl, I rounded over smoothly the bright succulent mass and then made a close-set raspberry mosaic of one side of it. That did famously for the close-up. As I settled back for the berry-eating shot Roos cut in sharply with his usual: “Snappy now! Don’t be a foot-hog!” Gordon, who had been digging his toe into the mud for some minutes, evidently under considerable mental stress, lifted his head at the word. “Hadn’t you better say ‘jam-hog’, Mr. Roos?” he queried plaintively.

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t be any use,” was the dejected reply. Roos was right. At the word “Action!” I dug in with my spoon on the unpaved side of the bowl of jam, and several turns before the crank ceased revolving there was nothing left but a few daubed raspberries and several broad red smears radiating from my mouth. Roos tossed the two empty jam tins into the murky torrent of Horse Thief Creek and watched them bob away down stream. “You’re getting too darn primitive,” he said peevishly.

It was nearly eleven o’clock before Nixon came with the horses; but we had camp struck and the packs made, so there was little delay in taking the trail. The bottom of the valley continued fairly open for a few miles, with the swollen stream serpentining across it, turned hither and thither by huge logjams and fortress-like rock islands. Where the North Fork came tumbling into the main creek in a fine run of cascades there was a flat several acres in extent and good camping ground. Immediately above the valley narrowed to a steep-sided canyon, and continued so all the way up to the snow and glacier-line. The trail from now on was badly torn and washed and frequently blocked with dead-falls. Or rather it had been so blocked up to a day or two previously. Now I understood the reason for Nixon’s complaisance when Harmon’s outfit, travelling in the rain, had passed our camp a couple of days before. “Don’t worry, sonny,” he had said in comforting the impetuous Roos; “we won’t lose any time, and we will save a lot of chopping.” And so it had worked out. Harmon’s men had cut the dead-falls out of the whole twelve miles of trail between North Fork and the Dragon-Tail Glacier.

Even so it was a beastly stretch of trail. The stream, completely filling the bottom of the gorge, kept the path always far up the side of the mountain. There were few dangerous precipices, but one had always to be on the lookout to keep his head from banging on dead-falls just high enough to clear a pack, and which, therefore, no one would take the trouble to cut away. The close-growing shrubbery was dripping with moisture, and even riding second to Nixon, who must have got all the worst of it, I found myself drenched at the end of the first half mile. Riding through wet underbrush can wet a man as no rain ever could. No waterproof ever devised offers the least protection against it; nothing less than a safe deposit vault on wheels could do so.

Streams, swollen by the now rapidly melting snow, came tumbling down—half cataract, half cascade—all along the way. At the worst crossings these had been roughly bridged, as little footing for men or horses was afforded by the clean-swept rock. Only one crossing of the main stream was necessary. It was a good natural ford at low water, but quite out of the question to attempt at high. We found it about medium—a little more than belly deep and something like an eight-mile current. With a foot more water it would have commenced to get troublesome; with another two feet, really dangerous. That prospect, with the rapidly rising water, was reserved for our return trip.

Such a road was, of course, wonderfully picturesque and colourful, and Roos, with a quick eye for an effective composition, made the most of his opportunities for “trail shots.” A picture of this kind, simple enough to look at on the screen, often took half an hour or more to make. The finding of a picturesque spot on the trail was only the beginning. This was useless unless the light was right and a satisfactory place to set up the tripod was available. When this latter was found, more often than not a tree or two had to be felled to open up the view to the trail. Then—as the party photographed had to be complete each time, and with nothing to suggest the presence of the movie camera or its operator—Roos’ saddle horse and the animal carrying his outfit had to be shuttled along out of line and tied up where they would not get in the picture. This was always a ticklish operation on the narrow trails, and once or twice the sheer impossibility of segregating the superfluous animals caused Roos to forego extremely effective shots.

The mountains became higher and higher, and steeper and steeper, the farther we fared. And the greater the inclines, the more and more precarious was the hold of the winter’s snow upon the mountainsides. At last we climbed into a veritable zone of avalanches—a stretch where, for a number of miles, the deep-gouged troughs of the snow-slides followed each other like the gullies in a rain-washed mudbank. Slide-time was in the Spring, of course, so the only trouble we encountered was in passing over the terribly violated mountainsides. If the trail came to the track of an avalanche far up on the mountainside, it meant descending a cut-bank to the scoured bedrock, click-clacking along over this with the shod hooves of the horses striking sparks at every step for a hundred yards or more, and then climbing out again. If the path of the destroyer was encountered low down, near the river, the way onward led over a fifty-feet-high pile of upended trees, boulders and sand. In nearly every instance one could see where the slides had dammed the stream a hundred feet high or more, and here and there were visible swaths cut in the timber of the further side, where the buffer of the opposite mountain had served to check the onrush.

The going for the horses was hard at all times, but worst perhaps where the dam of a slide had checked the natural drainage and formed a bottomless bog too large for the trail to avoid. Here the hard-blown animals floundered belly deep in mud and rotten wood, as did also their riders when they had to slide from the saddles to give their mounts a chance to reach a solid footing. The polished granite of the runways of the slide was almost as bad, for here the horses were repeatedly down from slipping. My air-treading, toe-dancing “Grayback” of the morning was gone in the back and legs long before we reached the end. My weight and the pace (Nixon was driving hard to reach a camping place before a fresh gathering of storm clouds were ready to break) had proved too much for him. The fighting light was gone from his eye, his head was between his legs, and his breath was expelled with a force that seemed to be scouring the lining from his bleeding nostrils. Dropping back to slacken his girths and breathe him a moment before leading him up the last long run of zigzags, I heard the sobbing diminuendo of the packtrain die out in the sombre depths above. It was like the shudder of sounds that rise through a blow-hole where the sea waves are pounding hard on the mouth of a subterranean grotto.

I had developed a warm and inclusive sympathy for “Grayback” before I reached the crest of that final shoulder of mountain we had to surmount, but lost most of it on the slide back to the valley when, in lieu of anything else to hand as he found himself slipping, he started to canter up my spine. I found Nixon and Jim throwing off packs on a narrow strip of moss-covered bottom between the drop-curtain of the fir-covered mountainside and the bank of the creek. It was practically the only place for a camp anywhere in the closely-walled valley. Slide-wreckage claimed all the rest of it. An upward trickle of lilac smoke a half mile above told where Harmon’s outfit had effected some sort of lodgment, but it was on a geesly slither of wet side-hill, Nixon said, and badly exposed to the wind that was always sucking down from the glacier.

The moss underfoot was saturated with water, but with an hour of daylight and pines close at hand this was a matter of small moment. We were well under cover by the time the snuffer of the darkness clapped sharply down, and with a good day’s supply of wood for stove and camp-fire piled up outside the tent. Not having stopped for lunch on the trail, we were all rather “peckish” (to use Nixon’s expression) by the time dinner was ready. After that there was nothing much to bother about. Nixon told goat hunting stories all evening, putting a fresh edge on his axe the while with a little round pocket whetstone. A Canadian guide is as cranky about his private and personal axe as a Chicago clothing drummer is about his razors. So it was only to be expected that Nixon took it a bit hard when Roos had employed his keenly whetted implement to crack open a hunk of quartz with. That was the reason, doubtless, why most of his stories had to do with the fool escapades of various of the geesly (that was Nixon’s favourite term of contempt, and a very expressive one it was) tenderfeet he had guided. But one of his yarns (and I think a true one) was of a time that he was caught by a storm at ten thousand feet in the Rockies and had to spend the night on the rocks a mile above the timber-line. Lightly dressed and without a blanket, the only protection he had from a temperature many degrees below freezing was from the carcasses of the two freshly-shot goats that had lured him there. Splitting these down the middle with his hunting knife, he had covered himself with them, entrails and all, in the hope that the remaining animal heat would keep him alive till daylight. Man and goat were frozen to one stiff mass by morning, but the man had still enough vitality to crack himself loose and descend to his camp. The exposure and hardship some of these northwest mountaineers have survived is almost beyond belief.

I went to sleep with the sizzle of snowflakes on the dying embers of the camp-fire in my ears, and awoke to find the tent roof sagging down on my ear under the weight of a heavy night’s fall. The storm was over for the moment, but the clouds were still lurking ominously above the glacier, and there was little light for pictures. Harmon, crossing the several channels of the creek on fallen logs, came over later in the day. He had been storm-bound ever since his arrival, he said, and had done nothing at all in taking either stills or movies yet. But fires and smoke were finished for the year now, he added philosophically, and it was his intention to remain until he got what he was after. Before he left he told me something of his work. “Stills,” it appeared, were the main thing with him; his movie work was carried on merely as a side-line to pay the expenses of trips he could not otherwise afford. He had been photographing in the Selkirks and Rockies for a dozen years, and he would not be content to rest until the sets of negatives—as nearly perfect as they could be made—of every notable peak and valley of western Canada. Then he was going to hold a grand exhibition of mountain photographs at Banff and retire. The Lake of the Hanging Glaciers was one of the very few great scenic features he had never photographed, and he only hoped he would be able to do it justice. The fine reverence of Harmon’s attitude toward the mountains that he loved was completely beyond Roos’ ken. “I never worries about not doing ’em justice—not for a minute. What does worry me is whether or not these cracked up lakes and glaciers are going to turn out worth my coming in to do justice to. Get me?” “Yes, I think so,” replied the veteran with a very patient smile.

CHAPTER III
AT THE GLACIER

Snow flurries kept us close to camp all that day. The next one, the sixteenth, was better, though still quite hopeless for movie work. After lunch we set out on foot for the big glacier, a mile above, from which the creek took its life. The clouds still hung too low to allow anything of the mountains to be seen, but one had the feeling of moving in a long narrow tunnel through which a cold jet of air was constantly being forced. A few hundred yards above our camp was a frightful zone of riven trees mixed with gravel and boulders. It was one of the strangest, one of the savagest spots I ever saw. It was the battle ground of two rival avalanches, Nixon explained, two great slides which, with the impetus of six or eight thousand feet of run driving uncounted millions of tons of snow and earth, met there every spring in primeval combat. No man had ever seen the fantastic onslaught (for no man could reach that point in the springtime), but it was certain that the remains of it made a mighty dam all the way across the valley. Then the creek would be backed up half way to the glacier, when it would accumulate enough power to sweep the obstruction away and scatter it down to the Columbia.

Straight down the respective paths of the rival slides, and almost exactly opposite each other, tumbled two splendid cascades. The hovering storm clouds cut off further view of them a few hundred feet above the valley, but Nixon said that they came plunging like that for thousands of feet, from far up into the belt of perpetual snow. The one to the east (which at the moment seemed to be leaping straight out of the heart of a sinister slaty-purple patch of cumulonimbus) drained the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers; that to the west a desolate rock and ice-walled valley which was rimmed by some of the highest summits in the Selkirks. Our road to the lake would be wet with the spray of the former for a good part of the distance.

We were scrambling through a land of snow-slides all the way to the glacier. For the first half mile patches of stunted fir survived here and there, due to being located in the lee of some cliff or other rocky outcrop which served to deflect the springtime onslaughts from above; then all vegetation ceased and nothing but snow-churned and ice-ground rock fragments remained. All along the last quarter of a mile the successive stages of the glacier’s retreat were marked by great heaps of pulverized rock, like the tailings at the mouth of a mine. Only the face of the glacier and the yawning ice caves were visible under the cloud-pall. The queerly humped uplift of the “dragon” moraine could be dimly guessed in the shifting mists that whirled and eddied in the icy draughts from the caves.

Our principal object in going up to the grottoes on so inclement a day was to experiment with our dynamite on the ice, with a view to turning our knowledge to practical use in making artificial icebergs for the movies in the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Selecting what looked like a favourable spot at the base of what seemed a “fracturable” pinnacle of grey-green ice, we dug a three-feet-deep hole with a long-handled chisel, pushed in two sticks of sixty per cent. dynamite, tamped it hard with snow after attaching a lengthy fuse, touched a match to the latter and retired to a safe distance. The result, to put it in Roos’ latest imported slang, was an “oil can,” which connotes about the same thing as fizzle, I took it. There’s a deal of kick in two sticks of “sixty per” set off in rock, but here it was simply an exuberant “whouf” after the manner of a blowing porpoise. A jet of soft snow and ice shot up some distance, but the pinnacle never trembled. And the hole opened up was smooth-sided and clean, as if melted out with hot water. Not the beginning of a crack radiated from it. Jim opined that a slower burning powder might crack ice, but there was certainly no hope of “sixty per” doing the trick. It was evident that we would have to find some other way of making artificial icebergs. We did. We made them of rock. But I won’t anticipate.

It snowed again in the night, snowed itself out for a while. The following morning it was warm and brilliantly clear, and for the first time there was a chance to see what sort of a place it was to which we had entered. For a space the height and abruptness of the encompassing walls seemed almost appalling; it was more like looking up out of an immeasurably vast crater than from a valley. All around there were thousands of feet of sheer rocky cliff upon which no snow could effect a lodgment; and above these more thousands of feet solid with the glittering green of glacial ice and the polished marble of eternal snow. The jagged patch of sky was a vivid imperial blue, bright and solid-looking like a fragment of rich old porcelain. The morning sun, cutting through the sharp notches between the southeastern peaks, was dappling the snow fields of the western walls in gay splashes of flaming rose and saffron, interspersed with mottled shadows of indigo and deep purple. Reflected back to the still shadowed slopes of the eastern walls, these bolder colours became a blended iridescence of amethyst, lemon and pale misty lavender. The creek flowed steely cold, with fluffs of grey-wool on the riffles. The tree patches were black, dead funereal black, throwing back no ray of light from their down-swooping branches. The air was so clear that it seemed almost to have assumed a palpability of its own. One imagined things floating in it; even that it might tinkle to the snip of a finger nail, like a crystal rim.

In movies as in hay-making, one has to step lively while the sun shines. This was the first good shooting light we had had, and no time was lost in taking advantage of it. Long before the sun had reached the bottom of the valley we were picking our way up toward the foot of the glacier, this time on horseback. Early as we had started, the enterprising Harmon had been still earlier. He was finishing his shots of the face of the glacier and the mouth of the ice caves as we came up. He would now leave the field clear for Roos for an hour, he said, while he climbed to the cliffs above the glacier to make a goat-hunting picture. That finished, he would return and, by the light of his flares both parties could shoot the interior of the ice caves. Before starting on his long climb, Harmon briefly outlined the scenario of his “goat” picture, part of which had already been shot. Two prospectors—impersonated by his guide and packer—having been in the mountains for many weeks without a change of diet, had become terribly sick of bacon. Finally, when one of them had disgustedly thrown his plate of it on the ground, even the camp dog, after a contemptuous sniff, had turned his back. He had had no trouble in getting the men to register “disgust,” Harmon explained, but that “contemptuous sniff” business with the dog was more difficult. After their voracious Airedale pup had wolfed three plates of bacon without paying the least heed to the director’s attempts to frighten him off at the psychological moment, they had tried thin strips of birch-bark, trimmed to represent curling rashers. Even these the hungry canine had persisted in licking, probably because they came from a greasy plate. Finally Harmon hit upon the expedient of anointing the birch-bark rashers with some of the iodine carried as an antiseptic in the event of cuts and scratches. “If the pup ate it, of course it would die,” he explained; “but that would be no more than he deserved in such a case.” But the plan worked perfectly. After his first eager lick, the outraged canine had “sniffed contemptuously” at the pungent fumes of the iodine, and then backed out of the picture with a wolfish snarl on his lifted lip.

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
LOOKING TOWARD THE ENTRANCE OF THE ICE CAVE

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
WHERE THE HANGING GLACIER IS ABOUT TO FALL

Then the packer registered “fresh meat hunger” (“cut-in” of a butcher shop to be made later), immediately after which the guide pointed to the cliffs above the camp where some wild goats were frisking. By the aid of his long-distance lens, Harmon had shot the goats as they would appear through the binoculars the guide and packers excitedly passed back and forth between them. And now they were going forth to shoot the goats. Or rather they were going forth to “shoot” the goats, for these had already been shot with a rifle. In order to avoid loss of time in packing his cumbersome apparatus about over the cliffs, Harmon had sent out Conrad, his Swiss guide, the previous afternoon, with orders to shoot a goat—as fine a specimen as possible—and leave it in some picturesque spot where a re-shooting could be “shot” with the camera when the clouds lifted. The keen-eyed Tyrolese had experienced little difficulty in bringing down two goats. One of these—a huge “Billy”—he had left at the brink of a cliff a couple of thousand feet above the big glacier, and the other—a half-grown kid—he had brought into camp to cut up for the “meat-guzzling” shots with which guide, packer and canine were to indulge in as a finale. It was a cleverly conceived “nature” picture, one with a distinct “educational” value; or at least it was such when viewed from “behind the camera.” Roos was plainly jealous over it, but, as he had no goats of his own, and as Harmon’s goat was hardly likely to be “borrowable” after bouncing on rock pinnacles for a thousand feet, there was nothing to do about it. He would have to make up by putting it over Harmon on his “glacier stuff,” he said philosophically. And he did; though it was only through the virtuosity of his chief actor.

Harmon had confined his glacier shots to one of his party riding up over the rocks, and another of it grouped at the entrance of the largest cave and looking in. Being an old mountaineer, he was disinclined to take any unnecessary chances in stirring up a racket under hanging ice. Roos was new to the mountains, so didn’t labour under any such handicap. His idea was to bring the whole outfit right up the middle of the stream and on into the cave. The approach and the entrance into the mouth of the cave were to be shot first from the outside, and then, in silhouette, from the inside.

Nixon, pointing out that the roof of the cave had settled two or three feet since we were there yesterday and that the heat seemed to be honeycombing all the lower end of the glacier pretty badly, said that he didn’t like the idea of taking horses inside, but would do so if it would make a better picture that way. He was quite willing to take chances if there was any reason for it. But what he did object to was trying to take the horses up the middle of the stream over big boulders when it would be perfectly plain to any one who saw the picture that there was comparatively smooth going on either side. “You can easy break a hawss’ leg in one of them geesly holes,” he complained; “but the loss of a hawss isn’t a patch to what I’d feel to have some guy that I’ve worked with see the pictur’ and think I picked that sluiceway as the best way up.”

Roos replied with a rush of technical argument in which there was much about “continuity” and “back-lighting,” and something about using the “trick crank so that the action can be speeded up when it’s run.” Not knowing the answer to any of this, Nixon finally shrugged his shoulders helplessly and signalled for Jim to bring up the horses. There was no need of a “trick crank” to speed up the action in the stream, for that glacial torrent, a veritable cascade, had carried away everything in its course save boulders four or five feet high. Nixon, in a bit of a temper, hit the ditch as though he were riding a steeplechase. So did Jim and Gordon. All three of them floundered through without mishap. “Grayback” tried to climb up on the tip of a submerged boulder, slipped with all four feet at once and went over sidewise. I kicked out my stirrups, but hit the water head first, getting considerably rolled and more than considerably wet. To Roos’ great indignation, this occurred just outside the picture, but he had the delicacy not to ask me to do it over again.

Taking the horses inside the cave was a distinctly ticklish performance, though there could be no question of its effectiveness as a picture. Roos set up a hundred feet in from the fifty-feet-wide, twenty-feet-high mouth and directed us to ride forward until a broad splashing jet of water from the roof blocked our way, and then swing round and beat it out. “Beat it out snappy!” he repeated. “Get me?” “Yep, I got you,” muttered Nixon; “you’re in luck if nothin’ else does.”

The ice that arched above the entrance looked to me like the salt-eaten packing round an ice-cream can as we pushed up and under it. The horses could hardly have noticed this, and it must have been their instincts—their good sound horse-sense—that warned them that a dark hole full of hollow crackings and groanings and the roar of falling water was no place for self-respecting equines to venture. It took a deal of spurring and swearing to force them inside, and most of the linear distance gained was covered in circles on their hind legs. It was old “Grayback” whose nerves gave way first; he that started the stampede back to light and sunshine. There was no question but what we “beat it snappy.”

Roos came out rubbing his hands gleefully. “That photographed like a million dollars,” he cried with enthusiasm. “Now just one thing more....” And forthwith he revealed what had been in his heart ever since he chanced onto that “natural shower bath” in the cave the previous afternoon. No one could deny that it was a natural shower bath. And since it was a natural shower bath, what could be more natural than for some one to take a shower under it? How would Nixon feel about trying it? Or Jim? He admitted that it might be something of a shock, but he was willing to make that all right. Would ten dollars be fair? Or say twenty? Or why not twenty-five? He knew Mr. Chester didn’t reckon cost when it was a question of getting a high class, he might say a unique, picture. Now which should it be? Nixon, a bit snappily, said his rheumatism put him out of the running, and Jim was equally decided. Money wouldn’t tempt him to go even into the Columbia at Windermere, let alone a liquid icicle under a glacier.

And right then and there I did a thing which Roos maintained to the end of our partnership repaid him for all the grief and worry I had caused him to date, and much that was still to accrue. “Since I’ve got to take a bath and dry these wet togs out sooner or later,” I said with a great assumption of nonchalance, “perhaps the ice cave will do as well as anywhere else. Just promise me you won’t spring a flare on the scene, and build a fire to dry my clothes by....” Roos was gathering wood for a fire before I finished speaking. As for the flares, Harmon had not given him any yet. It was only a silhouette he wanted—but that would show up like a million dollars in the spray and ice. There never had been such a picture; perhaps would never be again. I wasn’t joking, was I? And primitive....

“Go on and set up,” I cut in with. “I’ll be there by the time you’re ready to shoot. And don’t ever let me hear you say primitive again. Oh, yes—and you needn’t remind me to ‘Be snappy!’ There won’t be any trouble on that score. Just make sure your lens is fast enough to catch the action.”

I’ve had many a plunge overboard off the California coast that shocked me more than that “natural shower bath” did, but never a one with so exhilarant a reaction. Stripping off my wet clothes by the fire, I slipped into my big hooded “lammy” coat and hippity-hopped into the cave. Roos, set up ten yards inside the splashing jet from the roof, was already standing by to shoot. At his call of “Action!” I jumped out of my coat and into the black, unsparkling column of water. There was a sharp sting to the impact, but it imparted nothing of the numbing ache that accompanies immersion in water a number of degrees less cold than this—a feeling which I came later to know only too well on the Columbia. Nixon had warned me against tempting Providence again by making any unnecessary racket in the cave, but it was no use. No one could have the fun that I was having and not holler. It was against nature. Whooping like a Comanche, I continued my hydro-terpsichorean revel until a muffled “Nuff” from Roos called a halt. He had come to the end of his roll. I have been in more of a shiver coming out of the Adriatic at the Lido in August than I was when I ambled back to dry off by the fire and the sunshine. Glowing with warmth, I even loafed along with my dressing, as one does at Waikiki.

“You’d make a fortune pulling the rough stuff in the movies,” Roos exclaimed, patting me on the back. “You’ve got everything the real gripping cave-man has to have—size, beef, a suggestion of brutal, elemental force, primitive....” I chucked a burning brand at him and went over to borrow Nixon’s glass. A shot from far up the cliffs told that Harmon’s “goat-hunt” was in full cry. The real thrill of the day was about to come off; rather more of a thrill, indeed, than any one was prepared for, Harmon included.

MY SHOWER BATH IN AN ICE CAVE (left)
WARMING UP AFTER MY GLACIAL SHOWER BATH (right)

ROSS AND HARMON. DRAGON MORAINE IN DISTANCE (above)
THE HORSES IN THE MOUTH OF THE ICE CAVE (below)

While we had been filming our “cave stuff” Harmon had finished setting the stage for his picture. He had two shots to make—one of his packers firing at the goat at the top of the cliff, and the other of the body of the goat falling to the glacier. Conrad, the Tyrolean, climbing like a fly, had scaled the face of the cliff and was standing by for the signal to start the goat “falling.” The shot which had attracted my attention had been the packer discharging his rifle at the goat, which had been propped up in a life-like position, as though peering down onto the glacier. Harmon was still cranking when I got him in focus, while the packer had jumped to his feet and was executing a pas seul evidently intended to convey the impression he had made a hit. A curl of blue smoke from his rifle was still floating in the air. They had contrived that effective little touch by dribbling a bit of melted butter down the barrel before firing. Smokeless powder is hardly “tell-tale” enough for movie work.

Harmon now moved over and set up at the foot of the cliff, apparently to get as near as possible to the point where the goat was going to hit. As the sequel proves, he judged his position to a hair. Now he made his signal. I saw the flutter of his handkerchief. The goat gave a convulsive leap, and then shot straight out over the brink of the cliff. From where we stood I could plainly see the useful Conrad “pulling the strings,” but from where Harmon was set up this would hardly show. He was too careful to overlook a point like that in a “nature picture.” The white body caromed sharply off a couple of projecting ledges, and then, gathering momentum, began to describe a great parabola which promised to carry it right to the foot of the cliff.

I had kept my eyes glued to the glass from the start, but it was Nixon’s unaided vision which was first to catch the drift of what was impending. “You couldn’t drive a six-hawss team ’tween the side o’ Mista Ha’mon’s head and the trail in the air that geesly goat’s going to make passing by,” he said with a calculating drawl. “Not so su’ you could squeeze a pack-hawss through.” Then, a couple of seconds later: “No’ ev’n a big dawg.” And almost immediately: “By Gawd, it’s going to get him!”

And that surely was what it looked like, to every one at least but the calmly cranking Harmon. He went on humping his back above the finder, and I could see the even rise and fall of his elbow against the snow. The dot of white had become a streak of grey, and it was the swift augmentation of this in his finder which finally (as he told me later) caused Harmon suddenly to duck. To me it looked as if the flying streak had passed right through him, but he was still there at the foot of his tripod after the Bolt of Wrath, striking the surface of the glacier with a resounding impact, threw up a fountain of pulverized snow and laid still. He was never quite sure whether it was the almost solid cushion of air or a side-swipe from a hoof or horn that joggled the tripod out of true. It was a near squeeze, for the flying body, which must have weighed all of two hundred pounds, was frozen hard as a rock. Conrad came staggering down with the remnants of the battered trunk over his shoulders. Only the heart and liver were fit to eat. The rest was a sausage of churned meat and bone splinters. There was no question about its fall having limbered it up.

The illumination of the cave by the calcium flares was beautiful beyond words to describe, or at least so I was told. The first one was a failure, through the outward draught of air carrying the smoke back onto the cameras. I had set this off in a side gallery, about a hundred yards in from the mouth, with the idea of throwing a sort of concealed back light. Foolishly opening my eyes while the calcium was burning, I was completely blinded by the intense glare and did not regain my sight for several minutes. Harmon’s packer, who held the next flare set off—this time to the leeward of the cameras—had still worse luck. A flake of the sputtering calcium kicked back up his sleeve and inflicted a raw, round burn with half the colours of the spectrum showing in its concentric rings of singed cuticle. The chap displayed astonishing nerve in refusing to relinquish his grip on the handle of the flare and thus ruin the picture. I most certainly would never have done so myself. Roos described the glittering ice walls as a “veritable Aladdin’s Cave of jewels,” and only regretted that he couldn’t have had that lighting on my shower-bath.

That night we tried a camp-fire scene by flare. Roos set up on the further bank of the side channel of the creek which flowed past the tent. Between the door of the tent and the water a hole was dug in such a way that light from it would shine on a group in front of the tent but not on the lens of the camera. The glow from a flare burning in this hole represented the camp-fire. I was supposed to stroll up and tell a jovial story to Nixon, Jim and Gordon, who were to be “picked up” already seated around the fire. I made my entrance very snappily, but, unluckily, the blanket roll upon which I sat down spread out and let me back against the corner of the glowing sheet-iron stove, which was set up just inside the tent opening. Seeing I had not rolled out of the picture, Roos shouted for me to carry on, as it was the last flare. So, with the reek of burning wool rising behind me, I did carry on, making plausible gestures intended to convey the idea that the bit of comedy was just a humorous piece of by-play of my own. I carried on for something over half a minute. The only circumstance that prevented my carrying on my back the print of the corner of the stove for the rest of my days was the fact that the combined thicknesses of my duffle coat, lumberman’s shirt, sweater and heavy woollen undershirt were interposed to absorb the heat. The duffle coat was the worst sufferer, coming out with a bar-sinister branded most of the way through its half inch of pressed brown wool.

CHAPTER IV
THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS

It was now neck-or-nothing with the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture. Having already been out much longer than we had expected to be, there were left only provisions for two days. Nixon had suggested making a hurried trip out and bringing in fresh supplies, but as the time set by Chester for his arrival for the Big Bend trip was already past, I did not feel warranted in prolonging the present jaunt any further. If the morrow was fair all would be well; if not, the main object of our trip would be defeated.

By great good luck the clear weather held. There was not a cloud hovering above the mountains at daybreak the following morning, and we got away for an early start to make the most of our opportunity. Nixon himself had run and cut out the trail to the Lake earlier in the summer, but horses had never been taken over it. Though it was extremely steep in pitches, our maiden passage was marked with few difficulties. Much to Nixon’s surprise and satisfaction, only one big dead-fall had been thrown down to block the way, and our enforced halt here gave Roos the opportunity for a very effective “trail shot.” He also got some striking “back-lighting stuff” at spots along the interminable cascade that was tumbling and bounding beside the trail. The elevation of our camp on the creek was something like six thousand feet, and that of the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers a bit under eight thousand. The trail is between three and four miles long, and we were rather over two hours in making the climb. There were several halts out of this; steady plugging would do it much quicker.

Timber-line was passed half a mile below the lake, the last of the trees being left behind in a wonderful little mountain park studded with gnarled pines and still bright with late wild flowers. The autumn colouring here was a marvellous chromatic revel in dull golds and soft, subdued browns—the shedding tamaracks and the dying meadow grasses.

Clambering on foot up a steep-sided hillock that appeared to be an ancient glacial moraine augmented by many slides, we suddenly found ourselves on the edge of the high-water level of the lake. The transition from the flower-strewn meadow to a region of almost Arctic frigidity was practically instantaneous—the matter of a half dozen steps. One moment we were climbing in a cliff-walled valley, with rocky buttresses and pinnacles soaring for thousands of feet on either side, and with brown-black gravel and thinning brown-grey bunch grass under foot and ahead; the next, as we gained the crest of the old terminal moraine, the landscape opened up with a blinding flash and we were gazing at a sparkling emerald lake clipped in the embrace of an amphitheatre of glaciers and eternal snow, and floating full of icebergs and marble-mottled shadows. The “Hanging Glacier”—perhaps a mile wide across its face, and rearing a solid wall of ice a couple of hundred feet in the sheer—closed the further or southeastern end of the lake. Behind the glacier was a cliff of two thousand feet or more in height. It appeared to be almost solid ice and snow, but must have been heavily underlaid with native rock to maintain its abruptness as it did. Higher still a snow-cap, bright and smooth as polished marble, extended to the crest of the range and formed a glittering line against the cobalt of the sky. Of all the scenic gems of the North American continent, I recall none which is so well entitled to the characterization of “unique” as this white-flaming little jewel of the high Selkirks.

The lake was now rapidly receding to its winter low-water level, and to reach its brink we had to press on across three hundred yards of black boulders which were evidently covered in the time of the late spring floods. Ordinarily one would have expected the worst kind of rough and slippery walking here, but, to my great surprise, the great rocks were set as solid and as level as a pavement of mosaic. The reason for this became plain when we approached the water, where a flotilla of small icebergs, rising and falling to the waves kicked up by the brisk breeze drawing down the lake, were steadily thump-thumping the bottom with dull heavy blows which could be felt underfoot a hundred yards away. This natural tamping, going on incessantly during the months of high-water, was responsible for the surprising smoothness of the rocky waste uncovered by the winter recession. The great boulders had literally been hammered flat.

The icebergs, which were formed by the cracking off of the face of the great glacier filled half of the lake. They varied in size from almost totally submerged chunks a few feet in diameter to huge floating islands of several hundred. They were of the most fantastic shapes, especially those which had been longest adrift and therefore most exposed to the capricious action of the sun. By and large, the effect was that of a Gargantuan bowl sprinkled with puffy white popcorn. But if one took his time and searched carefully enough there were very few things of heaven or earth that were not represented in the amazing collection. One berg, floating on another, had been reduced by the sun to the seeming of a gigantic view camera—box, bellows and lens. A number of famous groups of statuary were there, but of course very much in the rough. “The Thinker” was perhaps the best of these, but even Rodin would have wanted to do a bit more “finishing” on the glacial cave-man humped up on his icy green pedestal. Roos, who had never heard of Rodin, said it reminded him of me drying out after my shower-bath in the ice-cave. His facile imagination also discovered something else. He had once seen a picture of “Lohengrin’s Farewell” in a Victrola record price-list, and there was a much sun-licked hunk of ice, very near the shore, which suggested the barge to him, swans and all. I saw the barge all right, but the Pegasus of my imagination had to have some spurring before he would take the “swan” hurdle.

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS, TAKEN FROM THE ICE WALLS, LOOKING NORTH

It was Roos’ idea that I should swim off, clamber over the side of the barge, lassoo the “near” swan with a piece of pack-rope to represent reins, and let him shoot me as “Lohengrin.” It wouldn’t exactly run into the “continuity” of the “sportsman” picture, he admitted; but he thought that Chester might use it, with a lot of other odds and ends, under some such title as “Queer People in Queer Places.” The idea appealed to me strongly. “Lohengrin’s Farewell” had always moved me strangely; and here was a chance actually to appear in the classic rôle! “You bet I’ll do it,” I assented readily. “What shall I wear?” The “Shining Armour,” which we both seemed to connect with “Lohengrin,” happened to be one of the things not brought up in our saddle-bags that morning. We were in a hot discussion as to the best manner of improvising a helmet and cuirass out of condensed milk and sardine tins, when Nixon, asking if we knew that the sun only shone about three hours a day in that “geesly crack in the hills,” dryly opined that we should take our pictures of the lake while there was plenty of light. That sounded sensible, and we started feverishly to hurry through with the routine grind so as to be free to do proper justice to “Lohengrin.” As Fate would have it, however, that which was presently revealed to me of the ways of fresh-water icebergs quenched effectually my desire to swim off and take liberties with the capricious things at close quarters.

After making a number of scenic shots, Roos announced that he was ready to go ahead with the “falling iceberg” stuff. As it was quite out of the question making our way along the base of the cliffs on either side of the lake to the face of the glacier in the limited time at our disposal, and, moreover, as we had already demonstrated the impossibility of making artificial icebergs with “sixty per” dynamite, it became necessary to improvise something closer at hand. It was Roos’ idea that a piece of cliff cracked off into the lake might produce the effect desired, especially if “cut” with discrimination. “Here’s the way it goes,” he explained. “The cracked off rock plunks down into the lake right into the middle of a bunch of floating icebergs. I starts cranking at the splash, and with the bergs all rolling about and bumping into each other no one can tell but what it was one of them that really started it. Then I’ll pick you up hopping up and down on the bank and registering ‘surprise’ and ‘consternation’; and then follow with a close-up of you standing on that high rock, looking down on the quieting waves with folded arms. Now you register ‘relief’ and finally a sort of ‘awed wonder.’ Then you take a big breath and raise your eyes to the face of the glacier. You keep right on registering ‘awed wonder’ (only more intense) and as I fade you out you shake your head slowly as if the mighty mysteries of Nature were beyond your understanding. Get me? They ought to colour the film for that dark blue in the laboratory (I could tell ’em just the solution to make that ice look cold), and the sub-title ought to be ‘The Birth of an Iceberg,’ and....”

“Jim’s the midwife, is he?” I cut in. “Yes, I get you. Tell him to uncork some of that ‘sixty per’ ‘Twilight Sleep’ of his and I’ll stand by for the christening.”

After a careful technical examination of the terrain, Jim, chief “Powder Monkey,” located what he thought was a favourable spot for operations and started to enlarge a thin crack in the cliff to make it take five sticks of dynamite. That was more than half of our remaining stock; but Roos was insisting on a big iceberg, and plenty of powder was the best way to insure success. It must have been the tamping that was at the bottom of the trouble, for moss and damp earth are hardly solid enough to deflect the kick of the dynamite in the desired direction. At any rate, although there was a roaring detonation, the mighty force released was expended outward rather than inward. The face of the cliff hardly shivered, and only an inconsiderable trickle of broken rocks and sand slid down into the lake. Too sore to take more than hostile notice of Nixon’s somewhat rough and ready little mot about the “‘Birth o’ the Iceberg’ turning out a geesly miscarriage,” Roos clapped the cap over his lens, unscrewed the crank and began taking his camera off its tripod. That rather hasty action was responsible for his missing by a hair what I am certain was the greatest opportunity ever presented to a moving picture operator to film one of the most stupendous of Nature’s manifestations.

The roar of the detonating dynamite reverberated for half a minute or more among the cliffs and peaks, and it was just after the last roll had died out that a renewed rumble caused me to direct a searching gaze to the great wall of ice and snow that towered above the farther end of the lake. For an instant I could not believe my eyes. It could not be possible that the whole mountainside was toppling over! And yet that was decidedly the effect at a first glance. From the rim of the snow-cap down to the back of the glacier—a mile wide and two thousand feet high—there was one solid, unbroken Niagara of glittering, coruscant ice and snow. Like a curtain strung with diamonds and pearls and opals it streamed, while the shower of flaming colours was reflected in the quivering waters of the lake in fluttering scarves of sun-shot scarlet, in tenuous ribbons of lavender, jade and primrose. It was only when the last shreds of this marvellous banner had ceased to stream (at the end of thirty or forty seconds perhaps) that I saw what it was that had caused it. The whole hair-poised brink of the great snow-cap—sharply jolted, doubtless, by the explosion of the dynamite—had cracked away and precipitated itself to the glacier level, nearly half a mile below. The shock to the latter appeared to have had the effect of jarring it sufficiently to crack down great blocks all along its face. The glacier had, in fact, been shocked into giving birth to a whole litter of real icebergs where, nearer at hand, we had failed dismally in our efforts to incubate even an artificial one. As glacial obstetricians it appeared that we still had much to learn.

Roos made a great effort to get his camera set up again in time to make it record something of the wonderful spectacle. He was just too late, however. Only a few thin trickles of snow were streaking the face of the cliff when he finally swung his powerful tele-photo lens upon it, and even these had ceased before he had found his focus. It was no end of a pity. I saw several of the great valangas started by the Austrian and Italian artillery in the Dolomites, and, previous to that, what I had thought were very considerable slides on Aconcagua and Chimborazi, in the Andes, and on Kinchinjunga and among the hanging ice-fields above the Zoji-la in the Himalayas. But any half dozen of the greatest of these would have been lost in that mighty avalanche of ice and snow that we saw descend above the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Nixon, with a lifetime spent in the Selkirks and Rockies, said he had never seen anything to compare with it.

Jim, reporting that he still had three sticks of dynamite in hand, said he reckoned there might be a better chance of starting an “iceberg” on the southern side of the lake than on the northern one, where we had failed to accomplish anything. The southern slope was even more precipitous than the northern, he pointed out, and he had his eye on a rock which looked as if a charge might turn it over and start it rolling. “You never can tell what you may be startin’ among a bunch o’ tiltin’ rocks like them ’uns,” he said hopefully. Nixon’s muttered “That ain’t no geesly hooch dream” might have meant several things; but I took it that he intended to imply that there was too much “unstable equilibrium” along that southern shore to make it the sort of a place that a neurasthenic would seek out for a rest cure. I felt the same way about it, only more so; but Roos’ disappointment over what he had already missed was so keen that neither of us had the heart to interpose any objections when he told Jim to go ahead and see what he could do. As two sticks of dynamite were already promised to Harmon, the trick, if it came off, would have to be pulled with one. Spitting tobacco juice on the taffy-like cylinder for luck, Jim clambered off up the cliff and planted it under his “likely rock,” Roos meantime setting up in a favourable position below.

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE FACE OF THE HANGING GLACIER

Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
WHERE MY PARTY FOREGATHERED WITH HARMON’S ON THE SHORE OF THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIER

Whether Jim’s “tobaccanalian libation” had anything to do with it or not, this time luck was with us. The sharp blast kicked Jim’s rock up on one ear, where it teetered for a second or two indecisively before rolling over sidewise and coming down kerplump on a huge twenty-ton cube of basalt that no one would have thought of moving with a barrel of giant. It wasn’t so much what the little rock did as the way it did it. The big block gave a sort of a quiver, much as a man awakening from a doze would stretch his arms and yawn, and when it quivered a lot of loose stuff slipped away from beneath and just let it go. It lumbered along at an easy roll for a bit, and then increased its speed and started jumping. Its first jump was no more than a nervous little hop that served to hurdle it clear of a length of flat ledge that reached out to stop its downward progress. A second later it had hit its stride, so that when it struck the water there had been nothing but rarefied air trying to stop it for two hundred feet. Down it went, pushing a column of compressed aqua pura ahead of it and sucking a big black hole along in its wake. It was when that column of compressed water spouted up again and tried to chase its tail down the hole it had come out of that things began to happen, for it found something like a dozen fat icebergs crowding in and trying to insinuate their translucent bulks into the same opening. And of course they made a tremendous fuss about it. When an iceberg found that it couldn’t get in standing up, it forthwith lay down on its side, or even rolled over on its back; which didn’t help it in the least after all, for the very good reason that all the other icebergs were adopting the same tactics. And so Roos, who was cranking steadily all the time, got his “Birth of an Iceberg” picture after all.

When the bergs ceased butting their heads off against each other Roos shot me in the scenes where I registered “consternation,” “relief” and “awed wonder,” and our hard-striven-for Lake of the Hanging Glaciers picture was complete. There was just a bit of a hitch at the “awed wonder” fade-out, though, but that was Roos’ fault in trying to introduce a “human touch” by trying to make Gordon’s dog perch up beside me on the crest of a hatchet-edged rock. The pup sat quietly wagging his tail until the moment came for me to lift up mine eyes unto the hills and increase the tenseness of my “awed wonder” registration. Then the altitude began to affect his nerves and he started doing figure “8’s” back and forth between my precariously planted feet. As a natural consequence, when Roos started in on his “fade-out” I was seesawing my arms wildly to maintain my balance, talking volubly, and registering—well, what would a temperamental movie star be registering while in the act of telling a dog and a man what he thought of them for their joint responsibility in all but pitching him off a twenty-foot-high rock into a vortex of tumbling icebergs? Again (unless this part of the film has been discreetly cut in the studio before exhibition) I beg the indulgence of lip-readers.

The lake was deeply shadowed before we were finally at liberty to take up again the sartorics of “Lohengrin”; but it was not that fact, nor yet the not entirely prohibitive difficulty of making shining armour out of tin cans, that nipped that classic conception in the bud. Rather it was the astonishing unstable-mindedness displayed by the bergs when impinged upon from without. Of the hundred or more hunks of floating ice within a five-hundred-yard radius of the point where our artificial berg had hit the water, only a half dozen or so of the broadest and flattest continued to expose the same profiles they had presented before the big splash. Most of the others had turned over and over repeatedly, and one, which seemed to “hang” in almost perfect balance, continued slowly revolving like a patent churn. “Lohengrin’s Barge,” half a mile distant from the heart of the “birth splash” and lapped by but the lightest of expiring waves, was rolling drunkenly to port and starboard as though in the trough of the seas of a typhoon. It looked ready to turn turtle at a touch, and there were too many angular projections on it—especially about the “swans”—to make even a man who aspired to grand opera care to court lightly the experience of tangling himself up in the wreck.

Descending to the timber-line meadow where the horses had been left, we found Harmon had brought up his outfit and pitched his tent midway of an enchanting vista framed in green-black pines and golden tamaracks, and with a wonderful background for “camp shots” both up and down the valley. There he was going to make his base, he said, until he found just the light he wanted on the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers. Then he hoped to get at least a negative or two that would do something approaching justice to so inspiring a subject. And there, working and waiting patiently through an almost unbroken succession of storms that raged in the high Selkirks for many days, he held on until he got what he wanted. It was in that quiet persistent way that he had been photographing the mountains of the Canadian West for many years, and it will be in that way that he will continue until he shall have attained somewhere near to the high goal he has set for his life’s work—a complete photographic record of the Rockies and Selkirks. It is a privilege to have met an artist who works with so fine a spirit, who has set himself so high an ideal. A number of Harmon’s scenic pictures of the mountains where the Columbia takes its rise are so much better than the best of my own of the same subjects, that I am giving them place in a work which it was my original intention to illustrate entirely myself.

We returned to our camp at the head of Horse Thief Creek that night, and set out on our return to Windermere the following morning. Save for a rather sloppy passage of the main ford, the journey was without incident. With light packs, we pushed right through to the head of the wagon-road—something over thirty miles—the first day. The seventeen miles to Invermere we covered in a leisurely fashion, reaching the hotel at three in the afternoon of the following day, Sunday, the twentieth of September. Here I found a wire from Chester, stating that it had finally proved impossible for him to get away from business, and asking me to go ahead and see the Big Bend trip through without him. In the event I decided to continue on down the river he would be glad to have his cameraman accompany me as long as the weather and light were favourable for his work. A letter with full instructions covering the two pictures he desired made had already been dispatched.

CHAPTER V
CANAL FLATS TO BEAVERMOUTH

Chester’s instructions respecting the two new pictures he wanted us to work on came through to Roos the day following our return to Windermere. One of these was to be confined entirely to the Big Bend voyage. Essaying again my role of “gentleman-cum-sportsman,” I was to get off the train at Beavermouth, meet my boatman, launch the boat and start off down the river. The various things seen and done en voyage were to make up the picture.

In the other picture I was to play the part of a young rancher who was farming his hard-won clearing on the banks of the Columbia near its source. With the last of his crops in, he is assailed one day with a great longing to see the ocean. Suddenly it occurs to him that the river flowing right by his door runs all the way to the sea, and the sight of a prospector friend, about to push off with a sack of samples for the smelter many hundreds of miles below, suggests a means of making the journey. And so the two of them start off down the Columbia. What happened to them on their way was to be told in the picture. The introductory scenes of this picture were to be made somewhere in the vicinity of Windermere, but the thread of the story was to be picked up below the Arrow Lakes after the Big Bend voyage was over.

Hunting “location” and rainy weather kept us four or five days in Windermere and vicinity, giving an opportunity we otherwise would have missed to meet and become acquainted with the always kindly and hospitable and often highly distinguished people of this beautiful and interesting community. From the time of David Thompson, the great astronomer and explorer of the Northwest Company who wintered there in 1810, down to the present Windermere seems always to have attracted the right sort of people. The predominant class is what one might call the gentleman-farmer, with the stress perhaps on “gentleman.” I mean to say, that is, that while a number of them have failed of outstanding achievement as farmers, there was none that I met who would not have qualified as a gentleman, and in the very best sense of the word. Sportsmen and lovers of the out-of-doors, there was this fine bond of fellowship between all of them. Nowhere have I encountered a fresher, more wholesome social atmosphere than that of this fine community of the upper Columbia.

That genial and big-hearted old Scot, Randolph Bruce, I recall with especial affection, as must every one of the many who has known the hospitality of his great log lodge on a bay of the lake below Invermere. An Edinburgh engineer, Bruce was one of the builders of the Canadian Pacific, and as such an associate and intimate of Van Horne, O’Shaughnessy and the rest of those sturdy pioneers who pushed to accomplishment the most notable piece of railway construction the world has ever known. In love with the West by the time the railway was finished, he built him a home in the most beautiful spot he knew—such a spot as few even among the Scottish lochs could rival—and associated himself with various projects for the advancement of the country. At the present time he is the owner of the Paradise mine, one of the richest silver-lead properties in British Columbia, and the head of an enterprise which purposes to bring the Windermere region to its own among the grandest of the playgrounds of North America.

We made the preliminary scenes for the “farmer” picture at a gem of a little mountain ranch in a clearing to the west of Lake Windermere. Shooting through one of his favourite “sylvan frames,” Roos picked me up violently shocking hay at the end of a long narrow field which the labour of a young Scotch immigrant had reclaimed from the encompassing forest. (As a matter of fact the hay was already in shocks when we arrived, and I had to unshock a few shocks so as to shock them up again before the camera and thus give the impression that this was the last of my season’s crop.) Then I threw up a couple of shocks for him set up at closer range, with more attention to “technique.” (This latter came easy for me, as I had been pitching hay for a fortnight on my California ranch earlier in the summer.) Finally I stopped work, leaned on my fork and gazed into the distance with visioning eyes. (I was supposed to be thinking of the sea, Roos explained, and in the finished picture there would be a “cut-in” of breakers at this point.) Then I registered “impatience” and “restlessness,” hardening to “firm resolve.” At this juncture I threw down my fork and strode purposefully out of the right side of the picture. (The cabin to which I was supposed to be striding was really on my left, but Roos explained that some sort of a movie Median law made it imperative always to exit to right.) Then we went over to make the cabin shots.

OLD HUDSON BAY CART AT BEAVERMOUTH (above)
MY FIRST PUSH-OFF AT THE HEAD OF CANOE NAVIGATION ON THE COLUMBIA (below)

OPENING SCENE OF THE "FARMER" PICTURE (left)
OLD STERN WHEELERS AT GOLDEN (above)
A QUIET STRETCH OF THE COLUMBIA NEAR GOLDEN (below)

The owner of the cabin was away at the moment, but his young Scotch wife—a bonnie bit of a lass who might have been the inspiration for “Annie Laurie”—was on hand and mightily interested. She asked if I was Bill Hart, and Roos made the tactical error of guffawing, as though the idea was absurd. She was a good deal disappointed at that, but still very ready to help with anything calculated to immortalize her wee home by emblazoning it on the imperishable celluloid. First I strode into the cabin, but almost immediately to emerge unfolding a map. Going over to a convenient stump, I sat down and disposed of a considerable footage of “intent study.” Then we made a close-up of the map—the Pacific Northwest—with my index finger starting at Windermere and tracing the course of the Columbia on its long winding way to the sea. That proved that there was water transit all the way to that previous cut-in of breakers which my visioning eyes had conjured up just before I threw down my fork. I stood up and gazed at the nearby river (which was really Lake Windermere, a mile distant), and presently stiffened to my full height, registering “discovery.” What I was supposed to see was a prospector tinkering with his boat. As this latter scene could not be made until we had bought a boat and signed up a “prospector,” all that was left to do here was to shoot me striding away from the cabin on the way to discuss ways and means with my mythical companion, and then striding back, getting my roll of blankets and exiting in a final fade-out. As we had neglected to provide a roll of blankets for this shot, we had to improvise one from such material as was available. I forget all that went to make up that fearful and wonderful package; but it is just as well the precariously-roped bundle didn’t resolve into its component parts until the fade-out was pretty nearly complete.

Roos tried hard to introduce “human interest” and “heart appeal” by staging a farewell scene with “wife and child,” both of which were ready to hand. I was adamant, however, even when he agreed to compromise by leaving out the child. He was rather stubborn about it, refusing to admit the validity of my argument to the effect that a would-be screen hero who deserted so fair a wife would alienate the sympathies of the crowd at the outset. Finally it was decided for us. “It’s too late noo,” cooed a wee voice in which I thought I detected both reproach and relief; “while ye’re talkin’, yon cooms Jock.”

It was too late all right; even Roos was ready to grant that. Jock was about six-feet-three, and built in proportion. Also a wee bitty dour, I thought. At least he glowered redly under his bushy brows when he discovered that I had wrapped up his own and another nicht-goon in my hastily assembled blanket-roll. If that bothered him, I hate to think what might have happened had he surprised that farewell scene, especially as Roos—with his Mack Sennett training and D. W. Griffith ideals—would have tried to stage it.

Roos was young and inexperienced, and lacking in both finesse and subtlety. I granted that this wouldn’t have cramped his style much in doing “old home town stuff;” but farther afield it was electric with dangerous possibilities. Driving back to the hotel I quoted to him what Kipling’s hero in “The Man Who Would Be King” said on the subject, paraphrasing it slightly so he would understand. “A man has no business shooting farewell scenes with borrowed brides in foreign parts be he three times a crowned movie director,” was the way I put it.

It was my original intention to start the boating part of my Columbia trip from Golden, at the head of the Big Bend, the point at which the calm open reaches of the upper river give way to really swift water. The decision to make the push-off from Beavermouth, twenty-nine miles farther down, was come to merely because it was much easier to get the boat into the water at the latter point. There was little swift-water boating worthy of the name above Beavermouth. Donald Canyon was about the only rough water, and even that, I was assured, was not to be mentioned in the same breath with scores of rapids farther down the Bend. In the ninety miles between the foot of Lake Windermere and Golden there were but twenty-five feet of fall, so that the winding river was hardly more than a series of lagoon-like reaches, with a current of from one to four miles an hour. Between Columbia Lake—practically the head of the main channel of the river—and Mud Lake, and between the latter and the head of Lake Windermere, there was a stream of fairly swift current, but at this time of year not carrying enough water to permit the passage of even a canoe without much lining and portaging.

From the practical aspect, therefore, I was quite content with the plan to start my voyage from Beavermouth. For the sake of sentiment, however, I did want to make some kind of a push-off from the very highest point that offered sufficient water to float a boat at the end of September. This, I was assured in Invermere, would be Canal Flats, just above the head of Columbia Lake and immediately below the abandoned locks which at one time made navigation possible between the Kootenay and the Columbia. Although these crude log-built locks have never been restored since they were damaged by a great freshet in the nineties, and although the traffic they passed in the few years of their operation was almost negligible, it may be of interest to give a brief description of the remarkable terrain that made their construction possible by the simplest of engineering work, and to tell how the removal of a few shovelfuls of earth effected the practical insulation of the whole great range of the Selkirks.

As a consequence of recent geological study, it has been definitely established that the divide between the Columbia and Kootenay rivers, now at Canal Flats, was originally a hundred and fifty miles farther north, or approximately where Donald Canyon occurs. That is to say, a great wall of rock at the latter point backed up a long, narrow lake between the Rockies on the east and the Selkirks on the west. This lake, unable to find outlet to the north, had risen until its waters were sufficiently above the lower southern barriers to give it drainage in that direction. At that time it was doubtless the main source of the Kootenay River, and its waters did not reach the Columbia until after a long and devious southerly course into what is now Montana, thence northward into Kootenay Lake, and finally, by a dizzy westerly plunge, into a much-extended Arrow Lake. An upheaval which carried away the dyke at Donald provided a northward drainage for the lake, and the divide was ultimately established at what is now called Canal Flats. It was a shifting and precarious division, however, for the Kootenay—which rises some distance to the northward in the Rockies and is here a sizable stream—discharged a considerable overflow to the Columbia basin at high water. It was this latter fact which called attention to the comparative ease with which navigation could be established between the two rivers by means of a canal. For an account of how this canal came to be built I am indebted to E. M. Sandilands, Esq., Mining Recorder for the British Columbia Government at Wilmer, who has the distinction of being, to use his own language, “the person who made the Selkirk Mts. an Island by connecting the Columbia and Kootenay rivers.”

Mr. Sandilands, in a recent letter, tells how an ex-big-game hunter by the name of Baillie-Grohman obtained, in 1886, a concession from the Provincial Government of British Columbia for 35,000 acres of land along the Kootenay River. In return for this he was to construct at his own expense a canal connecting the Columbia and Kootenay. This cut was for the ostensible purpose of opening up navigation between the two streams, but as nothing was stipulated in respect of dredging approaches the obligation of the concessionaire was limited to the construction of the canal and locks. “For this reason,” writes Mr. Sandilands, who was working on the job at the time, “our ‘Grand Canal’ was practically useless. Nevertheless, in 1888, it was opened with due form and pomp, engineer, contractor and concessionaire paddling up to the lock in a canoe well laden with the ‘good cheer’ demanded by such an occasion. I was driving a team attached to a ‘slush-scraper,’ and together with a jovial Irish spirit who rejoiced in the name of Thomas Haggerty, was ordered by the foreman to scrape out the false dam holding the Kootenay back from the canal. This we did as long as we dared. Then I was deputed, with gum-boots and shovel, to dig a hole through what was left of the false dam, and allow the Kootenay into the canal and the Columbia. This being done, the fact was wired to the Provincial Government at Victoria ... , and the promised concession of land was asked for and granted. I little thought at the time,” Mr. Sandilands concludes, “how distinguished a part I was playing, that I was making the Selkirk Mountains an ‘Island,’ a fact which few people realize to this day.”

Later a little dredging was done, so that finally, by dint of much “capstaning,” a shallow-draught stern-wheeler was worked up to and through the lock and canal, and on down the Kootenay to Jennings, Montana. It was Captain F. P. Armstrong who performed this remarkable feat, only to lose the historic little craft later in one of the treacherous canyons of the Kootenay. His also was the distinction, after maintaining an intermittent service between the Columbia and Kootenay for a number of years, of being the captain and owner of the last boat to make that amazing passage.

We reached Canal Flats at the end of a forty-mile auto-ride from Invermere. Traces of the old dredged channel were still visible running up from the head of Columbia Lake and coming to an abrupt end against a caving wall of logs which must at one time have been a gate of the inter-river lock. Out of the tangle of maiden hair fern which draped the rotting logs came a clear trickle of water, seeping through from the other side of the divide. This was what was popularly called the source of the Columbia. I could just manage to scoop the river dry with a quick sweep of my cupped palm.

A hundred yards below the source the old channel opened out into a quiet currentless pool, and here I found a half-filled Peterboro belonging to a neighbouring farmer, which I had engaged for the first leg of my voyage down the Columbia. It leaked rather faster than I could bail, but even at that it floated as long as there was water to float it. Fifty yards farther down a broad mudbank blocked the channel all the way across, and in attempting to drag the old canoe out for the portage, I pulled it in two amidships. I had made my start from almost chock-a-block against the source, however. Sentiment was satisfied. I was now ready for the Bend. Groping my way back to the car through an almost impenetrable pall of mosquitoes, I rejoined Roos and we returned to Invermere.

A wire from Blackmore stating that it would still be several days before his boat was ready for the Bend offered us a chance to make the journey to Golden by river if we so desired. There was nothing in it on the boating side, but Roos thought there might be a chance for some effective scenic shots. I, also, was rather inclined to favour the trip, for the chance it would give of hardening up my hands and pulling muscles before tackling the Bend. An unpropitious coincidence in the matter of an Indian name defeated the plan. Roos and I were trying out on Lake Windermere a sweet little skiff which Randolph Bruce had kindly volunteered to let us have for the quiet run down to Golden. “By hard pulling,” I said, “we ought just about to make Spillimacheen at the end of the first day.” “Spill a what?” ejaculated Roos anxiously; “you didn’t say ‘machine,’ did you?” “Yes; Spillimacheen,” I replied. “It’s the name of a river that flows down to the Columbia from the Selkirks.” “Then that settles it for me,” he said decisively. “I don’t want to spill my machine. It cost fifteen hundred dollars. I’m not superstitious; but, just the same, starting out for a place with a name like that is too much like asking for trouble to suit yours truly.” And so we went down to Golden by train and put in the extra time outfitting for the Bend.

Golden, superbly situated where the Kicking Horse comes tumbling down to join the Columbia, is a typical Western mining and lumbering town. Save for their penchant for dramatizing the perils of the Big Bend, the people are delightful. It is true that the hospitable spirit of one Goldenite did get me in rather bad; but perhaps the fault was more mine than his. Meeting him on the railway platform just as he was about to leave for Vancouver, he spoke with great enthusiasm of his garden, and said that he feared some of his fine strawberries might be going to waste in his absence for lack of some one to eat them. I gulped with eagerness at that, and then told him bluntly—and truthfully—that I would willingly steal to get strawberries and cream, provided, of course, that they couldn’t be acquired in some more conventional way. He hastened to reassure me, saying that it wouldn’t be necessary to go outside the law in this case. “The first chance you get,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, “just slip over and make love to my housekeeper, and tell her I said to give you your fill of berries and cream, and I have no doubt she’ll provide for you.”

If his Vancouver-bound train had not started to pull out just then, perhaps he would have explained that that accursed “love stuff” formula was a figure of speech. Or perhaps he felt sure that I would understand it that way, if not at once, at least when the time came. And I would have, ordinarily. But my strawberry-and-cream appetite is so overpowering that, like the lions at feeding time, my finer psychological instincts are blunted where satiation is in sight. That was why I blurted out my hospitable friend’s directions almost verbatim when I saw that the door of his home (to which I had rushed at my first opportunity) had been opened by a female. It was only after I had spoken that I saw that she was lean, angular, gimlet-eyed, and had hatred of all malekind indelibly stamped upon her dour visage. She drew in her breath whistlingly; then controlled herself with an effort. “I suppose I must give you the berries and cream,” she said slowly and deliberately, the clearly enunciated words falling icily like the drip from the glacial grottoes at the head of the Columbia; “but the—the other matter you would find a little difficult.”

“Ye-es, ma’am,” I quavered shiveringly, “I would. If you’ll please send the strawberries and cream to the hotel I am quite content to have it a cash transaction.”

Considering the way that rapier-thrust punctured me through and through, I felt that I deserved no little credit for sticking to my guns in the matter of the strawberries and cream. For the rest, I was floored. The next time any one tries to send me into the Hesperides after free fruit I am going to know who is guarding the apples; and I am not going to approach the delectable garden by the love-path.

I had taken especial pains to warn Roos what he would have to expect from Golden in the matter of warnings about the Big Bend, but in spite of all, that garrulous social centre, the town pool-room, did manage to slip one rather good one over on him before we got away. “How long does it take to go round the Bend?” he had asked of a circle of trappers and lumber-jacks who were busily engaged in their favourite winter indoor-sport of decorating the pool-room stove with a frieze of tobacco juice. “Figger it fer yerself, sonny,” replied a corpulent woodsman with a bandaged jaw. “If yer gets inter yer boat an’ lets it go in that ten-twent’-thirt’ mile current, it’s a simpl’ problum of ’rithmatick. If yer ain’t dished in a souse-hole, yer has ter make Revelstoke insider one day. As yer has ter do sum linin’ to keep right side up, it’s sum slower. Best time any of us makes it in is two days. But we never rushes it even like that ’nless we’re hurryin’ the cor’ner down ter sit on sum drownded body.”

As the whole court had nodded solemn acquiescence to this, and as none had cracked anything remotely resembling a smile, Roos was considerably impressed—not to say depressed. (So had I been the first time I heard that coroner yarn.) Nor did he find great comfort in the hotel proprietor’s really well-meant attempt at reassurance. “Don’t let that story bother you, my boy,” the genial McConnell had said; “they never did take the coroner round the Big Bend. Fact is, there never was a coroner here that had the guts to tackle it!”

We met Blackmore at Beavermouth the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of September. He reported that his boat had been shipped from Revelstoke by that morning’s way freight, and should arrive the following day. As I had been unable to engage a boatman in Golden, and as Blackmore had found only one in Revelstoke to suit him, it was decided to give me an oar and a pike-pole and make out the best we could without another man. I had brought provisions for a fortnight with me from Golden, and Blackmore had tents and canvases. Through the efforts of influential friends in Golden I had also been able to secure two bottles of prime Demerara rum. Knowing that I was going to pick up at least one cask of Scotch on the way, and perhaps two or three, I had not been very keen about bothering with the rum. But on the assurance that it might well be two or three days before any whisky was found, and that getting wet in the Columbia without something to restore the circulation was as good as suicide, I allowed myself to be persuaded. It was wonderful stuff—thirty per cent. over-proof; which means that it could be diluted with four parts of water and still retain enough potency to make an ordinary man blink if he tried to bolt it. We did find one man—but he was not ordinary by any means; far from it. I will tell about “Wild Bill” in the proper place.

There was a wonderful aurora borealis that night—quite the finest display of the kind I recall ever having seen in either the northern or southern hemispheres. Blackmore—weather-wise from long experience—regarded the marvellous display of lambently licking light streamers with mixed feelings. “Yes, it’s a fine show,” he said, following the opalescent glimmer of the fluttering pennants with a dubious eye; “but I’m afraid we’ll have to pay through the nose for it. It means that in a couple of days more the rain will be streaming down as fast as those lights are streaming up. Just about the time we get well into Surprise Rapids there will be about as much water in the air as in the river. However, it won’t matter much,” he concluded philosophically, “for we’ll be soaked anyway, whether we’re running or lining, and rain water’s ten degrees warmer than river water.”

CHAPTER VI
I. RUNNING THE BEND

Through Surprise Rapids

We pushed off from Beavermouth at three o’clock of the afternoon of September twenty-ninth. We had hoped for an early start, but the erratically running local freight, six or eight hours behind time, did not arrive with our boat until noon. The introductory shots had already been made. Made up momentarily as a gentleman—wearing an ankle length polished waterproof and a clean cap, that is,—I jumped the westbound Limited as it slowed down on entering the yard, dropping off presently at the platform with a “here-I-am” expression when Roos signalled that the focus was right. Then I shook hands with the waiting Blackmore, and together we strode to the door of the station and met the previously-rehearsed agent. (Roos had wanted me to shake hands with the agent as well as with Blackmore, but I overruled him by pointing out that I was a “gentleman-sportsman” not a “gentleman-politician,” and served notice on him that pump-handling must henceforth be reduced to a minimum.) We tried to perfect the agent in a sweeping gesture that would say as plainly as words “The train with your boat is just around that next bend, sir,” but somehow we couldn’t prevent his trying to elevate his lowly part. His lips mumbled the words we had put on them all right, but the gesture was a grandiose thing such as a Chesterfieldian footman might have employed in announcing “My Lord, the carriage waits.”

Roos, in all innocence, narrowly missed provoking a fight with a hot-tempered half-breed while he was setting up to shoot the incoming freight. He had an ingenious method of determining, without bending over his finder, just what his lens was going to “pick-up.” This consisted of holding his arms at full length, with his thumbs placed tip to tip and the forefingers standing straight up. The right-angling digits then framed for his eye an approximation of his picture. To one not used to it this esoteric performance looked distinctly queer, especially if he chanced to be standing somewhere near the arch priest’s line of vision. And that, as it happened, was exactly the place from which it was revealed to the choleric near-Shuswap section hand. I didn’t need the breed’s subsequent contrite explanation to know that, from where he had been standing, those twiddling thumbs and fingers, through the great fore-shortening of the arms, looked to be right on the end of the nose of the grimacing little man by the camera. Not even a self-respecting white man would have stood for what that twiddling connoted, let alone a man in whose veins flowed blood that must have been something like fifteen-sixteenths of the proudest of Canadian strains. Luckily, both Blackmore and his burly boatman were men of action. Even so, it was a near squeeze for both camera and cameraman. Roos emerged unscarred in anything but temperament. And, of course, as every one even on the fringes of the movies knows, the temperaments of both stars and directors are things that require frequent harrowing to keep them in good working order.

Roos’ filming of the unloading of the boat was the best thing he did on the trip. Every available man in Beavermouth was requisitioned. This must have been something like twenty-five or thirty. A half dozen, with skids and rollers, could have taken the boat off without exerting themselves seriously, but could hardly have “made it snappy.” And action was what the scene demanded. There was no time for a rehearsal. The agent simply told us where the car would be shunted to, Blackmore figured out the best line from there over the embankment and through the woods to the river, and Roos undertook to keep up with the procession with his camera. Blackmore was to superintend the technical operation and I was ordered to see that the men “acted natural.” And thus we went to it. The big boat, which must have weighed close to half a ton, came off its flat car like a paper shallop, but the resounding thwack with which her bows hit a switch-frog awakened Blackmore’s concern. “Easy! Easy! Don’t bust her bottom,” he began shouting; while I, on the other side, took up my refrain of “Don’t look at the camera!—make it snappy.” The consequence of these diametrically opposed orders was that the dozen or more men on my side did most of the work. But even so it was “snappy”—very.

Down the embankment we rushed like a speeding centipede, straight at the fine hog-proof wire fence of the C. P. R. right-of-way. That fence may have been hog-proof, but it was certainly not proof against the charge of a thirty-foot boat coming down a fifty per cent. grade pushed by twenty-five men. We had intended lifting over it, but our momentum was too great, especially after I had failed to desist from shouting “Make it snappy!” soon enough. The barrier gave way in two or three places, so that we were shedding trailing lengths of wire all the way to the river. On through the woods we juggernauted, Roos following in full cry. His city “news stuff” training was standing him in good stead, and he showed no less cleverness than agility in making successive “set-ups” without staying our progress. Only in the last fifty yards, where the going over the moss and pine needles was (comparatively speaking) lightning fast, did we distance him. Here, as there was plenty of time, he cut a hole in the trees and shot the launching through one of his favourite “sylvan frames.” For the push-off shot he provided his customary heart throb by bringing down the station agent’s three-year-old infant to wave farewell. That he didn’t try to feature the mother prominently seemed to indicate that what I had said at Windermere on the subject had had some effect.

After the “farewell” had been filmed, we landed at the fire ranger’s cabin to pick up Roos and his camera. The ranger told us that a couple of trappers who had been for some weeks engaged in portaging their winter supplies round Surprise Rapids would be waiting for us at the head of the first fall in the expectation of getting the job of packing our stuff down to the foot. “Nothing doing,” Blackmore replied decisively; “going straight through.” The ranger grinned and shook his grizzled head. “You’re the man to do it,” he said; “but jest the same, I’m glad it’s you and not me that has the job.”

The station agent came down with Roos, evidently with the cheering purpose of showing us the place where his predecessor and a couple of other men had been drowned in attempting to cross the river some months previously. “Only man in the boat to be picked up alive was a one-armed chap,” he concluded impressively. “Too late now for operations on any of this crew,” laughed Blackmore, pushing off with a pike-pole. “Besides, every man jack of us is going to have a two-arm job all the way.” To the parting cheers of the mackinawed mob on the bank, he eased out into the current and headed her down the Bend.

ARRIVAL OF OUR BOAT AT BEAVERMOUTH (above)
OUR FIRST CAMP AT BEAVERMOUTH (centre)
THE REMAINS OF A SUNKEN FOREST (below)

TRAPPER’S CABIN WHERE WE FOUND SHELTER FOR THE NIGHT (above)
WHERE WE LANDED ABOVE SURPRISE RAPIDS (centre)
WHERE WE TIED UP AT “EIGHT MILE” (below)

Roos stationed himself in the bow, with camera set up on its shortened tripod, waiting to surprise any scenery caught lurking along the way. Blackmore steered from the stern with his seven-feet-long birch paddle. Andy Kitson and I, pulling starboard and port oars respectively, rubbed shoulders on the broad ’midship’s thwart. Our outfit—a comparatively light load for so large a boat—was stowed pretty well aft. I saw Blackmore lean out to “con ship” as we got under way. “Good trim,” he pronounced finally, with an approving nod. “Just load enough to steady her, and yet leave plenty of freeboard for the sloppy water. This ought to be a dryer run than some the old girl’s had.” I chuckled to myself over that “dryer.” I hadn’t told Blackmore yet what was hidden down Canoe River way. I had promised Captain Armstrong not to do so until I had ascertained that we had a teetotal crew—or one comparatively so.

Andy Kitson was a big husky North-of-Irelander, who had spent twenty years trapping, packing, hunting, lumbering and boating in western Canada. Like the best of his kind, he was deliberate and sparing of speech most of the time, but with a fine reserve vocabulary for emergency use. He was careful and cautious, as all good river boatmen should be, but decidedly “all there” in a pinch. He pulled a good round-armed thumping stroke with his big oar, and took to the water (as has to be done so frequently on a bad stretch of “lining down”) like a beaver. Best of all, he had a temper which nothing from a leak in the tent dribbling down his neck to a half hour up to his waist in ice-cold water seemed equal to ruffling. I liked Andy the moment I set eyes on his shining red gill, and I liked him better and better every day I worked and camped with him.

As it was three-thirty when we finally pushed off, Blackmore announced that he would not try to make farther than “Eight-Mile” that afternoon. With comparatively good water all the way to the head of Surprise Rapids, we could have run right on through, he said; but that would force us to make camp after dark, and he disliked doing that unless he had to. In a current varying from three to eight miles an hour, we slid along down stream between banks golden-gay with the turning leaves of poplar, cottonwood and birch, the bright colours of which were strikingly accentuated by the sombre background of thick-growing spruce, hemlock, balsam and fir. Yellow, in a score of shades, was the prevailing colour, but here and there was a splash of glowing crimson from a patch of chin-chinick or Indian tobacco, or a mass of dull maroon where a wild rose clambered over the thicket. Closely confined between the Rockies to the right and the Selkirks to the west, the river held undeviatingly to its general northwesterly course, with only the patchiest of flats on either side. And this was the openest part of the Bend, Blackmore volunteered; from the head of Surprise Rapids to the foot of Priest Rapids the Columbia was so steeply walled that we would not find room for a clearing large enough to support a single cow. “It’s a dismal hole, and no mistake,” he said.

We took about an hour to run to “Eight Mile,” Andy and I pulling steadily all the way in the deep, smoothly-running current. We tied up in a quiet lagoon opening out to the west—evidently the mouth of a high-water channel. There was a magnificent stand of fir and spruce on a low bench running back from the river, not of great size on account of growing so thickly, but amazing lofty and straight. We camped in the shelter of the timber without pitching a tent, Andy and Blackmore sleeping in the open and Roos and I in a tumble-down trapper’s cabin. Or rather we spread our blankets in the infernal hole. As the place was both damp and rat-infested, we did not sleep. Roos spent the night chopping wood and feeding the rust-eaten—and therefore smoky—sheet-iron stove. I divided my time between growling at Roos for enticing me into keeping him company in the cabin against Blackmore’s advice, and throwing things at the prowling rodents. It did not make for increased cheerfulness when I hit him on the ear with a hob-nailed boot that I had intended for a pair of eyes gleaming vitreously on a line about six inches back of his gloomily bowed head. He argued—and with some reason I must admit—that I had no call to draw so fine a bead until I was surer of my aim. Largely as a point of repartee, I told him not to be too certain I was not sure of my aim. But I really had been trying to hit the rat....

I took the temperature of the air and the river water in the morning, finding the former to register thirty-eight degrees and the latter forty-one. There was a heavy mist resting on the river for a couple of hours after daybreak, but it was lifting by the time we were ready to push off. In running swift water good visibility is even more imperative than at sea, but as there was nothing immediately ahead to bother Blackmore did not wait for it to clear completely. The sun was shining brightly by nine-thirty, and Roos made several shots from the boat and one or two from the bank. One of the most remarkable sights unfolded to us was that of “Snag Town.” Just what was responsible for this queer maze of upended trees it would be hard to say. It seems probable, however, that a series of heavy spring floods undermined a considerable flat at the bend of the river, carrying away the earth and leaving the trees still partially rooted. The broadening of the channel must have slowed down the current a good deal, and it appears never to have been strong enough to scour out below the tenaciously clinging roots. The former lords of the forest are all dead, of course, but still they keep their places, inclining down-stream perhaps twenty-degrees from their former proud perpendicular, and firmly anchored. It takes careful steering to thread the maze even in a small boat, but the current is hardly fast enough to make a collision of serious moment.

The current quickened for a while beyond “Snag Town” and then began slowing again, the river broadening and deepening meanwhile. I thought I read the signs aright and asked Blackmore. “Yes,” he replied with a confirmatory nod; “it’s the river backing up for its big jump. Stop pulling a minute and you can probably hear the rapid growling even here.” Andy and I lay on our oars and listened. There it was surely enough, deep and distant but unmistakable—the old familiar drum-roll of a big river beating for the charge. It was tremendous music—heavy, air-quivering, earth-shaking; more the diapason of a great cataract than an ordinary rapid, it seemed to me. I was right. Surprise is anything but an ordinary rapid.

We pulled for a half hour or more down a broad stretch of slackening water that was more like a lake than a river. Out of the looming shadows of the banks for a space, mountain heights that had been cut off leaped boldly into view, and to left and right lifted a lofty sky-line notched with snowy peaks rising from corrugated fields of bottle-green glacier ice. Mt. Sanford, loftiest of the Selkirks, closed the end of the bosky perspective of Gold Creek, and the coldly chiselled pyramids of Lyell, Bryce and Columbia pricked out the high points on the Continental Divide of the Rockies. We held the vivid double panorama—or quadruple, really, for both ranges were reflected in the quiet water—for as long as it took us to pull to a beach at the narrowing lower end of the long lake-like stretch above the rapids, finally to lose it as suddenly as it had been opened to us behind the imminently-rearing river walls.

The two trappers of whom the fire-ranger at Beavermouth had spoken were waiting for us on the bank. They had permits for trapping on a couple of the creeks below Kinbasket Lake, and were getting down early in order to lay out their lines by the time the season opened a month or so hence. They had been packing their stuff over the three-mile portage to the foot of the rapids during the last three weeks, and now, with nothing left to go but their canoes, were free to give us a hand if we wanted them. Blackmore replied that he could save time and labour by running and lining the rapids. “Besides,” he added with a grin, “I take it these movie people have come out to get pictures of a river trip, not an overland journey.” The trappers took the dig in good part, but one of them riposted neatly. Since he was out for furs, he said, and was not taking pictures or boot-legging, time was not much of an object. The main thing with him was to reach his destination with his winter’s outfit. If all the river was like Surprise Rapids he would be quite content to go overland all the way. Neither of them made any comments on the stage of the water or offered any suggestions in connection with the job we had ahead. That was one comfort of travelling with Blackmore. In all matters pertaining to river work his judgment appeared to be beyond criticism. If he was tackling a stunt with a considerable element of risk in it, that was his own business. No one else knew the dangers, and how to avoid them, so well as he.

Blackmore looked to the trim of the boat carefully before shoving off, putting her down a bit more by the stern it seemed to me. He cautioned me on only one point as we pulled across the quarter of mile to where the banks ran close together and the quiet water ended. “Don’t never dip deep in the white water, and ’specially in the swirls,” he said, stressing each word. “If you do, a whirlpool is more’n likely to carry your oar-blade under the boat and tear out half the side ’fore you can clear your oar-lock. That’s the way that patched gunnel next you came to get smashed.” As we were about at the point where it is well to confine all the talking done in the boat to one man, I refrained from replying that I had been told the same thing in a dozen or so languages, on four different continents, and by “skippers” with black, yellow and copper as well as white skins, at fairly frequent intervals during the last fifteen years. There were enough slips I might make, but that of dipping deep in rough water was hardly likely to be one of them.

The rumble of the rapid grew heavier as we proceeded, but only a single flickering white “eyelash” revealed the imminent ambush lurking beyond the black rocks. The current accelerated rapidly as the walls closed in, but ran easily, effortlessly, unripplingly, and with an almost uncanny absence of swirls and eddies. “Have plenty way on her ’fore she hits the suds,” cautioned Blackmore, and Andy and I grunted in unison as we leaned a few more pounds of beef onto our bending spruces. That started our inside elbows to bumping, but without a word each of us sidled along an inch or two toward his gunwale to get well set while yet there was time.

With an easy bob—quick like a rowboat rides the bow wave of a steamer, but smoother, easier in its lift—we ran into the head of the rapid. There was a swift V-shaped chute of smooth jade-green water; then we slapped right into the “suds.” High-headed waves slammed against the bows and threw spray all over the boat and far astern of it. But they lacked jolt. They had too much froth and not enough green water to make them really formidable. We were in rough but not really bad water. I tried to grin at Blackmore to show him I understood the situation and was enjoying it highly; but his eyes, pin-points of concentration under bent brows, were directed over my head and far in advance. Plainly, he was thinking as well as looking well ahead.

Reassured by the smart way we were slashing through that first riffle, I ventured to steal a look over my shoulder. In the immediate foreground Roos, with his waterproof buttoned close around his neck, was shaking the spray out of his hair and watching for a chance to snap with his kodak. Ahead there was perhaps another hundred yards of about the same sort of water as that in which we were running; then a yeasty welter of white where the river disappeared round a black cliff into what seemed a narrow gorge. Opposite the cliff the river wall sloped slightly and was thickly covered with a dense growth of evergreen. The heavy roar we had been hearing for hours was still muffled. Evidently the main disturbance was somewhere beyond the bend at the cliff.

The thunder of falling water grew louder as we headed down toward the white smother in the embrasure of the bend, and it was from Blackmore’s lips rather than from any words I heard that I gathered that he was calling for “More way!” Still keeping fairly good stroke, Andy and I quickly had her going enough faster than the current to give the big paddle all the steerage “grip” Blackmore could ask for. Swinging her sharply to the right, he headed her past the out-reaching rock claws at the foot of the cliff, and, with a sudden blaze of light and an ear-shattering rush of sound we were into the first and worst fall of Surprise Rapids.

That dual onslaught of light and sound had something of the paralyzing suddenness of that which occurs when a furnace door is thrown wide and eye and ear are assailed at the same instant with the glare and the roar from within. One moment we were running in a shadowed gorge with a heavy but deadened and apparently distant rumble sounding somewhere ahead; the next we were in the heart of a roar that fairly scoured our ear-drums, and blinking in a fluttering white light that seemed to sear the eyeballs. The one hurried glance that I threw behind me as I began floundering on the end of my kicking oar photographed an intensely vivid picture on my memory.

What had been merely a swiftly-flowing river with a streak of silver riffles down the middle had changed to a tumultuous tumble of cascades that gleamed in solid white from bank to bank like the churned snow of a freshly descended avalanche. There was no green water whatever; not even a streak that was tinged with green. All that relieved the coruscating, sun-silvered tumble of whiteness were the black tips of jutting bedrock, sticking up through the foam they had churned. The deeply shadowed western wall, hanging above the river like a dusky pall, served only to accentuate by contrast the intense white light that danced above the cascade. It was as though the golden yellow had been filtered out of the sunlight in the depths, and only the pure blue-white of calcium reflected back into the atmosphere.

Heavy as was the fall of the river over the stretch we had now entered, I could just make out a point perhaps a half mile farther down where it dropped out of sight entirely. That, I told myself, must be the place where there was an unbroken reef of bedrock all the way across the stream, and where there was an abrupt drop of eight or ten feet. A great throbbing rumble cutting into the slightly higher-keyed roar that already engulfed us also seemed to indicate that the steepest pitch had not yet been reached. I had, of course, seen worse water than this, but certainly had never (as appeared to be the case now) been irretrievably committed to running it. I had heard that it was quite unrunnable in any kind of a boat, it certainly looked unrunnable, and I seemed to have the impression that Blackmore had said he was not intending to run it. Yet here we were into it, and without (so far as I could see) anything to do but drive ahead. However, that was Blackmore’s affair....