Part 17 (1/2)

The ferry-man a.s.sured me that I would encounter no really bad water until I came to the last pitch of Umatilla Rapids, about thirty-five miles below. He advised me to take a good look at that before putting into it, as an unbroken reef ran almost directly across the current and the channel was not easy to locate. It was the most troublesome bar to navigation on the lower Columbia, and steamers were repeatedly getting in trouble there. I would see the latest wreck a couple of miles below the foot of the rapids.

I pa.s.sed the mouth of the Snake about three miles below the ferry. Here was no such spectacular meeting of waters as occurs when the Pend d'Oreille and Columbia spring together, for the country is low and level, and the mouth of the Snake broad and shallow. The discharge was through two channels, and the water greenish-grey in colour; but where that blend in the swift tributaries of the upper river suggests the intense coldness of glacial origin, here the picture conjured up was of desert and alkali plains. Its mouth is the least interesting part of the Snake. It has some magnificent canyons in its upper and middle waters--as have also its two fine tributaries, the Salmon and Clearwater,--and its Shoshone Falls are second only to Niagara on the North American continent.

Lieutenant Symons, who concluded his exploration of the upper Columbia at the Snake, characterizes the region as a ”bleak, dreary waste, in which for many miles around sage-brush and sand predominate ... one of the most abominable places in the country to live in.” Alexander Ross, on the other hand, writing seventy years earlier, describes it as one of the loveliest lands imaginable. The fact that the one reached the Snake in the fall and the other in the spring may have had something to do with these diametrically opposed impressions. Irrigation and cultivation have gone far to redeem this land from the desert Symons found it, but it is still far from being quite the Paradise Ross seemed to think it was. As the only considerable plain touching the Columbia at any point in its course, this region of the Snake can never make the scenic appeal of the hundreds of miles of cliff-walled gorges above and below; but it is a land of great potential richness. With water and power available from the two greatest rivers of the West, there can be no question of its future, both agriculturally and industrially. Pasco will yet more than fulfil the promises made for that mushroom town in its early boom days. ”KEEP YOUR EYE ON PASCO!” was a byword from one end of the country to the other in the nineties, and this hustling rail and agricultural centre at the junction of the Columbia and the Snake should not be lost sight of even to-day.

The lighter-hued water of the Snake was pretty well churned into the flood of the Columbia at the end of a mile, leaving a faint suggestion of cloudiness in the transparent green that the latter had preserved all the way from the Arrow Lakes. The long bridge of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway spanned the Columbia just below the Snake, and from there on paralleled the river closely right down to the Willamette.

After the Oregon-Was.h.i.+ngton Railway and Navigation Company tracks appeared on the south bank below the Walla Walla, it was only at rare intervals that I was out of sight of a grade, or out of sound of a train, for the remainder of my voyage. In a day or two the trainmen, running back and forth between divisional points, came to recognize the bright green skiff plugging on down the dark green river (mighty small she must have looked to them from the banks) and never failed to give her a hail or a wave in pa.s.sing. On a certain memorable occasion one of them (doubtless in direct defiance of rules) ventured even further in the way of a warning ... but I will tell of that in its place.

Homley Rapids, seven miles below Pasco ferry, are formed by a rough reef of bedrock running half way across the river from the right bank.

Approached from the right side of the long gravel island that divides the river just above them, one might get badly tangled up before he got through; by the left-hand channel the going is easy if one keeps an eye on the shallowing water at the bars. A sky-line of brown mountains, with a double-turreted b.u.t.te as their most conspicuous feature, marks the point where the Columbia finally turns west for its a.s.sault on the Cascades and its plunge to the Pacific. That bend is the boundary of the fertile plains extending from the Yakima to the Walla Walla, and the beginning of a new series of gorges, in some respects the grandest of all. The matchless panorama of the Cascade gorges is a fitting finale to the stupendous scenic pageant that has been staged all the way from the glacial sources of the Columbia.

A low sandy beach just above the mouth of the rather insignificant Walla Walla comes pretty near to being the most historically important point on the Columbia. Here Lewis and Clark first came to the waters of the long-struggled-toward Oregon; here came Fremont, the ”Pathfinder;” here Thompson planted his pious proclamation claiming all of the valley of the Columbia for the Northwest Company; and by here, sooner or later, pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed practically every one of the trappers, missionaries, settlers and other pioneers who were finally to bring Oregon permanently under the Stars and Stripes.

The double-topped b.u.t.te, an outstanding landmark for _voyageurs_ for a hundred years, has long been called ”The Two Virgins.” The story is told locally of a Catholic priest who saved his life by taking refuge in a cave between the castellated turrets during an Indian ma.s.sacre, but who got in rather serious trouble with the Church afterwards as a consequence of sending words of his deliverance by a French-Canadian half-breed _voyageur_. The latter got the salient details of the story straight, but neglected to explain that the two virgins were mountains.

The result was that the unlucky priest narrowly missed excommunication for saving his life at the expense of breaking his vows. I got no affidavit with the story; but local ”stock” yarns are always worth preserving on account of their colour.

There were a number of big black rocks where the river began its bend to the west, but the channel to the right was not hard to follow. Neither did Bull Run Rapids, a few miles farther down, offer any difficulties. I followed the steamer channel as having the swiftest current, but could have pa.s.sed without trouble on either side of it in much quieter water.

Brown and terra-cotta-tinged cliffs reared higher and higher to left and right, encroaching closely on the river. There was little room for cultivation at any point, and often the railways had had to resort to heavy cutting and tunnelling to find a way through some jutting rock b.u.t.tress. There were no trees, and the general aspect of the country was desolate in the extreme.

It was toward the end of a grey afternoon that I headed _Imshallah_ into the first pitch of Umatilla Rapids. The sun had dissolved into a slowly thickening mist about three o'clock, and from then on the whole landscape had been gradually neutralizing itself by taking on shade after shade of dull, inconspicuous grey. From the grey-white mistiness of the sky to the grey-green murkiness of the river there was nothing that contrasted with anything else; every object was blended, dissolved, all but quenched. The foam-ruffles above even the sharpest of the riffles blurred like the streaking of clouded marble at a hundred feet, and it took the livest kind of a lookout to avoid the ones with teeth in them. Neither the first nor the second riffle had any very bad water, but my neck was stiff from watching over my shoulder even as they were.

I had rather intended avoiding this trouble by drifting down anything that looked very threatening stern first, but that would have involved retr.i.m.m.i.n.g the boat and greatly reducing her speed. If I was going to make Umatilla by dark, there was no time to lose.

From the head of the first riffle of Umatilla Rapids to the head of the third or main one is a mile and a half. There was a slight up-river breeze blowing in the mist, and the heavy rumble of the big fall came to my ears some distance above the opening riffle. The distant roar augmented steadily after that, and the sharper grind of the more imminent riffles was never loud enough to drown it out entirely. The fact that it had a certain ”all pervasive” quality, seeming to fill the whole of the gorge with its heavy beat, told me that it was an unusually long rapid, as well as an unusually rough one. That, it seemed, was about all I was going to be able to find out. No one was in sight on the left bank, which I was skirting, and the right bank was masked with mist. With none to seek information from, and with not enough light to see for myself, the alternatives were very simple: I could either land, line as far as I could while light lasted and then seek Umatilla on foot for the night, or I could take my chance at running through. It was the delay and uncertainty sure to be attendant upon lining that was the princ.i.p.al factor in deciding me to try the latter course. Also, I knew that there was an open channel all the way through, and that the rapid was a comparatively broad and shallow one, rather than constricted and deep. This meant that it would be straight white water--a succession of broken waves--I was going into, rather than heavy swirls and whirlpools; just the water in which the skiff had already proved she was at her best. These points seemed to minimize the risk of going wrong to a point where the chance of running was worth taking for the time and trouble it would save. If I had not known these things in advance, I should never, of course, have risked going into so strong a rapid under such conditions of light.

I shall always have a very grateful feeling toward that Pasco ferry-man for those few words he dropped about the run of the reef and the set of the current at Umatilla Rapid. This is one of the few great rapids I have ever known on any river where the main drift of the current will not carry a boat to the deepest channel. This is due to the fact that the great reef of native rock which causes the rapid is sufficiently submerged even at middle water to permit a considerable flow directly across it. The consequence of this is that a boat, large or small, which follows the current and does not start soon enough working over toward the point where a channel has been blasted through the reef, is almost certain to be carried directly upon the latter. This has happened to a good many steamers, the latest having been wrecked not long before my voyage.

With a rough idea of the lay of things in my mind, I had edged a good deal farther out across the current than would have been the case had I been trusting to my own judgment of the way the rapid _ought_ to develop in the light of my past experience. The smooth but swiftly-flowing water to the left looked almost empty of threat, and it was not until I was within a hundred feet of the barrier that I saw it was flowing directly over the latter and went tumbling down the farther side in an almost straight fall. At the same instant I saw that I was still heading forty or fifty feet to the left of where the ”intake” dipped through the break in the reef. Realizing that I could never make it by heading straight, I swung the skiff round and pulled quartering to the current with her head up-stream. Even then it was a nearer squeak than I like to think of. I missed the middle of the ”V” by ten feet as I swung her head down-stream again, and as the racing current carried her up against the back-wave thrown off the end of the break in the reef she heeled heavily to starboard, like an auto turning on a steeply-banked track. Then she shot out into the big white combers in mid-channel and started slap-banging down through them. It looked beastly rough ahead, but in any event it was better than hanging up on the reef at the outset. We were going to have a run for our money whatever happened.

The only precautions there had been time to take were slipping into my ”Gieve” and throwing all my luggage aft. Half-inflated, the rubber-lined jacket was no handicap in rowing, and the tube hung ready to receive more air if necessity arose. As for the trim, it had been my snap judgment at the last moment that it would be better to give the skiff her head in the rollers that I _knew_ were coming, and let her take her chance in being down by the stern in whirlpools that might never materialize. I still think that was the best thing to have done under the circ.u.mstances.

Not until I was right down into that wild wallow of rock-churned foam was there a chance to get an idea of the rather remarkable bedrock formation which is responsible for making Umatilla Rapids the worrisome problem they have always been for river skippers. After piercing the black basaltic barrier of the reef, the channel shoots to the left and runs for a quarter of a mile or more (I was too busy to judge distances accurately) right along the foot of it. With a considerable stream of water cascading over the reef at almost right angles to the channel, a queer sort of side-kick is thrown into the waves of the latter which make it one of the most ”unrhythmic” rapids I ever ran. _Imshallah_ pounded horribly, but gave not the savagest of the twisting combers a chance to put anything solid over her high held head. My erratic pecking strokes did not find green water often enough to give her much way over the current, but she responded instantly every time I dug deep to throw her head back after she had been buffeted sideways by an arrogant ruffian of a roller.

As soon as I saw the way she was riding the roughest of the water, I realized that the only chance of a bad mess-up would come through my failure to keep her head to the enemy. Knowing this wasn't likely to happen unless I broke an oar, I eased a bit on my pulling and gave just a quick short-arm jerk now and then to hold her steady. She was never near to broaching-to, and I'm mighty glad she wasn't. Umatilla is the sort of a rapid that hasn't quite the teeth to get the best of a carefully handled boat that is running in good luck, but which has the power, with a mile to spare, to grind to match-wood any craft that gets into trouble on its own account. It was an eerie run that--with the snarling cascade of the reef on one side, the ghostly dance of the rollers on the other, and the impenetrable grey curtain of the mist blanking everything beyond a radius of a hundred feet; but _Imshallah_ went through it with her head in the air and came waltzing out into the swirls below as c.o.c.ky as a partridge. Indeed, that was just the trouble.

The pair of us were just a bit _too_ c.o.c.ky over the way we had gone it blind and come through so smartly. It remained for a couple of lesser rapids to reduce both of us to a proper humility of spirit.

I had been prepared to make a quick s.h.i.+ft to the forward thwart in case there was a bad run of whirlpools following the rapid, and so bring her up by the stern. This did not prove necessary, however, as the rapidly broadening river was too shallow for dangerous under-currents. A short run in slackening water brought me to the town of Umatilla just as the lights were beginning to twinkle in the windows. Landing in the quiet water below a short stone jetty, I left my stuff in a nearby shack and sought the hotel. The pool-room ”stove-decorators” refused to believe I had come through the rapid until I described it to them. Then they said it was better to be a lucky darnfool on the Columbia than an unlucky school-teacher. ”School-teacher,” it appeared, was the local apotheosis of Wisdom, and stood at the opposite pole from ”darnfool.” It seems that there had been two male school-teachers drowned in Umatilla that summer and only one darnfool, and they were rather put out at me for having failed to even up the score. Then they tried to spoil my evening by telling me all the things that had happened to people in Devil's Run Rapids, which I would go into just below the mouth of the river the first thing in the morning. They had me rather fussed for a while, too--until they told one about a farmer who, after having had his launch upset on his way home from his wedding, swam out with his bride in his arms. I told them I'd try to get that l.u.s.ty swimmer to tow me through Devil's Run in the morning, and turned in for a good sleep.

Umatilla is a decrepit little old town that knew its best days away back in the last century, when it was the head of steamer navigation on the Columbia and the terminus of the freighting route to Idaho and eastern Was.h.i.+ngton. There are rich irrigated lands farther up the Umatilla River, but the development of these seems to have done little for the stagnating old settlement by the Columbia, which has little left but its historic memories. It was by the Umatilla that the rugged Hunt and the remnants of the Astor overland party came to the Columbia, after what was perhaps the most terrible journey ever made across the continent.

And all through the time of the _voyageurs_, the trappers and the pioneers, Umatilla was only less important as a halting and portage point than the Cascades and the Dalles.

I pulled away from the jetty of Umatilla at eight o'clock in the morning of November fifteenth. The sky was clear and there was no trace of the mist of the previous evening. There was brilliant, diamond-bright visibility on the river, with the usual early morning mirage effects, due to the chill stratum of air lying close to the water. This exaggerated considerably the height of distant riffles, lifting them up into eye-scope much sooner than they would have been picked up ordinarily. I put on my ”Gieve” and blew it up in antic.i.p.ation of a stiff fight at Devil's Run, only to find just enough rocks and riffles there to make me certain of locating them. I could see, however, that the formation was such that there might have been very troublesome water there at higher, and possibly lower, stages. Out of charity for the tellers of a good many awesome tales I had to listen to in respect of rapids I subsequently found to be comparatively innocuous, I am inclined to believe that a number of them were substantially straight accounts of disasters which had actually occurred in flood season, or at times when other water levels than those I encountered made the riffles in question much more troublesome.

I had an easy day of it for rapids, but, as a consequence of the comparatively slow water, rather a hard one for pulling. Canoe Encampment Rapids, twenty miles below Devil's Run, gave me a good lift for a mile or more, but not enough to make much of a respite from the oars if I was going to make the fifty miles I had set for my day's run.

I was still ten miles short of that at four o'clock when a drizzling rain setting in from the south-west decided me to land for shelter at Hepburn Junction, on the left bank. That was the first rain I had encountered since pa.s.sing the Canadian Boundary, after a month of practically continuous storms. There was nothing but a railway station at the Junction, but a nearby road-camp offered the chance of food and shelter. The young contractor--he was doing the concrete work on a State Highway bridge at that point--eyed my bedraggled figure somewhat disapprovingly at first, at a loss, apparently, as to whether I was a straight hobo or merely a disguised boot-legger. An instant later we had recognized each other as football opponents of Los Angeles-Pasadena school-days. His name was Walter Rees, of a family prominent among early Southern California pioneers. With the rain pattering on the tent roof, we talked each other to sleep lamenting the good old days of the ”flying wedge” and ma.s.sed play in football.

It was clear again the following morning, but with a mistiness to the west masking Mount Hood and the Cascades, to which I was now coming very near. The cliffs had been rearing up higher and higher at every mile, great walls of red-brown and black rock strongly suggestive, in their rugged barrenness, of the b.u.t.tressed, turreted and columned formation through which the river runs below the mouth of the Spokane. Owyhee, Blalock and Four O'clock rapids were easy running, but the sustained roar which the slight up-river breeze brought to my ears as the black, right-angling gorge of Rock Creek came in sight was fair warning that there was really rough water ahead. Although I had been able to gather very little information along the way, the fact that I had so far descended but a small part of the two hundred feet of drop between Umatilla and Celilo Falls meant that the several rapids immediately ahead would have to make up for the loafing the Columbia had been guilty of for the last sixty miles.

Taking advantage of the quiet stretch of water below Four O'clock Rapids, I went all over the skiff as she drifted in the easy current, tuning her up for the slap-banging she could not fail to receive in the long succession of sharp riffles which began at Rock Creek. In tightening up the bra.s.s screws along the gunwale, I removed and threw into the bottom of the boat both of my oar-locks. When I started to restore them to place as the roar of the nearing rapid grew louder, I found that one of them--the left--had been kicked out of reach under the bottom-boards. Rather than go to the trouble of tearing up the latter just then, I replaced the missing lock with one from my duffle-bag, a roughly-smithed piece of iron that I had carried away as a mascot from an old _batteau_ at Boat Encampment. It proved quite a bit too snug for its socket, besides being a deal wider than it should have been for the shaft of my light oar. There was a spoon oar, with a ring lock, under the thwarts, but I was somewhat chary of using it since its mate had snapped with me below Rock Island Rapids.