Down the Columbia
by Lewis R. Freeman · English · Gutenberg #38249 · 663,273 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Down the Columbia
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Release date: December 9, 2011 [eBook #38249]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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DOWN THE COLUMBIA
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: Publisher's logo]
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. Fremont 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
Mt. Sir Donald, which drains from all sides to the Columbia
_Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Mt. Assiniboine, near the headwaters of the Columbia 10
Twin Falls, Takakaw Falls, two great cataracts of the
Columbia watershed 11
The "turning-in" scene shot in silhouette 38
"Reverse" of the "going-to-bed" shot 38
On the Horse Thief Trail 39
A dead-fall on the trail 39
Looking toward the entrance of the ice cave 52
Where the Hanging Glacier is about to fall 53
My shower bath in an ice cave 58
Warming up after my glacial shower bath 58
Ross and Harmon. Dragon moraine in distance 59
The horses in the mouth of the ice cave 59
Looking across the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers 66
The Lake of the Hanging Glaciers, taken from the ice
walls, looking north 67
The face of the Hanging Glacier 72
Where my party foregathered with Harmon's on the shore
of the Lake of the Hanging Glacier 73
Old Hudson Bay cart at Beavermouth 80
My first push-off at the head of canoe navigation on the
Columbia 80
Opening scene of the "Farmer" picture 81
Old stern wheelers at Golden 81
A quiet stretch of the Columbia near Golden 81
Arrival of our boat at Beavermouth 96
Our first camp at Beavermouth 96
The remains of a sunken forest 96
Trapper's cabin where we found shelter for the night 97
Where we landed above Surprise Rapids 97
Where we tied up at "Eight mile" 97
"Shooting" the first bit of lining at Surprise Rapids 122
The camp where the roar of the rapids deafened us 122
Where Steinhof was drowned 122
Where Andy just missed drowning in Surprise Rapids 123
Looking through the pines at Surprise Rapids 123
Head of second fall of Surprise Rapids 123
Blackmore and the ling that refused to "register" 142
The winter, with pike-pole just before lining Death Rapids 142
Andy and I pulling down Kinbasket Lake 143
Our wettest camp, at Kinbasket Lake 156
The old ferry tower above Canoe River 156
Where we tied up at Kinbasket Lake 157
The bridge which the Columbia carried a hundred miles and
placed across another stream 157
Lining down to the head of Death Rapids 157
Trapper's cabin being undermined by stream 168
The camp above Twelve-Mile 168
Landing at sunset above Canoe River 169
Andy and Blackmore swinging the boat into the head of
Rock Slide Rapids 169
The big rollers, from 15 to 20 feet from hollow to crest, at
head of Death Rapids 169
Looking across to Boat Encampment 180
"Wood smoke at twilight" above Twelve-Mile 180
Lining down Rock Slide Rapids 181
When the Columbia took half of my riding breeches 181
Bonnington Falls of the Kootenay 198
Plastered log cabin in the Doukhobor village 198
Trucking the skiff through Kettle Falls 199
Twilight in the gorge at Kettle Falls 199
Waiting for the fog to lift above Bishop's Rapids 210
Ross and Armstrong registering "gloom" 210
The "intake" at the Little Dalles 211
Where we started to line the Little Dalles 211
Map of the Upper Columbia 236
A "close-up" of Ike building his raft 237
My fifty pound salmon 237
Ike riding a log 256
Ike on the mooring line of the raft 256
Raft in tow of launch near mouth of San Poil 257
Ike at the sweep below Hell Gate 257
The suspension bridge at Chelan Falls 270
Old River veterans on the landing at Potaris. (Capt. McDermid
on left, Ike Emerson on right) 270
Night was falling as we headed into Box Canyon 271
The Columbia above Box Canyon 271
A rocky cliff near head of Lake Chelan 288
Rainbow Falls, 350 feet high, above head of Lake Chelan 288
Wenatchee under the dust cloud of its speeding autos 289
Head of Rock Island Rapids 289
The picture that cost me a wetting 310
The wreck of the "Douglas" 310
We cooked our breakfast in the galley of the wreck of the
"Douglas" 311
A rocky cliff above Beverly 311
Lifted drawbridge on Celilo Canal 354
Tumwater Gorge of the Grand Dalles 354
"Imshallah" in the lock at Five-Mile 355
"Imshallah" half way through the Celilo Canal 355
Palisade Rock, lower Columbia River 362
Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Highway, near Portland 363
City of Portland with Mt. Hood in the distance 370
Bridge on Columbia Highway near Portland, Oregon 371
DOWN THE COLUMBIA
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.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
MT. ASSINIBOINE, NEAR THE HEADWATERS OF THE COLUMBIA]
[Illustration: TWIN FALLS]
[Illustration: TAKAKAW FALLS
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 bootleg 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 manoeuvre 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 manoeuvring 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 role 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 role, 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.
[Illustration: THE "TURNING-IN" SCENE SHOT IN SILHOUETTE (_above_)]
[Illustration: "REVERSE" OF THE "GOING-TO-BED" SHOT (_below_)]
[Illustration: ON THE HORSE THIEF TRAIL]
[Illustration: A DEAD-FALL ON THE TRAIL]
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.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
LOOKING TOWARD THE ENTRANCE OF THE ICE CAVE]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: MY SHOWER BATH IN AN ICE CAVE]
[Illustration: WARMING UP AFTER MY GLACIAL SHOWER BATH]
[Illustration: ROSS AND HARMON. DRAGON MORAINE IN DISTANCE (_above_)]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
LOOKING ACROSS THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS]
[Illustration: 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 role!
"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.
[Illustration: Courtesy of Byron Harmon, Banff
THE FACE OF THE HANGING GLACIER]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: OLD HUDSON BAY CART AT BEAVERMOUTH (_above_)]
[Illustration: MY FIRST PUSH-OFF AT THE HEAD OF CANOE NAVIGATION ON THE
COLUMBIA (_below_)]
[Illustration: OPENING SCENE OF THE "FARMER" PICTURE]
[Illustration: OLD STERN WHEELERS AT GOLDEN (_above_)]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: ARRIVAL OF OUR BOAT AT BEAVERMOUTH (_above_)]
[Illustration: OUR FIRST CAMP AT BEAVERMOUTH (_centre_)]
[Illustration: THE REMAINS OF A SUNKEN FOREST (_below_)]
[Illustration: TRAPPER'S CABIN WHERE WE FOUND SHELTER FOR THE NIGHT
(_above_)]
[Illustration: WHERE WE LANDED ABOVE SURPRISE RAPIDS (_centre_)]
[Illustration: 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....
The rather smart team-work which Andy and I had maintained for a while
dissolved like the morning mists as we banged in among the walloping
rollers at the head of the real cascade. Both of us were in
difficulties, but his round-armed thumping stroke seemed rather more
true to form than the shattered remnants of my fine straight-armed
slide-and-recover, with its dainty surface-skimming "feather." Nothing
but the sharpest of dabs with the tip of an oar can get any hold in a
current of fifteen to twenty miles an hour, and the short, wristy pull
(which is all there is time for) doesn't impart a lot of impulse to a
thirty-foot boat. That, and the staggering buffets on the bows, for it
was solid, lumpy water that was coming over us now, quickly reduced our
headway. (Headway _through_ the current, I mean; our headway floating
_in_ the current was terrific.) This was, of course, a serious handicap
to Blackmore, as it deprived him of much of the steerage-way upon which
he was dependent for quick handling of the boat. The difficulty of
maintaining steerage-way in rough water with oars makes a bow as well as
a stern paddle very desirable in running bad rapids. The bow paddler can
keep a very sharp lookout for rocks immediately ahead, and, in a pinch,
can jerk the boat bodily to one side or the other, where oarsmen have to
_swing_ it. However, Blackmore knew just what he was going up against,
and had made the best disposition possible of his available crew.
I was too busy keeping myself from being bucked off the thwart by my
floundering oar to steal more than that first hurried look over my
shoulder. It was not my concern what was ahead anyway. All I had to do
was to take a slap at the top of a wave every time I saw a chance, and
be ready to back, or throw my weight into a heavy stroke, when Blackmore
needed help to turn her this way or that. My signal--a jerk of the
steersman's head to the left--came sooner than I expected. It looked a
sheer impossibility to drive through the maze of rocks to the bank, yet
that--after a long, anxious look ahead--was evidently what he had
decided to attempt. As it was my oar he called on, I knew it was the
right or east bank, a sharply sloping reach of black bedrock littered
with water-scoured boulders.
By the way Blackmore was leaning onto his paddle I knew that he needed
all the pull I could give him to bring her round. Swinging back hard, I
threw every pound I had onto my oar. For an instant the lack of
resistance as the blade tore through foam nearly se
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