Читать книгу Down the Columbia - Lewis R. Freeman - Страница 5

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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 BC 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 BC 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.