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.

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.