The Columbia

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - River Remote and Wild

Chapter 2 - The Explorers

Chapter 3 - The Astorians

Chapter 4 - The Bay Company’s Capital

Chapter 5 - Oregon Is Born

Chapter 6 - The Steamboat Era

Chapter 7 - Coming of the Steamcars

Chapter 8 - CPR—A Spearhead of Empire

Chapter 9 - The Last Stern-Wheeler

Chapter 10 - A Wilderness Prophet

Chapter 11 - Timber

Chapter 12 - Salmon

Chapter 13 - Two Men Named Hill

Chapter 14 - New Pioneers at Longview

Chapter 15 - Canals, Locks and a Dam

Chapter 16 - The Dam Era Begins

Chapter 17 - The River as Powerhouse

Chapter 18 - The River at Mid-Century

Stewart H. Holbrook

The COLUMBIA

The Columbia

Copyright © 2016 Stewart H. Holbrook

Copyright © 2016 Sibyl Holbrook

Northwest Corner Books

Published by Epicenter Press

Fairbanks, Alaska and Kenmore, Washington

Originally published by

Rinehart and Co., Inc.

Copyright © 1956

No part of this publication may be reproduced of transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016919336

Print ISBN: 9781941890080

Ebook ISBN: 9781935347927

Cover image courtesy of The Library of Congress

Cover and interior layout and design: Jeanie James, 

Shorebird Creative LLC

Chapter 1 - River Remote and Wild

ABOUT THE HEADWATERS of a river there is something of the mystery of Genesis. I felt it as a boy long ago in Vermont when I heard men who had been there speak of the headwaters of the Connecticut. The word was magic. Though I wanted desperately to know, I did not think it proper to ask what a headwaters was like. I imagined it to be a sort of never-failing geyser, a lonely fountain spouting in one specific spot, and let it go at that.

It seemed to me then that the bold fellows who had seen a headwaters were in the select company of great explorers. They had been to the Source. The source was of necessity in some remote place, wholly inaccessible, even unknown, save to a few God-given men. Beyond the source there was nothing, nothing at all. Here you had arrived at Genesis, and you stood to look in awe upon the First Cause, where Adam drank, Eve bathed, and Deity moved over the face of the waters and commanded this stream to flow and gather together with other waters and be called the seas. And the evening and the morning were the third day …

On the other side of the continent, and forty years later, I discovered again that the magic and mystery of the headwaters were universal and timeless, and they applied to the sources of the Columbia. And at last I stood at the fountainhead, which starts the great surging stream on its tortured way a matter of more than twelve hundred miles to the sea. The spell was there. I felt a sense of achievement, not because of any hardships surmounted in getting there, but simply that by being there I was permitted to share in a cosmic secret.

The headwaters of the Columbia are in a small lake of the same name. The lake lies blue and cold and deep in British Columbia, on the high roof of the continent. Its eastern bank rises abruptly as a sheer wall of the Rocky Mountains. On the west are the magnificent Selkirks. It is a most satisfactory place for the giant of Western rivers to begin. Here hemmed by two great mountain ranges is the source of the Columbia. I looked at this complete drama in stone and water and wondered if the slow process of geological architecture had ever fashioned anything more fitting.

• • •

BY THE TIME I came to see its headwaters, I had already lived thirty years on the lower Columbia. I had also seen long stretches of it over much of a thousand miles, but never seen its source or felt the magic of its headwaters, of standing in a high mountain valley where springs a stream that is to flow in four directions and a thousand miles before it can break through its barrier to be lost in the anonymous sea.

Standing at the source gives a man the sense that he has at last come to understand a river. On him descends the complete assurance of those ancients who composed the books of the Old Testament. They had no doubts as to where and how things had their beginnings. Once I had stood here at the headwaters, I had no doubts about where and how the Columbia began. Here at the source, too, I found myself looking at the stream from a new viewpoint. It wasn’t possessive. The Columbia is not a cozy river, not the kind a man can feel belongs to him. It was rather a satisfying sense of having followed a big stream from its outlet to its source. Only people who have done as much will understand, while those unfortunates who have no feeling about a headwaters will think the whole business inexplicable.

Standing at the headwaters I found it a good spot to reflect on some of the places and people which and who have meant something or other in the life of the river; a good place to follow in imagination its course through wilderness and desert, to watch while it steadily grows bigger and at last is strong enough to cut through the last mountains that would bar it from the sea. Yet, no guidebook voyage. I like to be leisurely, to pause along the way to relate the river of yesterday to the river of the day before that.

I think I enjoy a dramatic or a soothing piece of scenery as well as the next man; but I happen to enjoy it infinitely more if I know that what I am looking at was once witness to some event in history. Big or small history. I like to know, for instance, that this little lake set between two mountain ranges is little more than six thousand feet from the Kootenay River which is here rushing south, while the Columbia starts north; and that once upon a time an ingenious Englishman dug a canal between the two and that a steamboat came up the Kootenay from Montana and crossed over to ply the far upper Columbia. The same geographical oddity may also explain what is otherwise a deep mystery in regard to fish. Not so long ago, huge Pacific salmon fought their way from the sea to these headwaters of the Columbia, twelve thousand miles against current and 2,650 feet against gravity. It was an epic voyage, even for so powerful and determined a species as the seagoing salmon. Then, in some forgotten year of freshet, when the Kootenay overflowed the narrow strip called Canal Flats that separates the two streams, salmon of Columbia Lake went adventuring and became progenitors of the landlocked fish which ever since have stocked the Kootenay. There seems to be no other way to explain the presence of true Pacific salmon in Kootenay Lake whose outlet is wholly proof against the entrance of fish, any fish.

Thus when I look at the headwaters, I see not only a handsome body of water, but can relate it to the heroic event of bringing a steamboat into a river at its source; and can also reflect on the marvel of nature stocking, by a roundabout method, a landlocked stream with fish from the deeps of the Pacific.

But to follow the Columbia. I mean as it was before man started to harness it with dams in the second quarter of this century. For more than two hundred miles after it leaves headwaters it must flow almost straight north, heading for the Arctic, before it can escape around its western barrier of the Selkirks. Then, in an astonishingly sudden bend, it turns to plunge south and to head, after its own fashion, for the Pacific Ocean. This quick turn is at the apex of the stream’s northern flow. It is a part of the Big Bend. Before reaching the Big Bend, the Columbia picks up the waters of Fairmont Hot Springs which, many years ago, good Father DeSmet likened in temperature to the fresh milk of a goat. For many miles of the stream’s early life it is serene. There is only a minor fall here. It is unhurried, meandering, and all but halts to form what are as much lakes as river. Even the Spillimacheen, tumbling down in its torrent from high in the Selkirks, fails to speed the main river. But at Golden, where the violent Kicking Horse comes in, after dropping fifty feet for every mile from the crest of the Rockies, the Columbia begins to feel its power. A little farther on it also begins to earn its reputation for fearfully sudden change; after flowing gently through a wide silent valley, it dives without warning over the edge of a steep incline to thunder into the fury of Surprise Rapids. This is the place which recalls, seventy years after the event, the carefully measured words of A. P. Coleman, who in 1885 went through this boiling water on a small raft and emerged somewhat shaken to say only that he did not care to repeat the exploit.

The first known white man to see the Columbia’s source missed Surprise Rapids on his first trip. He came in a little above them, by the Blaeberry River. He was David Thompson, astronomer and geographer for the Northwest Company of Merchants of Canada whose chief interest was furs. Thompson was to map the river. He was also the first to follow it from source to mouth. He was a thorough Briton, too. When he was first here and contemplating the headwaters, he looked up to admire the towering mountains on the west. He thought them heroic. By association he thought also of Trafalgar, only two years in the past, and he forthwith named these peaks the Nelson Range. Why the range came to be called the Selkirks is a political matter to be considered later.

Twenty miles below Surprise Rapids the river becomes briefly what must be one of the loveliest lakes on earth, Kinbasket, walled around by peaks that rise above 12,000 feet; yet its cobalt serenity turns immediately at the outlet into miles of roaring water that is still swift when it reaches the apex of the Big Bend at Boat Encampment. This is the extreme northerly point of the Columbia where the river turns in its tracks, so to speak, and heads south, carrying with it the added waters of two more streams. It is a spot that has long stirred men’s imaginations. Amid the universal gloom and midnight silence of the North, wrote one explorer, and a little above the 52nd Parallel of latitude, seemingly surrounded on all sides by cloud-piercing snowclad mountains, there lies a narrow valley where three streams meet and blend their waters, one coming from the southeast, one from the northwest, and one from the east. The streams which blend their waters are the Columbia, the Canoe, and the Wood.

The first white man here was the same who first saw the Columbia’s headwaters, David Thompson. We meet him often in the early annals of the region. He arrived here by coming down the Wood River from the east and thus added Athabasca Pass to the maps by establishing the connecting link between the vast regions lying on the eastern and western sides of the Great Divide. An incredible fall of snow forced Thompson to remain here three months. He named the place Boat Encampment. For decades it was a crossroads and rendezvous of the fur brigades. At Boat Encampment the river has now turned directly south, around the northern end of the Selkirks which Thompson had christened for Admiral Horatio Nelson. But the river is still hemmed, by the Selkirks that are now on the east, and on the west by the Monashees which a few old-timers still call the Gold Range. It is hemmed here so narrowly that the rush and roar of its dashings make the wilderness traveler believe he is hearing ocean breakers on an open shore. In this stretch is the sinister canyon that well earned the name of the Dalles des Morts applied to it by early voyageurs, several of whose comrades were lost there.

The lower end of the Big Bend is marked by Revelstoke, once called Second Crossing. Revelstoke is on the edge of solitude. Upriver, between Revelstoke and Golden, are two hundred miles of unbroken woods and terrain so appallingly difficult that, when the railroad came, the locating engineers preferred to take the rails over the terrible Selkirks rather than around their northern end. That seventy years later there is a highway of sorts around the Big Bend is eloquent praise for the determined men who made it.

Below Revelstoke, at the dreamy hamlet of Arrowhead, begins the glory of the Arrow Lakes, 130 miles of slowly moving inland sea set amid mountains, the queen of which for more than half a century was SS Minto, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company’s oldest and perhaps most beloved ship. The Minto was a leisurely vessel, and for years it was her custom to tie up for the night at Nakusp on Upper Arrow and to resume her way at daylight, passing through the several miles of narrows which the Scot botanist, David Douglas, a man not given to panegyrics and who was here long before the steamboats, said were of a beauty beyond description.

At the lower end of Lower Arrow Lake, where it becomes a river again, the Columbia is joined by the heaving Kootenay. Since it passed the place so near the Columbia’s headwaters at Canal Flats, this stream has been meandering nearly six hundred miles through Montana and Idaho, where it is spelled Kootenai, and returned to British Columbia to tear into the big river at Brilliant below a high cliff, on a shelf of which is the remarkable tomb of Peter the First and Lordly, prophet-king of the Dukhobors, a mighty man, hard to kill, whose death was accomplished only by blowing him into bits along with the railroad coach in which he was riding with one of his several handmaidens. It is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Columbia, and of Canada.

When the Kootenay has joined it, the Columbia proceeds swiftly through a mountain valley where a sudden gold rush lured away the gangs of Chinese laborers building the Dewdney Trail, British Columbia’s first attempt at a cross-province road, and resulted in a mining and smelting empire whose center stands monolithic in and above the city of Trail. For sixty years this stretch of the Columbia has flowed beneath the billows of smoke of this remote wilderness Birmingham—or Pittsburgh—a drama of spouting flame and fumes and towering stacks set in a grandeur that is all solid rock for a mile above the tallest stack and for half a mile below it.

Ten miles below Trail the Clark Fork (or Pend Oreille) enters the Columbia, and where they meet the tributary is longer than the main stream. Once upon a time this fact was put forward by Americans to claim that the true Columbia was the Clark Fork which has its headwaters not far from Butte, Montana. Nothing came of the claim, save to confuse many Americans as to the actual source of the Columbia. Just below the meeting of the two rivers the International Boundary crosses the Columbia at the 49th parallel.

In former times, the Clark Fork came into the Columbia with a roar over a fall of fifteen feet at low water that sent the main stream hurrying into the United States and soon into the rapids called Little Dalles. When Lieutenant Thomas Symons, Corps of Engineers, United States Army, came along here in a big bateau he saw many Chinese working the bars for their gold. That was in eighty-one. Some of the Orientals had already been around here and elsewhere along the river for two decades, washing the sand which white men said contained too little gold to trouble with. It is still a tradition on the river that many of these Chinese miners made their pile, then went back to China to live and die as wealthy men.

Forty miles below the boundary was Kettle Falls to which for centuries on end the tribes of the upper Columbia migrated, to net or spear their provender for a twelvemonth. This was the annual manna sent by the gods of the waters in the form of great Chinook salmon, leaping at the falls by the million. They were taken by the thousands each year, then split and dried, packed in baskets and carried away perhaps as many as four hundred miles, to serve as basic food for tribes living between the Rockies and the Cascades. Kettle Falls fell a total of twenty-five feet in two descents, then soon went into the wild reaches called the Grand Rapids.

Table of Distances and Elevations on the COLUMBIA RIVER

(Prepared especially for this book by the Corps of Engineers, U. S. Army, Office of the Division Engineer, Portland, Oregon, as of February 1, 1955.)

Mileage: Below International Boundary is from Corps of Engineers Mileage tables and from U. S. Geological Survey’s Plan and Profile Sheets. Above Boundary mileage is from 308 Report—Basin Map, (PI 14) and 308 profiles. Plates 2, 15, 43.

Elevations: From Corps of Engineers profiles, CL-201-15 and CL-106-13-34; U. S. Geological Survey Plan and Profile of Columbia River; 308 Profiles 2, 15, 43, and Canadian map Kootenay.

Note: Canadian maps do not agree on elevation of Columbia Lake. The Calgary sheet of British Columbia and Alberta Series has it 2650; the B. C. Department of Lands map Kootenay has it 2652; while the same Department’s map Windermere has it 2664.

It was at Kettle Falls that David Thompson and his paddlers spent two weeks to find a proper cedar, then to make a canoe, the third on this first voyage of a white man down the Columbia. That was in 1811, and on July 3, Thompson wrote in his journal: Voyage to the Mouth of the Columbia, by the grace of God, by D. Thompson and seven men. The sea was his goal, God Almighty was his guide, and no matter that fur was his business, his love was to walk up and down and across the Canadian and American West, adding lakes, creeks, rivers, mountains and passes through mountains to the maps.

Sixty miles or so below Kettle Falls the Spokane enters the big stream near where it makes the second of its surprising changes of direction. After its long run almost straight south from Boat Encampment, the Columbia turns west almost at right angles. It proceeds briefly west, then north again, west again, then southeast, forming a wide bow that people who live hereabout call the Big Bend. For the sake of clarity this portion of the Columbia will be called, in this book, simply the Grand Coulee country. The outstanding geographic feature of this region is the Grand Coulee.

Little wonder that this strange trick of nature on a colossal scale was a fearsome thing to the Indians. No man could see it without feeling a certain mystery. No man could look upon it without a sense of terrible loneliness. There it stood by the Columbia in the middle of seemingly illimitable wastes along this piece of the river—a boulder-strewn nothingness that ran on and on, no matter which way you looked, until lost over the horizon. A coulee by definition is a steep walled trenchlike valley. It is a description that only technically has anything to do with the Grand Coulee. The widely traveled Alexander Ross stood on its floor, looking up at the black wilderness of walls that rose, in places, a thousand feet, and ran on for more than fifty miles. The sight left him quite numb. The best he could do, in his usually vibrant Journal, was to remark weakly that Grand Coulee was the wonder of Oregon.

Once upon a time, due to glacial movements, Grand Coulee became a fifty-mile stretch of the river’s bed that ended in a waterfall three miles wide and four hundred feet high, perhaps the greatest cataract the world has known. Then, after a few thousand years, when the ice barrier had melted, the stream returned to its former bed. Even its former, and present, bed was enough to give a man pause. When Lieutenant Symons came along here to the Grand Coulee country in his big bateau, he thought the complete silence and lifelessness of the scene made it exceedingly wild, almost unearthly, and he welcomed approach to the dreaded Kalichen Falls and Whirlpool Rapids. At least they made a noise. His chief boatman, Old Pierre, a Frenchman who had steered bateaux for the Hudson’s Bay Company, knew what to expect here at Kalichen. He spoke to his Indians. They removed all superfluous clothing. They tied brightly colored handkerchiefs around their heads. They removed their gloves. The old man gave the word. The paddlers shouted, and away they went, yelling like the Indians they were as the craft heaved and rolled through the chutes and whirlpools. Years before, Thompson had found this going rough. He said they were strong waters, and remarked that I hope by the mercy of Heaven to take them much better on my return.

Symons camped where Chelan River enters the Columbia, near some Indians, and though the time was 1881 and a railroad had reached and crossed the river below, much of the middle and upper Columbia remained natively primitive. Symons got little sleep that night because of the moanings of an old medicine man performing his hideous incantations over a poor girl nearly dead with the consumption. These Indians were going to have a railroad soon. They already had all of the white man’s diseases. Seventy years before Symons, when Thompson came through here, he found savages who wore shells in their noses. By the time Symons was here, no natives were so decorated. The encroaching civilization could remove shells and replace them with fancy combs and derby hats, but none of the white man’s notions about medication and religion could quite obliterate a successful medicine man.

Passing the mouth of the Wenatchee, Symons’s men again prepared for wild water ahead and put on their bright headgear to run Rock Island Rapids. Symons looked at the bluffs along here—some of them rising, he estimated, a good twenty-five hundred feet—and was struck by the weird beauty of the black basaltic formations. High in a cleft of rock he noted a single stick of timber, white from the weather, which Old Pierre the boatman told him had been a landmark back in voyageur days. They also passed Victoria Rock, which Symons called one of the most perfect profiles in existence. At one angle, too, it did remind one of the appearance of the durable Queen of England.

Below Rock Island, Symons saw a large number of Chinese working the bars. He found Priest Rapids to be eleven miles of rough water and about as bad a place as there is on the whole river. He was now approaching the mouth of the Snake and the last of the notable bends of the Columbia. This was the only place east of the Cascade Range where a railroad touched the river. It did so at Ainsworth, where the Northern Pacific crossed the Snake to head north. And Ainsworth, Symons observed, was possibly the most uncomfortable, altogether abominable place in America. This was quite in keeping with the region. Though he looked in every direction, Symons could see nothing but bleak, dreary waste. The land was dry and powdery, virtually a desert. Symons went further. It is, he wrote, an almost waterless, lifeless region … It is a desolation where even the most hopeful can find nothing in its future prospects to cheer. Lieutenant Symons was born too soon to see what an Atomic Energy Commission could do in this land of the dead.

But the railroad came here, and Symons paid off his paddlers. Perhaps it was inevitable that in such a hellhole as Ainsworth, Old Pierre promptly made sundry visits to the local whiskey saloon. Even so, he promised Symons that he would not get drunk in such an ungodly place. He would return to Colville, have two good drinks there on his wages, and call it a day. Symons had nothing but praise for Pierre and the four paddlers, remarking it would be difficult to find five men who would ride four hundred miles of rough river without wanting strong waters.

• • •

IT IS WORTH REMARKING that many of the small sectional maps prepared by the Symons party, in referring to lands along the river between the Canadian boundary and the mouth of the Snake, carry notations like Sage Brush Plain, Drifting Sand Hills, Sage Brush, and Sand Drift. Yet Symons saw not only the endless miles of sagebrush, but what was beneath the weed. He wrote that the unusually tall brush was a species of this plant that grew only in the richest soil. If brought under irrigation, he said, it would produce bountiful harvests. This made him a true prophet of an event seventy-odd years in the future.

At the end of his exploration, here where the Snake comes in, Symons paused to reflect that this was where the Lewis and Clark party had first seen the Columbia. They, too, had found this no place to tarry overlong. They noted that all of the natives had sore eyes, doubtless from the torment of the blowing sand; and because the white men wanted horses and provisions, but had few trade goods left, they traded eye medicine with these blinking, squinting Indians. Our prescriptions, dryly remarks the Lewis and Clark Journals, though unsanctioned by the faculty, might be useful and we therefore are entitled to some remuneration….

The next white man after Lewis and Clark to see the mouth of the Snake was, almost inevitably, David Thompson. He was in a hurry, pausing only long enough to erect a small pole on the shore and attach to it a 1/2 sheet of paper on which he had inscribed a claim to this country for Great Britain, adding that it was the intention of the Northwest Company of Merchants of Canada to erect at this place a factory for the commerce of the country around. Then he struck out downriver, stopping again three days later to gum his canoe, and while so engaged looked up to see a snow mountain ahead, say 30 miles, another on the right, behind, say 25 miles. An English Navy man had already named one of these peaks for Admiral Hood, the other had no name, though in good time it became Mount Adams for a president.

When the Snake has added its waters of a thousand miles to the Columbia, there can no longer be any doubt as to where the big river is going. It turns west for the last time and begins its drive on the Cascade Mountains which have barred it from the coast ever since it left the Rockies to meander the deserts of Washington. As it makes this last western turn, too, it becomes the state line, with Oregon on the south bank.

The Walla Walla comes in but adds no appreciable volume of water. It does not matter. The big river is big enough now. It has begun to surge and boil through its narrowing channel. Gravity, pressure and time took it through the Cascades in the first place; and to get through, the stream had to undermine mountains, crumble them, and dig a channel which men have plumbed and found to reach a depth of three hundred feet below the surface water, and 215 feet below sea level. In a river this is an extraordinary depth. So is the force that made it.

As it reached Celilo, the Columbia plunged into a fall that dropped more than eighty feet in the next few miles of wild churnings. Until recently, its course through the mountains was sporadically furious until it had poured over the last fall called the Cascades, hidden now by dam water, to emerge from the mountains and widen into a calm-looking tidal stream. It was this providential path by which the founders of Oregon came through and not over the great range. It was the last lap of the Oregon Trail.

Crowding both sides of the Columbia’s narrow gorge stand mountains that extend for hundreds of miles north and south. Nowhere else in seven hundred miles of the Cascade Range is there a passage like the Columbia. Into and through it went the caravans of the Western migration, and it led them directly to the Willamette Valley which explorers before them had said was incomparably the best place to settle beyond the Rockies.

Once they had passed them, it was obvious to the people of the covered wagons that the Cascade Mountains were the border between two widely contrasting climates. For a thousand miles they had come through a region of light rainfall and sparse vegetation. The winter was cold, the summer blistering. Open pine forests stood on the hills. But as they came floating through these mountains, or followed along the Columbia’s south