The Columbia River: Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce/Part 2/Chapter 1

by William Denison Lyman

CHAPTER I

In the Heart of the Canadian Rockies

Extent of Navigation on the River—Attractions of a Canoe Journey—The Canadian Pacific Railroad—Banff and Lake Louise—Summit of the Rockies—The Continental Divide and its Western Descent—Field and the Wapta River—Golden and the Upper Columbia—Peculiar Interlocking of the Columbia and the Kootenai, and Professor Dawson's Explanation of this—Views of the Selkirks and the Rockies—Some Steamboat Men and their Tales—Captain Armstrong's Adventures on the Kootenai—The Picture Rocks—Lake Windermere—The Location of the Old Thompson Fort—Baptiste Morigeau and his Stories of Pioneer Days—The War between the Shuswaps and the Okanogans—Down the River from Golden—Rapids and Navigation—By the Canadian Pacific through the Selkirks—Glacier and the Illecillewaet—Revelstoke and the River again—Wise Management of the Canadian Government and the Railroad.

A JOURNEY upon the River may best begin with its source and end with the ocean. It is about fourteen hundred miles by the windings of the stream from its origin in the upper Columbia Lake to the Pacific. It descends twenty-five hundred feet in that distance. It is therefore swift in many places. Yet it would be possible to descend almost the entire length of the River in a small boat. Nor can one imagine a more fascinating journey, especially if he could conjure back the shades of the great voyageurs of seventy years ago, as Monique and Charlefoux, famous in Dr. McLoughlin's time time, and listen to their gay song, mingling with the plash of oars:

Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,
En roulant, ma boule roulant.

The way of approach for the Eastern tourist to a journey down the Columbia is by the Canadian Pacific Railway, a magnificent road in a gallery of masterpieces. Wonders begin before he reaches the western watershed. He will see Banff, with its hot springs, its immense hotel, its Bow River and Falls and Valley. He will see the gem of the Canadian Rockies, one of the gems of the earth, Lake Louise. Imagine a glistening wall of purest white, Mts. Lefroy and Victoria, with a vast glacier descending from them, great bastions of variously tinted rock closing on either side as a frame of the snowy picture, and in front a lake, small indeed, but of perfect form, a mirror in which the snowy wall, the glacier, the rocky ramparts, find a duplication as distinct as themselves.

A few miles farther west, and the traveller will find himself at one of the most significant of all places, the Continental Divide. Eastward the water flows into the Bow, thence into the Saskatchewan, and ultimately into the Atlantic. Westward the springs find their way to the branches of the Wapta, thence to the Columbia and the Pacific. The long westward ascent which we have followed all the way from Winnipeg ends at last. The track becomes level. We are at the summit. Looking southward we can see descending the steep slope, a clear mountain stream, which is parted into two branches by a little wall of stone. One branch goes east to the Atlantic, the other west to the Pacific.

It must have been of some such place, though farther north, that Holmes was imagining when he wrote:

Yon stream, whose sources run
⁠Turned by a pebble's edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun,
⁠Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed
⁠But for the slanting stone,
To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
⁠Of foam-flecked Oregon.

At the parting of the streams, a pretty rustic framework has been erected, bearing the words, "The Continental Divide."

We are now on the Columbia's waters. We are also in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, and in the midst of a perfect sea of mountains. It has been said that British Columbia is “fifty or sixty Switzerlands rolled into one.” Here are five distinct ridges, up and down, and through and around which, the Columbia and its affluents chase each other in a dizzy dance.

The descent of the west side of the Divide is appallingly steep. From Stephen to Field is a drop of one thousand two hundred and fifty-seven feet in ten miles. In that distance are several places which reach two hundred and thirty-six feet to the mile. Most explicit directions are given to engineers in respect to handling trains on this grade. A speed of only six miles an hour is allowed, and frequent stops and tests of air-brakes and signals are required. By reason of the exceeding care, no serious accident has ever occurred. In ascending three locomotives are required for an ordinary train.

There are several splendid resorts on the line of the Canadian railroad. Banff and Lake Louise are the resorts on the east side of the Divide. The first one west of that point is Field. There, as at all the other resorts, the hotels are managed by the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company. They are conducted with great skill and elegance, and may well be regarded as a tribute to the business ability and artistic taste of the managers.

As we descend the steep grade from Stephen to Field, we catch glimpses of peak after peak, range after range, valley after valley, glacier after glacier, purple, saffron, red, dazzling white, glistening greens and blues. Mt. Stephen lifts its great wall over a mile of almost perpendicular height, and nearly opposite is the spire of Mt. Burgess. Mountain wonders and attractions of every sort lie in all directions from Field. Perhaps the finest is Yoho Valley. There are the Takkakaw Falls, twelve hundred feet high. There is the Wapta Glacier, itself a part of a prodigious ice-field, known as Wahputekh, lying between the towering heights of Mts. Gordon, Balfour, and Tralltinderne.

Leaving Field, the road runs between two chains of mountains, the Ottertail on the north and the Van Horne on the south. The former is bold and spire-like in outline, with the snow-fields and ice pinnacles of Mt. Goodwin closing the vista. The latter is less bold in contour, but has a colouring of yellow rock-slopes in beautiful contrast with the rich purple of the lower forests.

Passing between those sublime mountain chains, we soon plunge into the Wapta cañon, with its

Natural Bridge Kicking Horse or Wapta River, and Mt. Stephen, B. C.
Photo, by C. F. Yates.

Sunrise on Columbia River, near Washougal.
(Copyright, 1902, by Kiser Photograph Co.)

perpendicular walls of rock rising hundreds of feet on either side. The Wapta is more commonly known as the Kicking Horse. It received that name in this wise. The Palliser exploring expedition of 1858 had been seeking unsuccessfully a feasible route through the Rockies. In the progress of the search, Sir James Hector, then in charge of the party, pitched camp on the Wapta. While there a vicious horse kicked him with such effect that he was left on the ground apparently dead. The three Indians with him had, in fact, dug his grave. But while they were conveying him to it, he suddenly came to himself. Having recovered, he became curious to follow the stream where he had met with the disaster. As a result he discovered the cañon and a short route through the main chain. Upon the pass he bestowed the name of "Kicking Horse," and this has latterly been bestowed upon the river itself. The river is one of the most remarkable of the tributaries of the upper Columbia. It drains a cordon of glaciated peaks, from which it bears a vast volume of water, foaming and frothing with frequent cataracts down the steep descent, from fifty to a hundred feet to the mile.

Forty-five miles west of the Divide we reach Golden on the Columbia. It is indeed a thrilling moment to the traveller when he first sets eyes upon these head-waters of the River of the West. Golden is a pleasant little town, a hundred and fifty miles below the upper Columbia Lake and twelve hundred and fifty by the windings of the River from its destination in the Pacific.

At Golden we must pause and make ready for our first journey on the River. The greater part of the tourist travel passes by Golden, not realising that between that pretty town and the lakes lie some of the most charming scenes in all the vast play-ground of British Columbia.

We find at Golden several steamboats in command of captains who are very princes of good fellows, as Captain Armstrong of the Ptarmigan and Captain Blakeney of the Isabel, with whom we may journey from Golden to Lake Windermere. Over the hundred miles between these two points the Columbia is a slack-water stream, having a descent of but fifty feet in the distance from the extreme head waters to Golden. Over considerable part of this distance the River runs in bayous. These bayous or channels wind their serpentine courses through low flats, flooded at high water, and exposing fair expanses of vivid green at the subsidence of the waters.

Professor Dawson, the eminent Canadian geologist, made a study of this section of the River some years before his death, and as a result expressed the opinion that the section of the Columbia above the mouth of Blue River, some thirty miles below Golden, formerly united with the Kootenai. But owing to some convulsion of nature, the surface was tilted just sufficiently to turn the section of the stream from Columbia Lake toward the north instead of the south, with the result that we have this slack-water system of lagoons and lakes constituting this marvellously picturesque division of the River. Now in confirmation of this theory of Professor Dawson we have in the relations of the Columbia and Kootenai the singular geographical phenomenon already referred to in an earlier chapter. The Kootenai runs through "Canal Flats," in which the upper Columbia Lake is situated, and comes within a mile of that lake. It is nine feet higher than the lake, but there is no high land there, and at one time a canal joined the Kootenai with the lake. This canal was wrecked in the great flood of 1894, but steamboats had run through it from the Kootenai to the Columbia, and it would be entirely feasible to reconstruct it. After having thus passed within a mile of each other and evidently having once been actually connected, the two rivers part company. The Columbia flows north and the Kootenai south. Each makes a vast bend. Again they reverse directions, the Columbia flowing south and the Kootenai north, and then come together many miles from their point of separation.

Aside from the unique beauty of the lagoons and the grassy shores, the eye of the traveller is delighted with the two mountain chains which confront each other across those glassy channels throughout the entire stretch from Golden to Windermere. On the east side is the main chain of the Rockies, and on the west are the Selkirks.

As we proceed on the deep, still stream, gliding from channel to channel, we may find ourselves mightily entertained by the conversation of such a navigator as Captain Armstrong or Captain Blakeney. For each can command a fund of historical and descriptive matter of rare interest.

Captain Armstrong was one of the earliest pilots on the Kootenai. In 1894 he built the North Star at Jennings, Montana, ran her up the wild stream to Canal Flats, thence through the canal to the Columbia lakes, and into the River itself. A more exquisite stretch of river navigation than that through Columbia Lake, Lake Adela, and Lake Windermere, and from them into the lagoons of the River, can scarcely be found or even imagined, and it was the lot of the North Star to ply upon that route until her unhappy destruction by fire in 1900.

There is little danger of accident on the placid water of the uppermost Columbia, but it is far different on the Kootenai. We heard many a tale of steamboating adventure from these pilots.

One of these so well illustrates those old-time conditions that we repeat here its chief points. Captain Armstrong owned two steamers, the Ruth and the Gwendoline. Both were engaged in transporting freight by way of Jennings to Fort Steele and the various mining camps in that district. The business was enormously profitable, for the boats received two and one half cents a pound. At that particular time there were twenty-six cars on the Great Northern Railway awaiting shipments.

From his two steamers Captain Armstrong sometimes made two thousand dollars a day in gross receipts. But though profitable, the business was also correspondingly risky. The Jennings Cañon, above Bonner's Ferry, is, perhaps, the worst piece of water that has ever been navigated on the Columbia or its tributaries. A strip of water, foaming-white, down-hill almost as on a steep roof, hardly wider than the steamboat, savage-looking rocks waiting to catch hold of any unwary craft that might venture through,—so forbidding in fact was that route that Captain Armstrong found no insurance agent that felt disposed to insure his boats and cargo. At last he induced a San

Lake Windermere, Upper Columbia, where David Thompson's Fort was built in 1810.
Photo by W.D. Lyman.

Francisco agent to make the trip with him and to offer a rate. After sitting in silence on the deck while the steamer whirled down the Jennings Cañon, the agent stated that his rate would be twenty-five per cent. of the cargo. The daring captain decided to take the risk himself. He had made a number of trips with entire success and immense profit. But just at the height of the season, when the twenty-six cars were on the track and a sack full of gold was waiting for him, the captain got into too much of a hurry. He was running the Gwendoline; one of his best pilots, the Ruth. The Ruth was ahead. Both were making their best possible time down the cañon to get a cargo. Captain Armstrong, at the wheel of the Gwendoline, was whizzing down the cañon at a rate which made stopping impossible, when to his dismay he saw the Ruth right ahead of him in a narrow turn, lying across the channel, wedged in the rocks. To stop was impossible. To select any comfortable landing-place was equally so. The Gwendoline piled right on top of the Ruth. Both were total wrecks, without a dollar of insurance. A two-thousand-dollar cargo gone in five minutes, to say nothing of boats and business that could not be replaced and a fortune within grasp that would never be so near again.

But such were the risks of steamboating on the Kootenai.

There are two historical notes of special interest to be made in connection with the journey to Windermere. One of these is a prehistoric drawing in some kind of red pigment on the smooth surface of a rock on the upper Columbia Lake. It seems to represent a battle scene, and, though rude, denotes some conception of picture art. The Indians think that it was made prior to Indian times. Apparently it belongs to the same order of pictures as the drawings on the rocks of Lake Chelan and other places in the north-west, furnishing a worthy theme for the antiquarian.

The other object of historical interest is the remains of the temporary fort built by David Thompson of the North-west Fur Company in 1810. Thompson crossed the Rockies in that year in order to descend the Columbia and gain possession of its territory for his fur company. He was a brave, intelligent, and enterprising man with considerable knowledge of astronomy. But he waited one season too long. For, finding it late in the year 1810 when he had reached the sources of the Columbia, he decided to winter there and descend the River in the spring. He selected a beautiful spot capable of defence on all sides on Lake Windermere and there built a rude fort, the trench and mound of which still remain. In the spring of 1811 he went down the river (and this was the first party to traverse the entire course of the Columbia) full of hope that he might take possession for Great Britain and the North-westers, only to find that the Astor party of Americans had preceded them by three months in effecting what might be called permanent occupation.

This was one of the important links in the history of the control of the North-west. Doubt has been raised as to the authenticity of this Windermere location, but there are certainly the remains of mound and trench, and the tradition has it that here was the place of the Thompson party of 1810, the first place located by white men on the upper Columbia.

Mt. Burgess and Emerald Lake, One of the Sources of the Wapta River, B. C.
Photo by C. F. Yates.

An interesting character lives on the shore of Lake Windermere in the person of Baptiste Morigeau. He is a man of sixty-six, the son of a French father and Indian mother. The father, Francis Morigeau, was born at Quebec in 1797, and came to the upper Columbia region as a free trapper in 1820. He trapped up and down the Columbia for many years, selling his catches to the Hudson's Bay Company, usually at Fort Colville. Baptiste was born at Windermere in 1842. Three years after that the father with his numerous family went to Colville. He had a number of horses and cattle, a large supply of valuable furs, ammunition, and traps. He located at Colville at just the right time. For, having taken up a large body of the rich land in that valley, he began raising hay and grain. His stock increased. He was surrounded with every species of rude plenty, and just at the most profitable time for him the gold discoveries began in 1854, followed the next year by the great Indian war. The fat cattle, the horses, the grain, hay, and vegetables of the Morigeaus were in great and immediate demand. Money came in to them by the handful. Baptiste states that they took in one hundred and fifty thousand dollars during the five years of Indian wars and settlement. Their lives were often in peril, but with good fortune, aided by their own connection with the natives, they escaped any serious harm.

On one occasion Indians were about to plunder them of their valuables and take possession of the barn where several of the family were thrashing grain with flails, when the oldest son, Aleck, suddenly turned his flail upon the marauders. So vigorously did he lay about him and so astonished were the Indians at the novel assault that they gave way and retreated.

Morigeau told us the interesting fact that there were practically no Indians living in the Windermere district until about a century ago. At that time some branches of the Shuswaps and of the Kootenais came in. Their relations were usually very amicable, but between the Shuswaps and the Okanogans was deadly and long-continued enmity. This was ended in a curious and interesting manner by the following event. The Shuswaps had captured the only daughter of the Okanogan chief. She was led with other captives into the Shuswap camp. The boasting warriors were gloating over the poor victim, and the squaws were discussing the greatest possible indignities and tortures for her, when an aged, white-haired chief got the attention of the crowd. He declared that his heart had been opened, and that he now saw that torture and death ought to end. He proposed that instead of shame and torture they should confer honour on the chieftain's child. He said: "I can hear the old chief and his squaw weeping all the night for their lost daughter." He then proposed that they adorn the captive with flowers, put her in a procession, with all the chiefs loaded with presents, and restore her to her father.

The girl meanwhile, who did not understand a word of the language, was awaiting torture or death. What was her astonishment to find herself decorated with honour, and sent with the gift-laden chiefs toward her father's camp. On the next day the mourning chief of the Okanogans and his wife, looking

Bonnington Falls in Kootenai River, near Nelson.
Photo by Allan Lean.

from their desolate lodge, saw a large procession approaching, and they said: "They are coming to demand a ransom."

As the procession drew nearer, one of their men said that it looked like a woman adorned with flowers in the midst of the men with presents of robes and necklaces. Then they cried out: "It is our child, and she is restored to us." So they met the procession with rejoicing and heard the speech of the old Shuswap chief. And after that there was peace between the Shuswaps and the Okanogans.

Having returned from Lake Windermere to Golden by small boat,—one of the most charming of all water trips,—we are prepared to make a new start down the River.

The River from Golden holds a general north-westerly course to its highest northern point in latitude 52 degrees. There having received its northmost tributary, Canoe River, a furious mountain stream, it makes a grand wheel southward, forming what is known as the Big Bend. This section of the River was navigated by the bateaux of the trappers and the canoes of the Indians. There are, however, several bad rapids, of which Surprise Rapids, Kimbasket Rapids, and Death Rapids, are the worst. These cannot be passed by steamboats. The voyageurs seem to have run them sometimes, though they ordinarily made portages. A Golden steamboat captain assures us that none but fools ever ran Death Rapids,—and they were mostly drowned.

The Canadian Pacific Railroad follows the Columbia from Golden to Beavermouth, then turns up the Beaver to cross the Selkirk Mountains. The Beaver is a magnificent mountain stream, and from the railroad, high on the mountain side, the traveller can at many points look down hundreds of feet upon the river. Though the Selkirks are not quite so high as the main chain of the Rockies, they are even grander. The snowfall is materially greater in the Selkirks, and the glaciers are vast in extent. It is said that the snowfall at Glacier averages thirty-five feet during the winter, and that it lies from four to eight feet deep from October to April. There are thirty immense snowsheds on this section of the railroad.

Glacier is the great resort in the Selkirks. This splendid resort has attractions in some respects superior to those of Banff, Lake Louise, or Field. It is in the very heart of the Selkirks. The Great Glacier is only a mile and a half distant, a glacier which is said to cover an area of two hundred square miles; more than all the glaciers of Switzerland combined. From the watch tower at Glacier, this mass of ice, twisted and contorted, with all the colours of the rainbow playing upon it, is one of those visions of elemental force which only great mountains reveal. Like all the glaciers of the Northern Hemisphere, this is receding at a rapid rate. A record on the rock indicates the point to which the ice attained in July, 1887, and the ice is now over seven hundred feet distant from that point.

The Asulkan Glacier is a more beautiful sight, as viewed from Abbott rampart, than the Great Glacier. Every traveller should climb the trail to Abbott in order to get that sight. And with it he will view the twin peaks of Castor and Pollux yet farther south, while to the north the splendid peaks of Cheops,

Bridge Creek, a Tributary of Lake Chelan, Wash.
Photo. by F. N. Kneeland, Northampton, Mass.

Hermit, and Cougar dominate the majestic wilderness.

But the most striking single sight is the granite monolith of Sir Donald. This is almost a counterpart of the Matterhorn of Switzerland, though not so high. It rises in one huge block to a height of 10,808 feet. It has been climbed, though this is one of the most daring and difficult of climbs. From the dizzy spire there is visible a perfect map of peaks, rivers, valleys, and lakes. It is said that a hundred and twenty glaciers can be seen.

From Sir Donald and the Great Glacier issues the Illecillewaet River, well-named, for this means the "swift flowing." From its source in the Great Glacier to its entrance of the Columbia it descends thirty-five hundred feet in forty-five miles. It is swift. One of the most interesting places on this section of the road is the "Loops," a place where the track has to descend five hundred and twenty-two feet in seven miles. To accomplish this, it has been carried in a "double S" around the bases of Mts. Ross and Bonney. So close are the tracks that the two parts of the loop a mile in length are not more than eighty feet apart, one being almost perpendicularly above the other. Some miles farther down is the Albert Cañon on the Illecillewaet. On this point the distinction has been conferred of a complete pause of the train, while from it the passengers hasten to a platform to gaze down the perpendicular walls three hundred feet to the white torrent tearing its way through the rock.

Soon Revelstoke is reached, and we are again on the navigable waters of the Columbia. Every traveller, as he leaves the line of the Canadian Pacific road, must pay his tribute of respect to the skill, energy, and intelligence with which this superb road is conducted. It has been said that English money supplied this road, Scotch energy built it, and Irish keenness and adaptability run it. Sir Thomas Shaughnessey, the manager, is certainly entitled to the respect and gratitude of thousands of tourists.

With the railroad, all tourists will associate the Canadian Park managers. The Canadian Government is a singularly intelligent one. It has grasped the possibilities in these vast and varied scenic charms, and has used exceedingly good judgment in rendering them accessible to the travelling public. This entire mountain area bordering the railroad, to an extent of five thousand seven hundred and thirty-two square miles, has been set apart as a park, in charge of the Department of the Interior. Superb roads are constructed in available places, and improvements are continually in progress about the springs and falls and lakes and other points of interest. The Government, in fact, exercises entire control, but grants concessions to the railroad company in the matter of hotels and other conveniences.

As we bid good-bye to the Canadian Rockies, we may say that perhaps the world offers nowhere else such a sea of mountains, such knots and clusters and cordons of elevations, as in this strange and sublime region where the Columbia and its tributaries, the Kootenai, the Illecillewaet, the Wapta, the Beaver, the Canoe, seem to be playing hide-and-seek with the Thompson and the Fraser. There are not less than five distinct snowy ridges between the head waters of the Saskatchewan and the Pacific Ocean. The

Kootenai Lake, from Proctor, B. C.
Photo. by Allan Lean.

existence of this immense watershed of snowy mountains accounts for the vast volume of the Columbia. Although not half as long as the Mississippi, the Columbia equals it in volume.

Well joined, in truth, are the sublime River and the sublime mountains. One cannot fully understand the River unless he has seen its cradle and the cradle of its affluents beneath the shadows of the great peaks of British Columbia.