Down the Columbia
By Lewis R. Freeman
SYNOPSIS
For the afficianado of adventure on the water, Lewis Freeman is one of the most exceptional rivermen who ever took pen to paper. Down the Columbia offers the reader a variety of thrills, from its initial trek to find the headwaters of the Columbia below a frosty glacier high in Canada's Selkirks, to its last precarious run past Palisade Rock. Freeman is noted for his attention to scenic detail, and this is one of the book's strengths:
"Bulking insignificantly as an achievement as does my trip in comparison with the many Columbia voyages, recorded and unrecorded, of early days, it still seems to me that the opportunity I had for a comprehensive survey of this grandest, scenically, of all the world's great rivers gives me warrant for attempting to set down something of what I saw and experienced during those stirring weeks that intervened between that breathless moment when I let the whole stream of the Columbia trickle down my back in a glacial ice-cave in the high Selkirks, and that showery end-of-the-afternoon when I pushed out into the tidewater at the foot of the Cascades."
Although Freeman had been thinking of the trip for almost a dozen years, it was the "scenic aspect" of the trip that provided Freeman with some financial backing for the trip. He was contacted by documentary film producer C.L. Chester who wanted to send a cameraman "to photograph the sources of the Columbia in the Selkirks . . ." and Freeman jumped at the opportunity to be a part of the project:
"It was finally arranged that I should go on ahead and engage men and boats for the Big Bend part of the trip while Chester would endeavor to disentangle homself from business in Los Angeles and New York in time to join his cameraman and myself for a jaunt by packtrain to the Lake of the Hanging Glaciers."
Chester could not come, however, and Freeman was left to deal with the irrepressible cameraman, Roos, who talked him into becoming the "star" of the intended documentary. And why not? "So far as I have been able to learn," he wrote, "my arrival in Portland marked the end of the first complete journey that has been made from the glacial sources of the Columbia to tidewater."
In fact, this journey was certainly the last complete trip of its kind before the construction of the Grand Coulee dam, and certainly is not a trip that could be duplicated in modern times. A good part of its charm rests on Freeman's descriptions of life along the river during the 20s.
Along the way he met an incredible cast of characters, from the competent and professional riverman Nixon who guides him on the upper part of the journey, to the "river rat" Ike who carries Freeman's skiff on a lumber raft through the treacherous Hell Gate, to the unperturbed Native American woman he almost ferries into Celilo Falls. It is the people who populate the river which make this book something more special, in the end, than an everyday tale of a dangerous river run. But the river is never far away, always calling, always ready, always wild.
Chapters
- PREPARING FOR THE BIG BEND
- UP HORSE THIEF CREEK
- UP HORSE THIEF CREEK
- AT THE GLACIER
- THE LAKE OF THE HANGING GLACIERS
- CANAL FLATS TO BEAVERMOUTH
- I. RUNNING THE BEND
- II. RUNNING THE BEND
- III. RUNNING THE BEND
- REVELSTOKE TO THE SPOKANE
- RAFTING THROUGH HELL GATE
- BY LAUNCH THROUGH BOX CANYON
- CHELAN TO PASCO
- PASCO TO THE DALLES
- THE HOME STRETCH
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
During his long career, Lewis Freeman traveled many of the worlds greatest rivers from the Nile to the Mississippi. But the most daring water he ever found was on the Columbia River. It was one so wild and untamed that he felt he had to have expert help to make passage safely.
Freeman left a wealth of travel experience to treasure, from his well-known adventures in the South Seas to his summation of trips down the world greatest rivers in 1937.
Title: Down the Columbia
Author: Lewis R. Freeman
Publisher: Dixon-Price Publishing
Mechanicals: 5.5 x 8.5 - trade paperback
ISBN-10: 1-929516-18-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-929516-18-6
Price: U.S. $19.99