The Doing of the Thing

Vince Welch and Brad Dimmock

“Despite her gentility, Mrs. Clegg had one unusual routine: she always slept outdoors. At her home, her bedroom had a screened sleeping porch upstairs; at ‘Camp Sechelt,’ she had another screened porch and slept on an iron army cot with a tick mattress. Always outside.

At some point in her reading about Northwest history, this uncommon woman became engrossed by the saga of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. She even, at some point, wondered weather their journey might be retraced, riverwise, to St. Louis, even to the head of the Ohio River?”

“Holmstrom contracted with a larger, commercial river boat on the Snake to cache food and twenty-five gallons of gas about every twenty-five miles, and he marked the sites on his maps. (It cost $11.99 to send 1,284 pounds from Lewiston to be distributed upriver at intervals along ninety miles by the steamboat ‘Idaho.’)

He wrote more letters of inquiry about the river, one of them to the Lewiston Chamber of Commerce. The reply was of little value:

Dear Sir:
In answer to your inquiry of March 14, it is possible to work a small boat up the Snake River Canyon to Weiser but it would have to be a very small and light boat that could be carried around various obstructions in the river. The trip has been made with such a light outfit (in April 1819 by Donald McKenzie and six boatmen for the North West fur company.) There is little information available on a trip from Lewiston to Snake River. However, we hope what information we have given you will be of help. If there is anything further we can do, please let us know.

“Now well outside the gorge, but nearly seventy miles from the confluence with the Snake, Hamilton began to fret increasingly about the plodding pace. An oil barge, the Mary Gail, hauling gas and oil upriver, churned past them coming and going. He remarked ‘Current is so swift we make awful poor time. I’m afraid we give up. It will take us a whole month to get to Lewiston at this rate. (Mary Gail) has 800 hp diesels – we sure could use 799 of them. We should have 16 hp motors, instead of 10.’ (Later he revised his estimate to 22 hp)”

“‘Lewiston at last!’ said Clegg, ‘It feels good to have got here.’ The expedition had been eighteen days on the rivers. They walked to town. Clegg wanted a facial; Hamilton wanted a bath; Holmstrom wanted mail and their supplies (it was his birthday, but no one mentions it, including him); Johnson wanted some extra shoes; Bean wanted a nap. Lewiston, although 470 miles inland from sea, then as now was a port town. It dealt in grain and wool, livestock and lumber. Stern-wheel steamboats still moored at her docks lined with warehouses and granaries. The expedition spent two and a half days in town, purchasing supplies and making arrangements for deliveries upriver for ninety miles, as far as Johnson Bar.”

“Clegg went up to the Lewis and Clark Hotel for a bath that cost her one dollar. She did her laundry, got her shoes mended, bought some film, and shopped for groceries for the trip. The men took the boats out of the water and worked on the hulls. They, along with Clegg, shipped every superfluous item ahead or home, even the stove and lantern, even coffee because it was heavier than tea. The boatmen took only the clothes they had on. Johnson wrote in his journal: ‘We won’t be too surprised if we aren’t able to make it up through for all the rivermen here tell us it is impossible but we are a little optimistic and are going to give it a good try.’”

“The boats pounded up through the three stages of Mountain Sheep Rapid, then worked the Idaho-side of Deer Rapid just below Eureka Creek (earlier, Deer Creek) but a mile below the Imnaha Bar. The current and strong waves forced Holmstrom to unload a part of his supplies on the Idaho shore before attempting his run. He knelt on the seat to hold the bow down, operating the motor with a rope extension, and gathered momentum as he raced up the eddyline below the rapid. When he hit the tailwaves in the main rapid, the boat went airborne “up in the air like a ball,” veered into the next wave, and pitched him headfirst over the bow into the river. He had forgotten to wear his life jacket. Holmstrom recalls: …go down & hear motor churning right over my head – it goes away & I come up – easy swimming at first – see them all running for the boat (Mongoose) below – Doc was about 200 feet away over a rough boulder bar but he gets there first – cuts the painter & jumps in – at first thot cinch to swim out but now can see that it isn’t for I’m drawn out into lower end where bad boils and down I go – getting pretty tired – after a while I come up & see Doc can’t make headway with oars as backcurrent so he starts motor & comes for me – I’m very tired now – just about the time he reaches me I get into another boil & down I go – I feel bottom of boat overhead & then go on down – very dark & seems like I’ll never come up – hold breath – pretty soon it gets lighter come to top – Doc throws kapok jacket & I can’t quite get it – as on other side of boil – he rows boat backward towards me & it sure looks good – about all I can do is reach up & grab drive shaft of motor & then he comes back grabs my hand & works me around to the side & hauls me in – no small job itself as I’m not much help – tears my pants – my only ones – dumps me off ashore as I’m too tired to be any good…”

“They proceeded up canyon, lined a rough pitch that required over two hours, and halted a half mile farther at camp. The hardest part had begun and the river served notice. Writing about the shoaly slope just completed, Johnson said, ‘…we took quite a battering from the surge of the water from the rapid hammering the boats against us. We were many times in water up under our arms and the water was chilly. We are bruised and sore and tired tonight.’ Holmstrom agreed: ‘Glad to be on the last leg of the canyon.’”

“After lunch, they spent the rest of the afternoon getting above Granite. With motors, they worked the boats to the head of the rapid on the Oregon-side, finally lining them over the lip. Next they portaged all their dunnage from the base of the rapid to a spot fifty yards above its tongue. Then they motored upriver along the shore and crossed to a cramped sandbar on the idaho-side for the night. Looking back at the rapid, Holmstrom said he would prefer not to run it. Johnson said it was one of the most dangerous they had come to. In any event, they took a quiet pride in their accomplishment – the first party since 1819 to bring any sort of a boat above that point. (Completion of three dams by Idaho Power Company in Hells Canyon left Granite Creek Rapid, with the exception of the Murtaugh section, the roughest on the river.) It was not over by any means, but they had done what they had been told they could not do. … The next morning they all took a deep breath – Holmstrom observed, ‘The canyon where we are now is the prettiest yet I think’ – and pressed on.”

“They heard Kinney Creek Rapid well before they saw it. Nine months earlier, a flashflood roared down the creek on the Idaho-side and temporarily dammed the river. After a few minutes, the river broke through, but it left a residual dam, a steep rapid – ‘more of a falls than a rapid’ – in between, and a minefield of boulders below. They lined the boats to the tail of the rapid, removed the motors, carried the boats 150 yards to the top of the rapid, and stopped to study the run with a critical eye. Johnson said, ‘No boat could live in that rapid;’ Holmstrom, however, said, ‘…the rapid has the greatest fall of any I ever saw – could be run OK in a boat tho.’ After lunch they ran glassy water for another half mile and set up camp in a ponderosa pine grove on the Oregon shore. Shouts from the road across the river announced the arrival by car of Hamilton’s wife, Phyllis, his mother and step-father, uncle and aunt. Hamilton motored over to get them. They brought dinner with them and joined the group. An air of triumph pervaded the moonlit camp, lending a festive mood to the evening. The hills drew back, announcing the limits of the canyon. Johnson rejoiced in his diary, ‘We are through Hells Canyon. Nothing can stop us now.’ The expedition’s achievement was an extraordinary feat. It had been done only once before, in 1819, almost 120 years earlier to the week. Donald McKenzie, a partner in the North West Company, who was determined to prove that the Snake River could furnish a downstream channel for the furs of the upper Snake River country, left from a fort near present Walla Walla, Washington, and went at the Snake against the grain: his six boatmen with a ‘barge,’ poled, paddled, and cordelled their way up the canyon. The indefatigable McKenzie, who weighed over 300 pounds, took two months to reach the southern end of the canyon above the rapids, and the ordeal left him with reservations: ‘Yet from the current and frequency of the rapids it may still be advisable and perhaps preferable to continue the land transport…’ Holmstrom’s party was the last to accomplish such a coup – before dams erased six major rapids.”