Renegade River

Leonard Miracle
Field and Stream
February, 1951

“There were still forty uncharted miles of the Bruneau River between us and our destination. The last point at which we could scale the wall was six miles behind us. Once atop the 2,000-foot canyon rim, it was fifteen or twenty miles to the nearest road. I say “road.” Anything in which a coyote can make a U-turn is a road in Owyhee County. In an area larger than the two smallest Eastern States combined, Owyhee County houses less than 6,000 persons, many of them Indians on the Duck Valley Reservation. Bruneau Canyon runs through the middle of the badlands.

You can’t beat that canyon bareback, barehanded and afoot. That’s how we’d stand if we lost that boat.”

“Three of us pulled as if we had hold of the hatch to heaven. We didn’t budge the boat. A mill-race current wedged it under a rock shelf and pounded it deeper and deeper as more water poured over the top of the boat. John and I held a conference in one quick glance.

‘Save my .38!’ he yelled as he splashed into the water.

‘My camera!’ I prompted.

Out it came. Water gushed from the water proof bag that held it. I flung the load back toward Stan, who caught it in his free hand and tossed it unceremoniously to a gravel bar. Our grocery bag came next. I passed it up the line with an expression of anguish. It was like lifting your bird dog from under a truck wheel.”

“I fished in my levi pockets for a smoke. The cigarettes came out like a lump of wholewheat dough. A wooden match stuck to the pack, the head dissolved to a blue smudge. I stuck the match-stick in my mouth and leaned back against the rock.

A man was a damn fool to get himself into a fix like this, I thought soberly. I’d been a damn fool before, but in this case, it was the third day in a row. And there was more to come.”

“Pat Murphy was partly responsible for this. Pat, who ran the little general store and hot-springs accommodations know as Murphy’s Hot Springs, had supplied the idea a year ago.”

“The Bruneau leap-frogs down an avenue of century-old junipers, a sparkling riffle, then a deep black pool. I’d seen flecks of gold dust and cougar tracks on the sand-bars. There were mule deer along the banks. Trout could die of old age below Pat’s place without seeing a fish hook. All of this was guarded on every side by at least fifty miles of sage-studded wilderness and lay deep within the sheer walls of a 75-mile gorge. It is claimed that a rock can be dropped for a free fall of twenty-one seconds before striking the wall at one point.

Rattlesnakes? About one for every ten rocks. Local sportsmen, though, may attack the figure as being too conservative.

With this information in mind, I walked back to the bar. ‘Pat,’ I inquired, ‘has anyone ever been all the way through that canyon in a boat?’

‘Nope.’”

“That information caused me a restless winter. I was thinking of the rubber boats made for life rafts during the war. Light, tough, seaworthy, big enough for a crew of two or three and supplies – Bruneau Buster, I’d call the craft. Then a partner, essential equipment, a grubstake – we’d beat the Bruneau, so help me!

Partners were hard to come by. It was surprising how few people were willing to spend their vacation in Bruneau Canyon. ‘But, man, think of the trout fishing! Exploring! Prospecting!’ I urged.

Finally my brother Stan and a local friend, John Hughes, took the bait.”

“The first run was a short one. We had pushed off in late afternoon. Cut off from the sun, the canyon floor was soon too dark to travel. Two miles down, we passed a juniper-fringed gravel bar. Wood, water, a clear, level place to camp – we beached the boat.

It was six o’clock when I crawled out of my sleeping bag the next morning. After the fire and coffee pot had been snuggled together for breakfast, I assembled my fishing rod. I knotted a Renegade on my two-pound leader. A ten-inch rainbow tied onto the fly as it touched the water. I stumbled over Stan’s sack in the skirmish.

‘You might get off my bed to finish your fishing,’ he growled, taking in the situation with one open eye.

‘Reach for your rod, and you can fish from that sack,’ I answered.”

“Eight more trout in about twice that many minutes. Stan, fishing in his shorts and barefoot, made it three apiece for breakfast.”

“The third day we met a cliff in the middle of the river, and trouble – real trouble. The smart thing to do was to portage around that spot. The whole stream rushed up to the cavernous base of the cliff. There it climbed up the wall in a foaming column, then topped backward in a whirlpool that sucked it under a submerged ledge and out into a deep pool. But we were cocky as we approached the spot. We got smart later.

‘We’ll slide the boat through along the edge of the rock,’ I suggested.

That plan may might have worked. We’ll never know, because Stan and John lowered the boat experimentally as I worked my way around the shore. Then the whirlpool reached out and grabbed it!

That was why I was leaning against a sheltered rock and watching a cold wind sweep the littered, fireless gravel bar. Stan and John were buttoning on wet shirts and starting to prowl through the sodden wreckage.

I walked in with a GI mess kit I’d fished from a riffle below. It broke open and spilled out a handful of silverware as I tossed it down. I kicked it into a pile.

‘Looks like the rest of the trip’ll be kinda tough,’ I began.

‘Yeah, it’ll be a little pimitive the rest of the way,’ John finally agreed.”

“Inventory: five cans of food, the labels gone; two pounds of bacon; powdered coffee for three days, wet in a loosely sealed jar, but salvable; seven eggs, twenty potatoes; half a cup of salt, half a gallon of flour, match sticks and sand combined, and two soggy lumps of dough that had been loaves of bread.

Everything, down to the last cigarette in a sealed carton, was soaked. Our serious loss was in groceries and matches. It would take a lot of food and fire to put us through another sixty miles of the canyon.

Flattened into pancakes and fried, our wet bread was delicious with a dash of syrup. The flour, crudely sifted, made three more pan-sized cakes. We rolled them in a dishtowel for future use.”

“At the crack of dawn next morning (day 6) we waded into the river. Our last can of food lay crumpled under the rocks of the fire pit. Late that afternoon both the river and canyon began to widen. That could mean but one thing – we were nearing Bruneau Valley. There were fewer rocks in the river. It was running in one continuous riffle over a gravel bottom.

An hour later we tossed the Bruneau Buster, patched, battered and deflated, against the wall of George Bertschy’s Hot Springs Store. Bruneau village lay just a few hayfields ahead. Mission completed! George, who had never had a customer float in from the south before, stared for just a moment.

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ George said. ‘I’ll be damned.’”