Adventurers whose pathways were rivers and oceans

Water. It is one of the hottest topics in today's world. Today it is distribution of its life-giving properties. Yesterday it was more discussions of water -- rivers and oceans -- as the pathway to finding new lands. Imagine you yourself setting out on a boat, large or small, to find out what lands, if any, were out there. I have always been fascinated with the stories of those who dared to explore the unknown. At least three of my current books tell of their adventures, personal and sometimes commercial: The Columbia River, San Juan Islands: Into the 21st Century; and Ranald MacDonald, Pacific Rim Adventurer.

In the book, The Columbia River, coastal native Americans traveled through rapids to trade salmon with landlocked "brothers" for deer and bear skins. Hudson's Bay Company voyageurs,  mostly French boatmen, would dress in their finest before landing at Fort Vancouver to bring messages from the home office in central Canada. Early settlers, half starved and ragged, took to the river in today's eastern Washington, to reach the fertile farmlands of Oregon. After farmers grew wheat on the high mesas of eastern Washington, bold rivermen brought boats through vicious rapids to bring oil for farm machinery and take back to coastal ports the farmers' wheat -- loading it from the tops of mesas down to the river in chutes. In Canada gold prospectors struggled up toward Barkerville on the Fraser and Columbia rivers and, as late as the 1900s found the only way north from parts of the international border was on genuine steamboats on the Arrow Lakes (wide parts of the Columbia River). The river's path wandered through Canada and the United States (today's names) in such a convoluted way that no one realized until the early 1800s where the river had begun. I love the stories of those extraordinary people as they created their daily lives. Never mind who made the treaties and rules. I am far more interested in the adventurers who actually lived the tales mentioned and more. They worked, were eaten by wild animals, drowned, cheered their comrades, killed each other for various reasons, vied with authorities.  Real, live people. Those are my characters in the books.

Widely publicized were the stories of the temporary difficulties between the local Indian tribes and those from  southeast Alaska, between the British government and early prospectors or settlers. Shooting of a British  pig rooting in an American's frontier garden resulted in the Pig War, a war where the two sides were more apt to meet halfway for picnics than shoot each other. Instead I tell the individual stories of those who settled the islands, most so remote from commerce that a family had to row over testy ocean waters in makeshift rowboats to get supplies. About the early boats that linked the islands like a horde of mosquitoes, and the later barge companies usually owned by one or two people or a family to take supplies to the islanders and bring machinery to them. A doctor, the only one in the islands for some years, who waded ashore on any island in stormy weather to save a critically ill person. Later he learned to fly so he could get care on mainland hospitals for his patients. The changes in farming from livestock and fishing to growing lavender and starting tourism-related business. Again these brave  adventurers encountered the water -- the ocean which is their constant companion, friend, and enemy while merely living on remote islands.  Bold, flexible people.in San Juan Islands: Into the 21st Century.  Both of these books by Caxton Press, a pioneer itself as an early Northwest publisher of the Boise area that has told the history of the Pacific Northwest throughout two generations of publishing.

Adventurers are certainly not confined to the early Europeans. The astonishing true story published by Washington State University Press as Ranald MacDonald, Pacific Rim Adventurer tells of Ranald's birth at Astoria (mouth of the Columbia River)  to a Hudson's Bay Company factor and a Chinook tribal princess, who died a few months after the birth. Few mixed race Northwesterners could rival his courage and imagination in leaving his bookkeeping job at a HBC post in Canada to go to sea on several different types of vessels in the 1800s. Believed lost at sea, Ranald was very much alive but -- even more risky and with the permission of his sea captain -- he deliberately had himself appear to be a shipwreck survivor in a leaky boat just off the Japanese island of Hokkaido so that he could find out what manner of people were the Japanese. He was rescued by the Japanese, went before the authorities, eventually was transported all the way to south Japan and sustained what we would call house arrest for months. He was ordered to teach English to 14 Japanese translators who had only learned Dutch at a commercial port in Nagasaki. Who could know that, much later, one or two students would meet and translate for Admiral Perry when he came to Japan. And meanwhile, he had been allowed to leave Japan on a U.S. military ship. Not through with his incredible adventures, he then was really shipwrecked from a commercial ship in the Indian Ocean, spent time in Australia where he knocked out the then champion Australian boxer, dug gold there, went back to Canada via England to visit his ancestral Scottish family and frightened his mother in Canada who had thought he was dead, and went on to even more amazing adventures during the development of Canada's gold and railroads. Stories like this of Ranald are about those who MAKE history not slide through it. Bold, imaginative people.

Who's my next subject, I wonder. JoAnn

In the earliest days of settlement of the USA and Canada most explorer and new

The baby Columbia River becomes a vast body of water as it enters the Pacific

Grand Coulee Dam Light Show

During the dry months of Eastern Washington State, Grand Coulee Dam stages a free light show after dark for visitors, who may watch from their parked cars or sit on the lawn or inside somewhere. At the appointed time a switch turns to permit the Columbia River's water behind the dam to flow down the face of the dam and create a sort of  movie screen. A prepared show, much of it historical in nature but including other topics or cartoons, plays across this watery backdrop. Families especially love the informal presentation that makes it easy to include children in an audience.

Grand Coulee, the town, and other small settlements near the official town have motels and restaurants today. When the dam was being built during the Great Depression years, at first nothing existed at the site -- no homes, no amenities. Workmen came on freight trains to the site, if they had no other means to travel. After all, it was a JOB. Eventually, wives and families joined them, mostly living at first in flimsy shacks that barely minimized the dust from construction. One housewife told a reporter that, when she picked up her baby after its afternoon nap, dust lined its eyelashes in that short time. And one always had to beware of possible rattlesnakes.

Astoria's "butterfly fleet"

The last town on the Oregon side of the Columbia River (before the river joins the sea) is Astoria. It was a teeming port for fishing in pioneer days. At one point many small boats plied the waters adjacent to Astoria town. They had a type of sail plan that caused them to become known as the butterfly fleet and, indeed, they were delightfully colorful during times when they held a sort of regatta, when not seriously fishing. 

A current marvel for Astoria visitors is the four-mile-wide bridge over the Columbia from Washington to Oregon. A part of the span is so high that major seagoing ships can go under the bridge comfortably on their voyages to and from river to ocean.