Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/113

 ready for what they fully believed the last and most pleasant part of their great undertaking. Some were set to felling the big trees and making the canoes, others were sent out in pairs to get furs and game for food, and still others to mending their battered and torn clothing. There being, as they thought, no further use for the pack horses, they were all turned over to the Shoshones to look after, if perchance any of the party should ever return that way and need a horse. By the 19th of October, fifteen canoes had been completed, and everything being ready the whole merry party of adventurers embarked on the Snake river and struck out for the Pacific ocean.

They had one good day's run, the loaded canoes gliding swiftly down the placid river, passing the confluence of the two branches of the stream and enabling the party to camp before night on the banks of the main river. But the next day brought trouble and danger. From a broad unruffled stream the river changed into a series of dangerous rapids in one of which one canoe was wrecked and another filled with water and the goods damaged. The next day the dangers multiplied; a laborious and dangerous portage was made, and later on a waterfall of the whole river required another portage, and still farther on another canoe was wrecked and one man lost his life. Dangers thus multiplying, it was decided to send ahead scouts to examine the river before again trusting their canoes and lives to the boiling whirlpools. Accordingly two parties were sent out to examine the stream; one down the left-hand side and the other down the right side, and at the end of four days, after examining the river for forty miles. they returned and reported Snake river a succession of dangerous rapids. whirlpools and waterfalls that no canoe could ever pass. Here was a misadventure calculated to appall the stoutest heart, and well nigh seemed to be a catastrophe that would wreck the whole undertaking. In the heart of what seemed a boundless desert, on a wild stream that forbid even a crossing, without a single pack horse, with rapidly vanishing supplies of food, at the near approach of winter, and utterly ignorant of the country before them to be traversed before reaching their goal, a more hopeless situation could hardly be imagined. That they survived and overcame dangers and obstacles that could not be foreseen or imagined. shows the fibre, courage and endurance of men whose like or equal has never been seen in any other part of the world.

On reaching this jumping-off place on the river, a picture of which is given on another page. it was called "Caldron Linn," but on parting with it in disgust they named it "The Devil's Scuttle Hole." Bravely facing the inevitable, Hunt and his men set to work to march a thousand miles to Astoria on foot, not calculating on any aid from Indians or canoes. After concealing in caches the goods they could not pack the men divided into four parties. Crooks with five men should return to Fort Henry, over two hundred miles, get their horses and return as quickly as possible to relieve the situation. Mackenzie with five men should strike northward and find another branch of the Columbia river; Reed with three men, and McLellan with three men, should descend the river, one party on each side, while Hunt with the balance of the party—thirty-one men and the Indian wife and children of Pierre Dorion—would advance through the sage brush desert of Idaho. But they had scarcely completed the arrangements for their march when the Crooks party suddenly returned accounting it as hopeless to recover the horses and return to the party before deep snow would