Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/377



REMINISCENCES OF CAPT. W. P. GRAY 337

About half an hour later he came up to the pilot house and said, 'I am willing- to risk the loss of another raft if you will agree to take it down. If we can once get a raft down the Snake river and get it to Umatilla Landing it will pay for the loss of all the others. 1 I told him I was willing to take charge of the raft but I doubted whether Captain Felton would let me go. He said he thought he could arrange it with Captain Felton, as he knew him well.

"He said, 'I realize it is dangerous work. Tell me what you are going to charge me.' I told him I would charge $10 a day while running the raft and $5 a day for any time we had to lay at the bank. He saw Captain Felton, who came to me and said he was anxious to accommodate Atwood, and he would spare me for a trip.

"Atwood and I went to his mill at Asotin, where he built a raft containing 50,000 feet of lumber. ***** When we came to the big eddy above Lewiston (where Atwood had always had trouble, and had missed landing at that place with several rafts and as a consequence lost the lumber as there was no market farther down the river), I threw the raft into the center of the eddy. Atwood protested, believing that we cer- tainly would miss the Lewiston landing, but the raft returned up the eddy and shot out towards the Lewiston shore, his face was wreathed with smiles.

"We took on 10,000 additional feet of lumber here. Next morning at 2 o'clock I cast loose and started down the river. Whenever we came to a rapid I sent the raft into the center of the rapid. The rapid would give the raft such impetus that it would carry us through the slack water. Atwood said, 'The very thing we have been trying to avoid getting the raft in the rapids, seems to be the reason for your success/ We were averaging nine miles an hour. I told him we would get along all right until we came to the Palouse rapids and we were going to have a serious time of it there. The water pours through a narrow chute and empties into the eddy, which boils back toward the current from the south shore.