the rapid was examined and it was discovered that by
pulling straight out into it clear of the rocks, we could easily get
through. This was accordingly done and one after the other the boats
sped down as if towed by an express train. Then we ran a number of
smaller ones with no trouble, and toward evening arrived at a place
where the entire river dropped into a sag, before falling over some very
bad rapids. We avoided the sag by keeping close to the left bank, and
rounded a little point into a broad eddy, across which we could sail
with impunity. Then we landed on a rocky point at the head of the first
bad plunge, the beginning of Disaster Falls, where the No-Name was
wrecked two years before. At this place we camped for the night. The
descent altogether here is about fifty feet. In the morning all the
cargoes were taken over the rocks to the foot of the first fall, and the
boats were cautiously worked down along the edge to where the cargoes
were, where they were reloaded and lowered to the head of the next
descent, several hundred yards. Here the cargoes were again taken out
and carried over the rocks down to a quiet bay. This took till very late
and everyone was tired out, but the boats were carried and pushed on
skids up over the rocks for twenty or thirty yards, past the worst of
the fall, and then lowered into the water to be let down the rest of the
way by lines. Two had to be left there till the following day. We had
found a one hundred pound sack of flour lying on a high rock, where it
had been placed at the time of the wreck of the No-Name, and Andy that
day made our dinner biscuits out of it. Though it was two years old the
bread tasted perfectly good; and this is a tribute to the climate, as
well as to the preservative qualities of a coating of wet flour.
This coating was about half an inch thick, and outside were a cotton
flour-sack and a gunny bag. The flour was left on the rock, and may be
there yet. Not far below this we came to Lower Disaster Falls, which
a short portage enabled us to circumnavigate and go on our way. The
current was so swift all the time that objects on shore flitted past as
they do when one looks from a window of a railway train. Just opposite
our camp on this night the cliff was almost perpendicular from the
water's edge to the height of about twenty-five hundred feet. The walls
seemed very close together, only a narrow strip of sky being visible.
As we sat after supper peering aloft a