The True Account Read Free Page B

Cape Horn (the High Falls at Kingdom Common) by fierce headwinds laden with hail, sleet, and driving snow. At last, on the fourth attempt, we cleared the tip of the Cape with room to spare and sallied on up the west coast of South America past the Juan Fernandez Islands, as my uncle called the stone-filled timber cribs in the river designed to regulate log drives. Then on to the Galapagos, where he had arranged for us to be set upon by a party of three lads from the village, their faces all besmeared with blue river clay, in the guise of cannibals. After putting these savages to rout and beating up the coast of Spanish California past the mission of San Francisco—the little French Canadian chapel just outside town—we reached the mouth of the Columbia—Kingdom Brook—at noon. Out came my uncle’s sextant and astrolabe, out came his book of navigational tables. After the most elaborate mathematical calculations, he estimated our latitude at about 60° north, from which he concluded that the Columbia entered the Pacific not far south of Alaska. To celebrate this surprising news he smoked half a pipe of hemp.
    With the daunting overland portion of our trip through
terra incognita
now at hand, our explorations were about to begin in earnest. Reminding me that everything we saw next would be country viewed by Americans for the first time, and that we were about to venture where the foot of civilized man had never trod before, and, furthermore, that I should take particular notice of everything I saw so that, when home again, I could paint what had “ne’er been painted before,” and commending us both to Providence and to our Maker, my uncle planted the flag on a little knoll overlooking the river and we started out again. Our struggles up the rapids of the Columbia, as represented by several old beaver dams, were Herculean—indeed, a hotter, wetter, more tedious and arduous four hours than we had getting to the Rockies, or Kingdom Mountain, can scarcely be imagined. But our travails were not yet over. In the thick hemlock woods on the mountainside we fought off a horde of black flies, which my uncle mistook for “the all-puissant Blackfeet”; and as evening drew near, and we waded back down the little foot-wide rill on the back side of the mountain—the “broad Missouri”—a swarm of mosquitoes descended on us with all the savagery of the “treacherous Sioux.” Seth Hubbell’s sheep pasturage my uncle denominated the great western prairie; Seth’s dozen merino sheep, a thundering herd of bison.
    As twilight settled over the mountain and we started down the last slope, my uncle said, “Ti, we’ve done it. We have discovered the Northwest Passage—backward. I only wish Colonel Allen could have been with us.”
    Exhausted, soaked through and through, bruised and bugbitten, we arrived home at a little after eight o’clock, to a heroes’ welcome from my father and Helen of Troy, who fixed us a late supper of ham and eggs and pancakes laced with maple syrup. I ate eleven pancakes, my uncle twenty-six, my mother four, and my father one and part of another, which I finished for him.
    My uncle then fired up his long, curved hemp pipe and began to recount our adventures of the day. Stimulated by the mild cannabis fumes, he told how the
Samuel de Champlain
had been wrecked on the Columbia and how, having been cast away, we had made our way back afoot. My father’s arms and elbows were now sticking directly out from his head in an attempt to exert more pressure upon that seat of reason. Warming to his subject, True fetched his map of North America, and, in the large blank section, began to trace our route very exactly, marking down the places where we had skirmished with the Blackfeet and Sioux and asking me to draw in a few bison. At this juncture my father rose from the table and declared that even if I should turn out to be a Vermont