River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  While waiting for a drop in the water before our federally assigned departure day down the Salmon, we laid over in Baker, Idaho, at a red farmhouse that, so we learned, had also been a stage stop, a railroad “depot,” and a bordello frequented by Al Capone. Other than our quarters, Baker was a couple of small dwellings, a closed-up general mercantile, and two highway signs, one on each end, the distance between them seventy-two yards; I could walk across town in three quarters of a minute.

  Our hosts were kindly people, Sharon and Roger Solaas, who came into the valley in the early seventies to raise a family and had spent much time refurbishing the house and its yard, putting in a garden, pruning the ninety-year-old poplars. Mrs. Solaas, a woman of smiles and teasings, kept rabbits and chickens, and to one tree she had nailed a sign, COUNTRY FRESH EGGS; she also offered travelers several bedrooms decorated with antiques and curiosities, each chamber opening to a view of the Beaverhead Mountains eastward or the Lemhis westward. During our several-day wait, we sat on the front porch and read or wrote or listened to the narrow irrigation ditch that was in effect a brooklet, or we just looked across the Divide Valley and wondered what it was like when young Sacagawea lived here or exactly where along the Lemhi River William Clark set up camp. Mrs. Solaas’s breakfasts were big spreads of eggs fresh from the cacklers, or French toast, or pancakes, potatoes and muffins, meals that negated lunch and necessitated long walks. Sharon and Roger, she adept in the culinary arts and he in the chase, told many stories, hers occasionally concluding with, “Now don’t write that down,” and his ending with a bang—that is, with a bullet. Across the country, we had met no better people than they.

  On our first afternoon there, I sat quietly, happily thinking how we’d at last shed the constraints of the calendar, and once I paused in my reading only to doze off for three hours. Every night thereafter, with the sweet summer air from the Bitterroots coming through my second-floor window, I knew the sleep of a seventeen-year cicada, and indeed, when I awoke, I too felt changed. Sometimes in the evening we went up the road to a café with both a good salad bar and view of the Lemhi, where I watched the tumult pour past and imagined the flow lessening; afterward we would go into Salmon, twelve miles north of Baker, to hunt out a conversation that might lead us to a boat capable of descending the river, but we turned up nothing except refusals. Most of the town soon learned of our mission, in part because of our continual queries and partly because in front of the farmhouse Nikawa sat in full view of the highway. A woman, cocking her head like a hen hunting up a morsel, asked me the second day, “Where you trying to get to in that little boat Nirvana?”

  I went to the public library in Salmon to read about the valley and happened across a nineteenth-century book containing a lexicon of Shoshone; I copied into my log the translations of certain phrases because they amused me and seemed a hidden history of red and white relations here before the Indians moved north and the townspeople named the high school teams the Savages. (Someone said, “You’re surprised? Man, you’re in Republican country. The University of Idaho is the Vandals.”) When I looked at the phrases I’d copied down, a found poem materialized:

  Are you good looking?

  Stop rambling about.

  Both of you kiss.

  Your face does not look good.

  Got no nose.

  You are a great liar.

  You think you talk smart.

  Let me loose.

  Break his toe.

  Do your best!

  I tried to learn the lines in Shoshone, but the pronunciations surpassed my capacities, so I settled on the last line, rendered as too-nuts, then went up the street for a snack of spud fudge made from Idaho potatoes. It managed to taste like both, losing the best of both.

  Every morning I checked our company’s resolve not to test the river by using our small kayak and canoe, each time finding their will unshaken, and secretly I was glad because the Lemhi was still ripping at full pelt. One afternoon on the porch during a chess game (the scrounged-up pieces were two sets of salt-and-pepper shakers for royalty, .270-caliber bullets as bishops, shotgun shells for castles, quarters as knights, and pennies for pawns), a fellow rode past on a bicycle, saw Nikawa, and turned back toward us. He said, “I knew we’d cross trails. I’ve been hearing you were out here somewhere.”

  A native of Long Island, New York, Rob Pike, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, seven years earlier had begun crossing the United States by boat and bicycle, using wheels where his V-hull would not go. Each summer vacation he put in several hundred miles. Except for Fort Peck Reservoir, the solid fellow had pedaled over Montana, and to that Pilotis said, “You’re smarter than some people who insist on struggling along completely by water.” I asked if he were biking through the Idaho mountains, he nodded, and my copilot said, “Worlds smarter.” Pike was bound for the head of navigation on the Snake River at Lewiston-Clarkston. “So are we,” said Pilotis looking dimly at me. I said I admired his soloness, but his concept was different—his was a boat-and-bike. Pilotis: “Ours is a hope-and-hike.” More like a goad-and-gripe, I said.

  I asked the lawyer what led him into such an undertaking, and he said, “I watched the wife of a friend struggle through a car crash and its aftermath. I saw her broken body go from an ICU to a hospital bed to a wheelchair to a walker to crutches and onto her feet again. It all made me take a hard look at myself coming into midlife and the way I was spending my time. One of the results is this trip, my American Passage.” He liked our company and the porch and decided to stay for a few days of rest before taking on Idaho. He said, “I’ll tell you, heaven is an ignition switch.”

  Because we would travel down the Salmon River with a local outfitter, a man I considered a master raftsman with proper boats for white water, I needed more than our company of three to make the long descent worth his time, so I had lined up several friends to join us on the River of No Return. Toward the end of our layover, they began arriving. To celebrate the start of our run to the Pacific, I asked our hosts to prepare a special and historically appropriate dinner, an idea that came to me when I was reading Meriwether Lewis’s account of a lunch break with the Lemhi Valley Shoshones, one of the most graphic descriptions in the journals:

  When [the Indians] arrived where the deer was which was in view of me they dismounted and ran in, tumbling over each other like a parcel of famished dogs each seizing and tearing away a part of the intestens which had been previously thrown out by Drewyer who killed it; the seen was such when I arrived that had I not have had a pretty keen appetite myself I am confident I should not have taisted any part of the venison shortly. Each one had a peice of some discription and all eating most ravenously. Some were eating the kidnies, the melt, and liver, and the blood runing from the corner of their mouths, others were in a similar situation with the paunch and guts but the exuding substance in this case from their lips was of a different discription. One of the last who attracted my attention particularly had been fortunate in his allotment or reather active in the division; he had provided himself with about nine feet of the small guts, one end of which he was chewing on while with his hands he was squezzing the contents out at the other. I really did not untill now think that human nature ever presented itself in a shape so nearly allyed to the brute creation. I viewed these poor starved divils with pity and compassion. I directed McNeal to skin the deer and reserved a quarter, the ballance I gave the Chief to be divided among his people; they devoured the whole of it nearly without cooking.

  Mrs. Solaas could dress out farmyard creatures or a grouse or deer or anything else that made an unfortunate wander onto the highway, and Roger kept the family table additionally supplied with game fromthe field and fish from the rivers, as well as filling their large vestibule with taxidermied salmon and heads of mammals (a mule deer, antelope, caribou, black bear, cougar, several sets of antlers, and a bison skull he found). Even though no one in our outfit hunted any longer and some of us gave fair allegiance to vegetable diets (I asked one
member to go easy on calling the foyer “The Hall of Death”), I proposed we sit down to a farewell meal the Corps of Discovery might have eaten.

  On their twenty-seven months away from St. Louis, the men shot and devoured at least:

  Deer 1,001

  Elk 375

  Large fowl 252 (probably more)

  Bison 227

  Beaver 113

  Antelope 62

  Wolves/Coyotes 48 (ate only one)

  Grizzlies 43

  Black bears 23

  Otter 16

  Fish countless

  They also ate 190 Indian dogs and a dozen horses, the latter keeping them alive north of the Lemhi Valley. Although they occasionally cooked up smaller creatures, the near absence of rabbits, squirrels, and prairie dogs suggests such game wasn’t worth expending the limited supply of shot and powder. Clark said the company could consume in a day four deer or one bison. There were also meals of various grains and legumes, wild berries, wappato, and enough camas root to give the Corps gastrointestinal upsets.

  One morning I read the list to Mrs. Solaas who said her freezer held nearly everything except a bear, wolf, and otter; instead she had cougar, mountain goat, and thought she could get a raccoon and maybe some moose. No coyote? I said. She looked shocked. “I raised a pup from before its eyes opened. It was darling. Our children taught it to howl in the living room.” We’ll forget the coyote, I said. Just then the Solaases’ Labrador, Duke, ambled past, and I commented that although Lewis was inordinately fond of loin of puppy, the only animal the often-hungry Corps refused to eat was the captain’s Newfound land, Seaman. Mrs. Solaas said to the dog something on the order of, “We won’t let the bad man put you in the oven.”

  I proposed the menu to Pilotis who has been alleged to weep when passing a meat counter. “So now our participatory history is turning into gustatory history?” Pausing, then, “Okay, but no puppy and no horse.” And I: Explain to me the ethical difference between a fish and a pony. While I drew up a menu, Pilotis, watching over my shoulder, said for both of us, “Mea culpa!” A few days later, early in the morning, Mrs. Solaas began preparing the feast, a shameless festal board. To recapitulate history, she used only the simplest means of cooking, few seasonings, and made no attempt to remove any “wild” tastes. On our last night together, she set out a spread such as I’d never before seen or ever again could condone for myself. Over two tables were platters, bowls, pots, tureens, pans, broilers, and trays, and in them:

  Mule Deer Roast

  Bighorn Meatloaf

  Chicken-fried Cougar

  Roasted Mountain Goat au Jus

  Haunch of Bison Stew

  Grouse in Cream Sauce

  Skillet-fried Elk

  Roasted Flank of Antelope in Gravy

  Baked Leg of Raccoon

  Steelhead Trout in Cream

  Roasted Beavertail

  Boiled Beavertail

  *

  Salmon River Wild Cherry Pie

  I affirm here that what might seem a menu of the forbidden was all taken legally and that we ate it respectfully but with due relish. I proposed the toast: May these critters before us forgive us, and may none among us even once utter the words “Tastes like chicken”—and now my boon friends, too-nuts!

  Our preferences varied. I found the mountain lion the most delicious, the only feline I’ve ever eaten, except perhaps one time in China when the smiling host once too often reassured us, “No, no, American guests, house cat not in soup bowl.” The bighorn was a close second, but I was alone in tolerating raccoon for more than a bite. We were unanimous regarding only one dish—no matter how prepared or how favored by Captain Lewis—our distaste for beavertail, a glutinous mess. About cooking it, even our chef, her face pinched as if she’d sniffed offal, said, “Never again.” In all my days, including China, I’ve never eaten a meal more singular.

  Thus full of American history, we moved to the cool porch to look off into the mountains that had abundantly provided most of our supper; toward the north lay the range that nearly starved to death the Corps of Discovery. The Photographer said, “It’s sad that the great river of these valleys, the one we’ve got coming up, can’t any longer provide the fish it’s named for.” That comment about sockeye salmon depressed conversation until I asked whether anyone had noticed in town the shop selling T-shirts imprinted:

  THE RIVER OF NO RETURN

  WHERE NO ONE HEARS YOUR SCREAM

  X

  THE SALMON RIVER

  NEAR GOSPEL HUMP WILDERNESS, IDAHO

  Iconogram X

  The Salmon River is one of the upper branches of the Oregon or Columbia and takes its rise from various sources among a group of mountains to the northwest of the Wind River chain. It owes its name to the immense shoals of salmon which ascend it in the months of September and October. The salmon on the west side of the Rocky Mountains are, like the buffalo on the eastern plains, vast migratory supplies for the wants of man, that come and go with the seasons. As the buffalo in countless throngs find their certain way in the transient pasturage on the prairies, along the fresh banks of the rivers, and up every alley and green defile of the mountains, so the salmon at their allotted seasons, regulated by a sublime and all-seeing Providence, swarm in myriads up the great river and find their way up their main branches, and into the minutest tributary streams so as to pervade the great arid plains and to penetrate even among barren mountains. Thus wandering tribes are fed in the desert places of the wilderness, where there is no herbage for the animals of the chase, and where, but for these periodical supplies, it would be impossible for man to subsist.

  The rapid currents of the rivers which run into the Pacific render the ascent of them very exhausting to the salmon. When the fish first run up the rivers, they are fat and in fine order. The struggle against impetuous streams and frequent rapids gradually renders them thin and weak, and great numbers are seen floating down the river on their backs. As the season advances and the water becomes chilled, they are flung in myriads on the shores, where the wolves and bears assemble to banquet on them. Often they rot in such quantities along the river banks as to taint the atmosphere. They are commonly from two to three feet long.

  Washington Irving

  The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West, 1843

  Bungholes and Bodacious Bounces

  OF AMERICAN RIVERS outside Alaska, the undammed Salmon, the River of No Return, is one of the longest entirely within a single state, and probably the most unabused big one, chiefly because its lower two thirds passes through the least accessible large tract in the contiguous forty-eight, a fiercely mountainous region where roads cease and humans thin to almost nothing along a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon and second only to Hell’s Canyon not far distant; for 180 miles the Salmon gorge is more than a mile down. It is the only river Lewis and Clark turned away from. Meriwether wrote of Sacagawea’s brother explaining the terrain:

  I now prevailed on the Chief to instruct me with rispect to the geography of his country. This he undertook very cheerfully by delienating the rivers on the ground. But I soon found that his information fell far short of my expectation or wishes. . . . He placed a number of heeps of sand on each side which he informed me represented the vast mountains of rock eternally covered with snow through which the river passed. That the perpendicular and even juting rocks so closely hemned in the river that there was no possibilyte of passing along the shore; that the bed of the river was obstructed by sharp pointed rocks and the rapidity of the stream such that the whole surface of the river was beat into perfect foam as far as the eye could reach. That the mountains were also inaccesible to man or horse. He said that this being the state of the country in that direction that himself nor none of his nation had ever been further down the river than these mountains.

  Not fully trusting Indian geography, Clark followed a “wolf path” over the high and broken north bank for fourteen miles only to reach a vista r
unning to a horizon of ridge after ridge of rough metamorphic rock uplifted into a chaos of ten-thousand-foot mountains. He said:

  This river is about 100 yards wide and can be forded but in a few places. Below my guide and maney other Indians tell me that the Mountains Close and is a perpendicular Clift on each Side, and Continues for great distance and that the water runs with great violence from one rock to the other on each Side foaming & roreing thro rocks in every direction So as to render the passage of any thing impossible.

  Clark, who not once recorded a disparaging word about his friend, named this most difficult of rivers, the impossible one, the Lewis, and the Expedition bypassed it to go north into mountains that nearly killed them before they reached easier descent on the Clearwater. A century later, a settler said the Salmon gorge looked like “Creation chopped it out with a hatchet.”