The dreaded Little canon

Just below the dreaded Little canon the Ogilvie crept up beside the anchored coal-boat and took on more fuel. We could look straight up the quarter-mile rock flume, whose sides rise perpendicularly for less than 100 feet and then slope away into wooded foothills, far above which towers the great sky-line of the Sawback range, the continental divide. A white disk shot out from a tree branch overhanging the canon’s mouth as signal to our boat that the way was clear to ascend, the reverse of the disk showing a black warning to any boat at the upper end that it must not enter, since two boats cannot pass in that narrow cut, where the broad river is compressed and turned on edge. The incline of foaming water between jagged rock walls that approach within 60 and 100 feet of each other was running with a mild currentonly a little over 10 miles an hour that dayand with full steam and forced draught our boat was able to climb the hill of running water in thirteen minutes. In flood times steamers were forced to wait for the fury to subside and to “line up” by reeling in on the capstan wire cables fastened to the largest trees ashore. There was a deafening roar from the boilers and the boat shook as if all its upper works would be loosened, while it worked its way upward, dipping, careening, quivering in all its solid frame, and shipping, waves at the bows, and there was more personal excitement and tension in this struggle with the Stikine’s fury than we had any idea of until we came out to wider and slower reaches and tied up for the night. We were then ” over the range,” ” east of the mountains,” ” across the divide,” and there was a great difference in the character of the country. There were grassy benches and hills, stretches of burned forests, and every sign of a scorching, dry, interior climate. The Kloochman’s canon, named because the Indian canoeman, exhausted with his day of frantic tracking and paddling through the Little canon, leaves this bit of navigation to his kloochman, or squaw, was only a stiff millrace of water running for one or two hundred yards between green banks. We easily surmounted its slope, and turning sharply where a bald cliff met the flood, speedily climbed the Big riffle of the Stikineonly a stretch of dashing rapids over a stony bed. Green benches or terraces along the river bank, open and grassy stretches, with towering peaks in the background, gave one the idea of approaching civilization again and the group of log-houses and buildings at Hudson’s Bay Flats, or Shakesville, seemed quite in keeping.