FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 18, 1910. 
980 
An Ozark Canoe Trip. 
Continued from page 946. 
A TYPICAL MERAMEC TIE RAFT. 
It was decided that evening to make a very 
early start the next morning, and the first one 
to awake was to rouse the others. This duty 
fell upon Siwash, who was up at four. Every¬ 
thing moved with dispatch, and in a very short 
time we were afloat, and in a few hours reached 
Indian Creek. Here Jim and I left the boats 
to visit the club house and to try to obtain 
milk, eggs and butter. We returned with none 
of these. The club house was full and the 
steward had not enough on hand for his guests. 
While we were away, Boots discovered a huge 
blacksnake which the Schoolma’m promptly at-’ 
tacked and killed. Below the club house is a 
wagon bridge and under it a nasty riffle. A 
partly submerged log prevented us from going 
through the quiet water. We entered single 
file, three or four boat lengths apart. There 
was an audience of vacationists on the bridge, 
a great many women among them, and this, 
probably, caused the girls to be nervous. We 
got through, however, after shipping a little 
water. 
We ate our lunch at the St. Clair ford and 
then made for Moselle. We simply had to make 
Moselle that night or face starvation. The ad¬ 
dition of two persons to the original party up¬ 
set all our food arrangements. We were es¬ 
pecially in need of coffee, tea, milk and sugar. 
For the past two days we had been on short 
rations. All worked hard; the girls plying their 
paddles steadily, and at four-thirty we were re¬ 
warded by a sight of Moselle Bridge. A tie 
raft was running under the bridge as we ap¬ 
proached, and stuck there. Immediately below 
the bridge a pair of canoeists were campel, so 
we continued for a few hundred yards and 
camped, stretching our tents in a row, backed 
up to a willow thicket. We had two very high 
cottonwood trees in front of our camp, and 
under these we prepared our dining room and 
kitchen. While the men worked at arranging 
the camp, the girls decided among themselves 
that they would like to spend their extra day at 
that point. To this arrangement we assented. 
Truth to tell, we were tired—played out—and 
glad to get a rest. 
Jim had just finished putting up his tent when 
the dinner bell rang. Poor Jim!—his tent never 
was designed for canoe cruising. The Newly¬ 
weds were using a heavy army wall affair, 9x9, 
made of duck that must have weighed a pound 
a yard. It had not been their intention to 
cruise back, and their tent had been chosen for 
a permanent camp, for which it was excellent. 
After supper Jim and I walked to town and 
loaded up on provisions. It was a tired sex¬ 
tette that crawled into slumberland that night. 
The sun was high in the heavens when we 
awoke. We were still at breakfast when the 
morning passenger train rolled over the bridge 
at ten. After breakfast, Siwash, who was not 
satified with the result of the previous day’s 
marketing, went to town and returned with a 
watermelon, a steak and a bottle of beer, which 
he hid. I did not mind the beer, but, oh! that 
steak. How I thrilled at the sight of it! Not 
that I had missed steak greatly for the past 
week, but now that I was actually in the same 
camp with one, I could hardly wait for the next 
meal. And then there was the watermelon! 
Big times were in sight for that camp. 
At the request of Boots I also journeyed over 
to town that morning and telephoned home. 
She was hungry for news of our little boy; so 
was I. Mother was kind enough to hold him 
to the telephone so I could hear him try to 
talk to his daddy. I had an attack of homesick¬ 
ness after that. Better not telephone home 
from camp. 
The cooks combined dinner and supper, and 
we ate our second and last meal that day about 
four-thirty. We could not have eaten a third 
meal. When the last bit of that watermelon 
had disappeared, I know none of us had any 
appetite left. 
The tie raft stretched along in front of our 
camp got away about that time, almost time 
for them to tie up again for the night. I could 
not but compare the method of getting timber 
to market, in Missouri, with the ways of the 
Northern lumbermen. In Michigan and Wis¬ 
consin they threw the logs loose into the stream 
and drove _ them down the river like cattle. 
Here the ties are cut; then each is secured to 
its neighbor by a sapling. The rafts are from 
five to eight hundred yards long. The one in 
front of our camp was at least six hundred yards 
in length. This huge affair was manned by 
three men, one in front, one in the rear, and an¬ 
other who constantly kept on the move from 
front to back. These three men worked all 
day in wet clothing. Often it was necessary 
for them to stand in the water, neck-deep, and 
lift the raft over an obstruction. When the raft 
attained any speed, as it did when passing 
through any length of free water, it required 
something real tangible to stop it. I have seen 
whole sections of shore torn away and immense 
trees, lying in the water, tossed aside like sticks. 
When moving at this speed the man in front 
had his hands full. If the head end crashed into 
anything, the ties would buckle up and he would 
be lucky to escape with his life. 
Jim worked all the evening cutting and haul¬ 
ing large logs to camp. That was the only fault 
we could find in Jim; he worked so hard he 
made Siwash and myself feel constantly morti¬ 
fied. Jim created work. He actually loved it. 
The girls thought him great. Any comfort he 
could furnish for them in camp was provided, 
regardless of the amount of physical labor re¬ 
quired. We had to hide the ax to keep him 
from cutting more than the share of the wood. 
Well, when Jim had a pile of logs higher than 
his head, he fired it. Flames mounted high in 
the air. It was not a camp-fire, it was a con¬ 
flagration. Between the gravel, still very hot 
from the sun’s rays, and Jim’s fire, we were 
in for it. There was but one way to escape—to 
go in swimming. This we did. The moon 
was full, there was plenty of light, so we 
splashed around and had a good time. 
The next day trouble started early. The tie 
raft had pulled a log out of the riffle above and 
deposited it in the narrows below camp. We 
tried hard to avoid this log, but were unsuccess¬ 
ful, so we jumped out and led the boats around. 
A few hundred yards below this point, on the 
opposite side, was the mouth of the Bourbois 
River, another fork of the Meramec, a shallow, 
muddy stream, of no interest to canoeists. 
After a couple hours’ paddling, we overtook 
our friends the tie-rafters again. The raft was 
split in three parts. They were in heaps of 
trouble, poor fellows. 
From Moselle down we had poor canoeing. 
All was still water, and this required constant 
and hard paddling. By noon we were all very 
tired, and looked forward eagerly to lunch time 
for a rest. 
Somewhere in this land there lives a - man 
who wrote a book which he titled “Camping 
and Woodcraft.” I hope he and the School¬ 
ma’m never meet—for his sake, I hope so. In 
this book he makes reference to citric acid. 
This particular drug never accompanied our 
former trips, but this time, in accordance with 
the author’s advice, a quarter pound of it was 
taken along. We had almost forgotten it. 
When we found that the girls had forgotten to 
fill the thermos bottles with tea and the 
necessity for making a fire confronted us, the 
Schoolma’m thought of the acid and hauled it 
forth. How our mouths watered at the pros¬ 
pect of “lemonade”! Every one present had 
something to say of the delicious lemonade that 
they heard could be made with citric acid. 
Conrad Lueke, Jr. 
[to be concluded.] 
the camp at moselle. 
