Chris Dixon uncovers the tale of the longest freshwater boat passage ever—powered by twin 4-horsepower Evinrudes.
Back in 1923, an intrepid Angeleno got a wild idea. Why not follow the trail of Lewis and Clark from Oregon to the East Coast, but do it backwards—with a motorboat? When I first learned of the audacious attempt of John Edwin Hoag and his friend Frank S. Wilton on a boating forum, my interest was piqued, but it appeared that aside from a tantalizing photo at the Mystic Seaport Museum of their arrival at 86th street in Manhattan, there wasn’t much record of their attempt. A little digging revealed a mention in the New York Times. Then, jackpot: Hoag had serialized the effort in the gilded age pages of William Randolph Hearst’s Motor Boating magazine.
It seems that Hoag had become obsessed with the idea of a transcontinental boat trek and spent two years poring and planning. Then, in early 1925, he and Wilton christened the Transcontinental, a high-bowed, dory-shaped 18-footer with a five-foot beam, big leaning posts fore and aft and a steering wheel near the enclosed bow. Hanging off her stern was a pair of 40-pound, 4-horsepower Evinrude “Sport Twin” two-cylinder motors that the team affectionately named “Lewis and Clark.” With their Scottish Terrier, Spy, Hoag and Wilton set off up the Columbia River from Astoria, Oregon on May 20. On her bow were inscribed the words, Headed for Heaven, Hell or Hoboken.
Immediately, disaster struck. The surging Columbia was well above flood stage, and filled with logs. Hoag hoped to make 7 knots upstream, but couldn’t manage 2. When Wilton failed to avoid a careening piece of timber, Transcont-inental’s stern was ripped off, requiring a six-day repair. Still, the pair soldiered on, navigating rolling rapids along the Willamette River before reaching the Snake River in Lewiston, Idaho. There, raging floodwaters forced a 400-mile portage by train to Fort Benton, Montana. For the next 300 miles of the roiling Missouri River, they stocked up on bacon and eggs (sustenance they came to abhor), and eventually reached Wolf Point with a half-gallon of gasoline to spare.
On they ran, burning 1,200 gallons of gasoline through wicked storms and turbulent waters to the Mississippi, and through the locks that would carry them through the Trent waterway, Lake Michigan—where they were mistakenly reported lost after a storm—and Lake Ontario. “Our run down the St. Lawrence after darkness that evening was one of the worst nightmares of the whole ocean to ocean journey,” Hoag wrote. “…dodging through the Thousand Islands on the current, and by what Wilton termed lightning navigation … fog, rain, total darkness, running down a current, and through unlighted rocks, and uncountable islands, would have been bad enough—but, added to that was lightning and thunder that fairly rent the air. We’d cruise a little ways—going it blind, and then when a flash enabled us to see. We’d slide around a pile of rocks—squeak between a couple of islands where we didn’t know whether we were going to hang up or go through, and go it blind again. Every flash would leave us staring owl-eyed with the rain beating our faces, and into the night so black that it seemed we should have been able to put pieces of it in our pockets for souvenirs … just then lightning illuminated the whole river. We were going between two piles of rock so close that I could have jumped to either one.”
Arriving in New York in time for a wicked September Nor’easter, the pair were greeted as celebrities. They’d cruised 5,280 miles and set what they correctly reckoned was a record for a freshwater powerboat passage. Lewis and Clark would have approved.
