PADDLING PRESIDENTS

 

White House on the Potomac, 1836-37 White House Collection/The White House Historical Association

"Life is a great adventure…accept it in such a spirit. --Theodore Roosevelt

In the spirit of President’s Day, we salute those who have answered the call to higher office in service to our nation as President of the United States. From the high to lows, these men have shaped our country's history and standing around the free world. As Abraham Lincoln said, ”The Presidency, even to the most experienced politicians, is no bed of roses; and General Taylor like others, found thorns within it. No human being can fill that station and escape censure." But for some presidents, the river called and kept calling, offering adventure and liberation from the burden of our highest office.

In the early days of our fledgling nation, our country's rivers were natural highways allowing for westward expansion and transporting raw materials such as lumber, fur, food, and other supplies. Our early canoeing presidents identified with this need to explore our seemly less endless waterways.
Thomas Jefferson called the Ohio River the most beautiful river on earth. "Its current gentle," he went on, "Waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted."

As river traffic began to decline by the 1870s, thanks to trains, a coinciding interest in nature emerged producing a new recreational activity called tourism. Affluent citizens and presidents were now flocking to scenic lake and river locations for fishing, canoeing, boating, for rest and relaxation.
Wisconsin's Brule River is often called the River of Presidents because five United States Presidents have visited and to fish the north woods river, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower.

Modern-day presidents dedicated themselves to environmental awareness and pledging to keep rivers running wild. It was President Lyndon Johnson who advocating for the Wild & Scenic Rivers Act in the 1960s who said, "The time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great scenic rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.”

For many presidents, the call of the river poured into in their souls, making them who they were and guiding them on their path as president.
Here are 6 paddling presidents and their exploits on the water before, after and even during their presidency.

 Daniel Huntington 1816-1906

George Washington 1789 to 1797 While our first president is mostly remembered for crossing ice-obstructed Delaware River on Christmas 1776 and leading a surprise attack on the Hessians during the American Revolutionary War, his days on the icy water didn't start there. In October 1753, Washington volunteered to lead a special envoy to make peace with the Iroquois Confederacy but more importantly tell that the French forces vacate territory claimed the British, after hearing their plans to establish forts along the Ohio River.
Traveling with the Ohio Company’s representative Christopher Gist on horseback, foot, and canoe across the Appalachians all the way to Ohio River and then up almost to the shores of Lake Erie Washington had various meetings with the Indian Chiefs of the area.
After delivering their message to the French, who said thanks but no thanks, the two found themselves double-crossed by their guide and on the run from hostile from Indians in the middle of winter.
Upon reaching the Allegheny River, they fashion a raft together in an attempt to cross it.
"I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft, that the ice might pass us by," wrote Washington in his journal, "When the rapidity of the stream threw it with so much violence against the pole that it jerked me out into ten feet water, but I, fortunately, saved myself by catching hold of one of the raft logs; notwithstanding all our efforts we could not get the raft to either shore, but were obliged, as we were near an island, to quit our raft and make to it."
Wet, numb and exhausted they spent a miserable night on the island unable to make a fire. In the morning, luckily they had found the river was totally frozen so they were able to walk to the shore and continue on to Virginia and on to becoming the first president of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson 1801 to 1809 Though there little if anything was written about Jefferson ever paddling in a canoe, there is one thing we know for sure. He was obsessed with the rivers of the interior of what would later become the United States. In sending Lewis & Clark on perhaps the greatest paddling expedition he wrote,
"The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce."
With a river and canoe trails named in his honor, it would be hard to leave him out of our group of river presidents.

Thomas Hart Benton 1889-1975

Abraham Lincoln 1861-1865 One of our first backwood presidents, Lincoln with a gift of storytelling and doling out homespun advice such as "It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river."
Yet unlike Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, Lincoln was not a naturalist and thought of waterways as something tamed and advocated improving and clearing the rivers to accommodate large boats for commerce. In 1849 he even filed a patent application for a boat buoying system to raise boats in shallow water.
Undoubtedly Lincoln had a deep appreciation for Illinois' Sangamon River. He was looking for a bit of adventure when the 21-year-old Lincoln and his cousin paddled away from the homestead in a newly purchased canoe in spring 1831. He didn't get far before being hired on to a crew building a Mississippi style flatboat at a river encampment near Sangamo Town. When built he and others would transport cargo and goods all the way down to New Orleans.
Every bit a riverman, the young Lincoln was described by one of the locals as "the rawest, most primitive-looking specimen of humanity I ever saw. Tall, bony, and as homely as he has ever been pictured.”
During construction of the boat, a tale is told how young Lincoln rescued two co-workers from the icy waters after they capsized their canoe and were swept downriver cling to an overhanging tree. Lincoln tied a long rope to a log and drop it into the current. As were others holding the rope, he jumped aboard the floating plank wrapping his legs around the log and drifted it towards the tree and men. Once the men were able to grab on to the log, he singled the others to pull them back like a fish on a hook.
That dramatic log rescue made Lincoln a bit hero along the river. But as he would later say, “It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”
What more could you expect from the president who went on to save the union?

Illustration from August 1886

Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, 1885–1889 and 1893–1897 Fast-forwarding to the late 19th century, many of our rivers, streams, and lakes were much like they are now, were places for vacations while escaping the burden of the office. Looking at Grover Cleveland you wouldn’t think of him as an outdoorsman, but, he was an avid camper, hunter and but mostly a fisherman. As a matter of fact, he was such a passionate angler that the press often accused him of spending too much time on the water and not enough time at the White House.
He defended himself and the honor of all fishermen accused of being lazy in the Saturday Evening Post when he wrote, "What sense is there in the charge of laziness sometimes made against true fishermen? Laziness has no place in the constitution of a man who starts at sunrise and tramps all day with only a sandwich to eat, floundering through bushes and briers and stumbling over rocks or wading streams in pursuit of elusive trout. Neither can a fisherman who, with rod in hand, sits in a boat or on a bank all day be called lazy—provided he attends to his fishing and is physically and mentally alert at his occupation.”
Cleveland also published a book in 1901, called Fishing and Shooting Sketches, displaying his humor and love of the outdoors. He would write, "In these sad and ominous days of mad fortune chasing, every patriotic, thoughtful citizen, whether he fishes or not, should lament that we have not among our countrymen more fishermen."

Theodore Roosevelt 1901 to 1909 He would be arguably our most adventuresome president. A cowboy, a soldier. a big game hunter and a river explorer, Roosevelt lived what he preached the “strenuous life.”

Library of Congress

"The man who does not shrink from danger," wrote Roosevelt, "From hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”
A fierce naturalist and warrior for wildlife and wild places he left an enduring legacy through policy and legislation still felt today. As president, he designated five national parks and created programs that would protect 230 million acres of land.
"All life in the wilderness is so pleasant that the temptation is to consider each particular variety, while one is enjoying it, as better than any other," he said "A canoe trip through the great forests, a trip with a pack-train among the mountains, a trip on snow-shoes through the silent, mysterious fairy-land of the woods in winter--each has its peculiar charm."
After losing the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt accepted an opportunity to explore an uncharted tributary of the Amazon: the mysterious Rio da Dúvida, or River of Doubt. Despite little experience with the South American jungle, the burly 55-year-old ex-president called it his “last chance to be a boy,”
Traveling along the winding jungle waterway, the expedition was plagued by tropical illnesses, lack of supplies, alligators, piranhas, venomous snakes, and hostile native tribes, but mostly miles of tortuous rapids.
Roosevelt's crew were forced to either portage their boats on their backs through the dense jungle or shoot the whitewater rapids in their canoes. On one such occasion, one crewman drowns after attempting to run a waterfall.
Injured and sick Roosevelt finished the two-month river odyssey more dead than alive and never quite recovered. He died in his sleep in 1919 at the age of 60, but by then, the river of Doubt had a new name. It's now called the Roosevelt River.

Wisconsin Historical Society

Calvin Coolidge 1923 to 1929 Silent Cal as they called him, loved the quiet tranquility of the water. In the summer of 1928, he escaped to Wisconsin's Brule River where he called the Cedar Island Lodge his "Summer White House."
Accompanied by his Indian guide, John LaRock, he could while away the hours fishing from his canoe which he appley named "Beaver Dick." It was a much more innocent time back then, so you'll have to take our word for it and not Google search this, but it was said he named it after the legendary mountain man Richard “Beaver Dick” Leigh who lived in the Tetons and Yellowstone area in the 1860s.
For Coolidge who had decided not to run for re-election as president and the canoeing and fishing seemed to take over his time that summer.
“These are true outdoor sports in the highest sense," said Coolidge, "And must be pursued in a way that develops energy, perseverance, skill, and courage of the individual."
However, many denounced his passion for paddling and fishing while ignoring his presidential duties. The nearby Duluth Herald reported, “Paddling a canoe up the Brule river is more interesting to President Coolidge than the Democratic national convention which opened at Houston today. Attention to business routine and recreation are again on the schedule today, with the president more anxious to master the paddling of a canoe against the Brule rapids than in learning what is going on at the … convention.”
When he left later that summer, he told the people he hoped to return someday but never did. He died a few years later during the height of the Great Depression and the birch bark canoe the Beaver Dick floated away into history.

Jimmy Carter 1977 to 1981 In 1974, the strumming and picking of Dueling Banjos were still reverberating through the hills along Georgia's Chattooga River when Carter and his paddling partner Claude Terry canoed its free-flowing whitewater that was the backdrop to the movie, Deliverance.
Having grown up along a small creek in rural Georgia, Carter came to appreciate the water, but it was his time on the Chattooga that gave rebirth to his passion for wild rivers.
"The Chattooga was the first time I ever risked my life, I would say, in going down a wild river," Carter said in the short film Wild President by NRS and American Rivers celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Courtesy of  Doug Woodward and American Rivers

While governor of Georgia, Carter says he learned all he could about canoeing and kayaking from Terry, the co-founder of American Rivers and capped off the training by making the first tandem canoe descent over Bull Sluice Rapid, one of the river's prominent Class IV rapids.
"There is a religious experience in coming over top of a huge rapid and burying your bowman’s face down until you maybe can’t see him,” Terry recalled in the film about their adventurous canoe run.
"I think it gave me a sense of heroism in confronting the awe-inspiring power Chattooga," Carter would add.
That experience transformed his life and shape his political career, just as it did Teddy Roosevelt's. He became a staunch supporter of the environmental causes and protector of wild rivers. Shortly after the river run, Carter successfully pushed to designate 57 miles of the Chattooga as Wild & Scenic.
As president, his administration designated more than 40 new Wild and Scenic Rivers, protecting over 5,300 miles of what can be thought of as our National Parks for rivers.
“My motivation was trying to preserve the beauty of God’s world,” said Carter said in the film, “I think it’s very important for all Americans to take a stand, a positive stand, in protecting wild rivers. I hope that all Americans will join together with me and others who love the outdoors to protect this for our children and our grandchildren.”

This article was originally published in Outside Adventure to the Max on February 14, 2020. 

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RIVER & PADDLING RELATED MOVIES TO WATCH WHILE QUARANTINED DURING THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK

If you don't know what day it is, you're not alone. As the novel coronavirus know COVID-19 has halted all social activities everywhere to slow the spread of the disease, people have gotten the feel of "River Time" while sheltering in place these past few weeks.
For a lot of paddling folks, it being means stuck inside playing video games and streaming movies, instead of paddling in the stream or river.
So while you can't go to the river, here are some movies to watch (or perhaps, in some cases, revisit) that will keep you in a paddling mood in the coming days and weeks ahead.

The African Queen (1951)
Arguably one of the greatest river movies of all time, as Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, take on the jungle, the rapids, and the German Navy in this classic movie adventure.

Filmed on the Ruiki River, in the heart of the Belgian Congo at Murchison Falls near Lake Victoria in Uganda, just making this movie was a monumental test of endurance for the cast and crew. They endured sickness, spartan living conditions, and even had brushes with wild animals and poisonous snakes while on location.
The African Queen deck was tight and too small to shoot on, given the size of the bulky Technicolor cameras. While on the river, most of the filming had to be done on a sprawling raft mock-up to shoot the close-ups. The cumbersome raft (built over three large canoes) would get stuck on submerged logs, while cameras and lights would get caught in the overhanging foliage of the jungle.

"The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare”, wrote Hepburn in her 1987 memoir The Making of The African Queen. “The engine on the Queen would stop. Or one of the propellers would be fouled up by the dragging rope. Or we would be attacked by hornets.”
The scenes considered too dangerous to shoot on the river were shot in studio water tanks in Isleworth Studios, Middlesex.
And in the days before CGI, the dramatic sequence of the African Queen going over a waterfall and through rapids was actually an eight-foot model boat shot through a telephoto lens. Flim makers layered their footage, incorporating the location sequences with the miniature boat careening over a waterfall.


The River of No Return (1954)
Riding the wave of the success of The African Queen, moviegoers returned to theaters to journey downriver again, but this time with blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe rocking the boat.
While trying to start a new life together with his son after being released from prison, Robert Mitchum works his farm along the river, only to have Monroe and her low-life gambler fiance wash up along its shores.

On the run, the gambler knocks out Mitchum, steals his horse and rifle, and leaves the three stranded and surrounded by hostile Indians, with only one escape.
"The Indians call it the River of No Return,"  Mitchum's character says as they head into a series of treacherous rapids.  "From here on, you'll find out why."
Including the raft trip down the river, the film is an action-packed western with mountain lions, gunfights, and Indian attacks, but Monroe is still given time to serenade us with four songs, including the movie's willowy title tune.
Flimed in British Columbia on the Bow River, the production was plagued with problems, with the insistence from the director that the cast would perform many of their own stunts. In one incident, Monroe's hip waders filled with water, dragging her under and nearly drowning her after slipping on a rock in the river. Mitchum and others jumped to her rescue, but her ankle was injured as a result.
Another mishap occurred when Monroe and Mitchum's raft became broached on the rocks in the middle of the river, nearly capsizing before some quick thinking stuntmen saved the day and pulled them off the rocks.
It was much safer but not much drier for them while filming the remaining scenes indoors in Los Angeles. Onboard a hydraulic platform in front of a giant screen, Monroe and Mitchum clung to rafting props, while men stood to the sides and splashed them with buckets of water.

Deliverance (1972)

Even people who have never seen the film have encountered Deliverance's legacy, especially those who are connected to the canoe and kayak community. From bumper stickers and T-shirt reading, ‘Paddle faster, I hear banjos,’ to the hearing the iconic movie line "squeal like a pig,” the will film will forever as cause us to "squirm with angst."

It's a Heart of Darkness-like voyage into the rural backwoods of the south, as four suburban Atlanta men take a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the Georgia wilderness. Burt Reynolds' character calls it the “the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unf*cked-up river in the South." But time is ticking. In a short time the river, the rapids, and even the town will be flooded over with the imminent construction of a dam.
After a bumpy ride through rapids, the light-hearted adventure turns to horror when they encounter a pair of dangerous mountain men. Separated from the others, John Voight's character was tied to a tree and could only watch helplessly as his canoe partner Ned Beatty is violently raped by one of the men. That attack sets off a chilling sequence of events, including a disastrous turn through whitewater that challenges the canoeist's moral codes as they fight to survive.
Flimed on Northern Georgia's Chattooga River, the actors who performed their own stunts spent two weeks learning to canoe the rapids.
"We rehearsed for quite a long period," director John Boorman, told The Guardian in a 2017 interview, "Because we had to get the actors up to scratch in archery and canoeing. I had already been down the Chattooga, a ferocious river, to make sure it was safe."
In the scene where the canoe broke in two (five were actually destroyed during filming), Boorman coordinated a release of water from the upstream Tallulah Falls dam.

"I got them to close all the sluice gates upstream, so only a trickle came down," Boorman recalled in the interview, "That let us build rails on the riverbed, so we could mount the canoe on them, and trigger the breakup later. When we came to shoot, I was down at the bottom of the cataract on the phone to the dam. But I got impatient and got them to open all the gates. We just about survived the avalanche of water."
While Boorman was down below, tough-guy Reynolds (who nixed using a dummy in the shot because the stunt coordinator thought it looked too phony), requested to have the scene re-shot with himself going over the falls instead.
"I dream sometimes of the water coming," years later Reynolds told the Hollywood Reporter, "I looked around and there was a tidal wave coming at me. I went over the falls and the first thing that happened I hit a rock and cracked my tailbone, and to this day it hurts. Then I went down to the water below and it was a whirlpool. I couldn’t get out and a guy there said if you get caught, just go to the bottom. You can get out but you can't swim against it. So I went down to the bottom. What he didn’t tell me was it was going to shoot me up like a torpedo. So I went out."
Years before the phrase "wardrobe malfunction" would become popular, Reynolds would have one while caught in the force of that churning whirlpool.
"They said later that they saw this 30-year-old guy in costume go over the waterfall and then about fifteen minutes later they saw this nude man come out," Reynolds recalled in the interview, "It had torn everything—my boots and everything off."
For more about the movie see Canoe and Kayak Magazine article Summer of Deliverance.


Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977)

The Peanuts gang heads off to Camp Remote in this animated adventure. Hoping to use this experience in building confidence, Charlie Brown leads the group in a river-raft race against some cheating bullies. The action transpires as the kids, get lost, battle thunderstorms, wild river rapids, and Peppermint Patty's endless calls for a vote.
After overcoming considerable odds Charlie Brown takes charge. "Let's go to the river," he commands as he leads the gang in paddling over a waterfall and to the movie's climax.
The longtime executive producer of the Peanuts Specials, Lee Mendelson said that he and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz came up with the idea after going on a river trip to Oregon.
"I said to him (Schulz)," recalled Mendelson in a 2015 interview with ToonZone News, “We’ve got to do research and go down the Rogue River.” He said, “Well, it rains a lot up in Oregon,” and I said, “I’m going to find out when the perfect time to go is.” They told me in July, it never rains in Oregon. So we spent three days on a raft in a thunderstorm. Rained the whole time. (laughter) That was the research we did for that movie."

White Water Summer  (1987)
Footloose's Kevin Bacon trades his dancing shoes for a PFD and hiking boots as he leads a group of young teenagers including Sean Astin on a trip into the wilderness. Attempting to toughen up the boys, Bacon and Astin are constantly at odds as they fish by hand, survive storms, cling to mountains and causing the others to become a bit annoyed when they paddle off through rapids.
"We carry the goddamn thing, and look who gets to ride in it!” complains one of the boys as Bacon and Austin canoe off on a difficult stretch of the river.
Mostly shot in Northern California, the filmmakers, however, would travel all the way to New Zealand to film some of the exciting canoeing sequences.
It would only be warm-up for Bacon, as he would take to the river again in River Wild.
"The River Wild' was great, with Meryl Streep," said Bacon, "That guy was really a bad dude who ultimately sorted of fundamentally impotent in a weird way. That was kind of interesting."



River Wild (1994)

We don't think of Meryl Streep as an action star, but when she says "We're are risking death a number of times on this trip", we know we're in for a wild ride. called the Gauntlet. "It's off the scale," Streep's character says. "One man was killed, and another one paralyzed for life. The Rangers no longer allow anyone to try it."
She stars as a suburban mom and former white-water rafter who, while trying to save her marriage, battles wits with an evil Kevin Bacon and runs a dangerous stretch of river
Many of the movie's whitewater scenes were filmed on Montana's Kootenai River, while other scenes were shot on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, the Colorado River in Utah, and Oregon's Rogue River.
While most of the dangerous river scenes did require expert stunt doubles, Streep did several of her own stunts in the film on some milder river sections, but even those had some peril when the star was swept off the raft into the river.
''Actually, I was really very quiet and not scared, which is not at all how I thought I'd react under these circumstances", Streep told the New York Times in 1994. ''I remember sinking down to the bottom with this powerful and freezing water pulling me in deeper."
Wearing a PFD, she was rescued by a hired kayaker after the river pushed her 500 yards downstream.

The White Mile (1994)
Like The Titanic and A Perfect Storm, we have no doubts about the fate of the rafters. But it's hard to look away as we watch their misguided steps that lead to disaster. In the end, five men are killed, setting up moral crises within their corporate world when the surviving relatives file a liability suit against the firm.

Loosely based on a true story, the movie depicts an advertising agency taking 11 executives rafting on Canada's Chilko River. On a Class V section of the river known as the White Mile, the rafters suffer catastrophe after their raft capsizes, tossing them all into the raging current.
A not-so-nice Alan Alda stars as a hard-charging and unrepentant advertising executive who bullies not only his colleagues and clients into the male-bonding trip but also the raft guide by piling too many men into the raft.
During filming, however, California's South Fork of the American River (standing in for the Chilko River) dished out more than a few licks on Alda.
In a 1994 interview with St Louis Post-Dispatch, Alda tells how he and co-star Robert Loggia were struggling to stay afloat in the rapids while shooting one of the extremely edgy and authentic whitewater sequences above a big drop in the river.
"We didn't go over, but we came close enough I remember thinking to myself," recalled Alda "When the hell are they going to come out here with one of those kayaks?' Everybody thought the scene was going great and they weren't going to interrupt it. We had gone twice as far they said we would before they stopped us. And we were heading for the waterfall!"

Without A Paddle (2004)
While Deliverance and The White Mile made us all cringe, the trio in Without A Paddle can only make us smile at their awkward ineptness on the wild river.

When asked if he had done any paddling before, Dax Shepard's character boasts with confidence. When pressed by the outfitter, "So... are you a Class... 4,5?", Shepard's character gloats, "Why don't you try to put those numbers together. Yeah. I shot a Class 45, and haven't lost a man yet."

In search of legendary skyjacker D.B. Cooper's loot in the Oregon wilderness, the three childhood buddies encounter a bear, a pair of sexy treehuggers, a couple of bumbling but well-armed pot farmers and, with a nod to Deliverance, even wild-bearded Burt Reynolds.
Shot in New Zealand, the producers use sections of the Waikato River and Wellington’s Hutt River for the boating scenes and South Auckland’s Hunua Falls for our hapless canoeist's trip over the falls. The actors performed many of their own stunts, including paddling their canoe through some hurtling rapids.
"We capsized that boat more times than I care to relate to you," actor Seth Green told The Morning Call in 2004 interview.

And some other favorites

The River Why
The Bridge of the River Kwai 
Cape Fear 
Apocalypse Now 
Rooster Cogburn and The Lady
A River Runs Through It
Black Robe
Eyewitness
Damn River
Up The Creek

Hopefully, this list reminded you of some classics you want to watch again or gave you some new ones to rent or stream while you stay home and stay safe.

 

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PADDLING PRESIDENTS

White House on the Potomac, 1836-37 White House Collection/The White House Historical Association

"Life is a great adventure…accept it in such a spirit. --Theodore Roosevelt

In the spirit of President’s Day, we salute those who have answered the call to higher office in service to our nation as President of the United States. From the high to lows, these men have shaped our country's history and standing around the free world. As Abraham Lincoln said, ”The Presidency, even to the most experienced politicians, is no bed of roses; and General Taylor like others, found thorns within it. No human being can fill that station and escape censure." But for some presidents, the river called and kept calling, offering adventure and liberation from the burden of our highest office.

In the early days of our fledgling nation, our country's rivers were natural highways allowing for westward expansion and transporting raw materials such as lumber, fur, food, and other supplies. Our early canoeing presidents identified with this need to explore our seemly less endless waterways.
Thomas Jefferson called the Ohio River the most beautiful river on earth. "Its current gentle," he went on, "Waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted."

As river traffic began to decline by the 1870s, thanks to trains, a coinciding interest in nature emerged producing a new recreational activity called tourism. Affluent citizens and presidents were now flocking to scenic lake and river locations for fishing, canoeing, boating, for rest and relaxation.
Wisconsin's Brule River is often called the River of Presidents because five United States Presidents have visited and to fish the north woods river, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower.

Modern-day presidents dedicated themselves to environmental awareness and pledging to keep rivers running wild. It was President Lyndon Johnson who advocating for the Wild & Scenic Rivers Act in the 1960s who said, "The time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great scenic rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.”

For many presidents, the call of the river poured into in their souls, making them who they were and guiding them on their path as president.
Here are 6 paddling presidents and their exploits on the water before, after and even during their presidency.

 Daniel Huntington 1816-1906

George Washington 1789 to 1797 While our first president is mostly remembered for crossing ice-obstructed Delaware River on Christmas 1776 and leading a surprise attack on the Hessians during the American Revolutionary War, his days on the icy water didn't start there. In October 1753, Washington volunteered to lead a special envoy to make peace with the Iroquois Confederacy but more importantly tell that the French forces vacate territory claimed the British, after hearing their plans to establish forts along the Ohio River.
Traveling with the Ohio Company’s representative Christopher Gist on horseback, foot, and canoe across the Appalachians all the way to Ohio River and then up almost to the shores of Lake Erie Washington had various meetings with the Indian Chiefs of the area.
After delivering their message to the French, who said thanks but no thanks, the two found themselves double-crossed by their guide and on the run from hostile from Indians in the middle of winter.
Upon reaching the Allegheny River, they fashion a raft together in an attempt to cross it.
"I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft, that the ice might pass us by," wrote Washington in his journal, "When the rapidity of the stream threw it with so much violence against the pole that it jerked me out into ten feet water, but I, fortunately, saved myself by catching hold of one of the raft logs; notwithstanding all our efforts we could not get the raft to either shore, but were obliged, as we were near an island, to quit our raft and make to it."
Wet, numb and exhausted they spent a miserable night on the island unable to make a fire. In the morning, luckily they had found the river was totally frozen so they were able to walk to the shore and continue on to Virginia and on to becoming the first president of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson 1801 to 1809 Though there little if anything was written about Jefferson ever paddling in a canoe, there is one thing we know for sure. He was obsessed with the rivers of the interior of what would later become the United States. In sending Lewis & Clark on perhaps the greatest paddling expedition he wrote,
"The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce."
With a river and canoe trails named in his honor, it would be hard to leave him out of our group of river presidents.

Thomas Hart Benton 1889-1975

Abraham Lincoln 1861-1865 One of our first backwood presidents, Lincoln with a gift of storytelling and doling out homespun advice such as "It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river."
Yet unlike Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, Lincoln was not a naturalist and thought of waterways as something tamed and advocated improving and clearing the rivers to accommodate large boats for commerce. In 1849 he even filed a patent application for a boat buoying system to raise boats in shallow water.
Undoubtedly Lincoln had a deep appreciation for Illinois' Sangamon River. He was looking for a bit of adventure when the 21-year-old Lincoln and his cousin paddled away from the homestead in a newly purchased canoe in spring 1831. He didn't get far before being hired on to a crew building a Mississippi style flatboat at a river encampment near Sangamo Town. When built he and others would transport cargo and goods all the way down to New Orleans.
Every bit a riverman, the young Lincoln was described by one of the locals as "the rawest, most primitive-looking specimen of humanity I ever saw. Tall, bony, and as homely as he has ever been pictured.”
During construction of the boat, a tale is told how young Lincoln rescued two co-workers from the icy waters after they capsized their canoe and were swept downriver cling to an overhanging tree. Lincoln tied a long rope to a log and drop it into the current. As were others holding the rope, he jumped aboard the floating plank wrapping his legs around the log and drifted it towards the tree and men. Once the men were able to grab on to the log, he singled the others to pull them back like a fish on a hook.
That dramatic log rescue made Lincoln a bit hero along the river. But as he would later say, “It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”
What more could you expect from the president who went on to save the union?

Illustration from August 1886

Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, 1885–1889 and 1893–1897 Fast-forwarding to the late 19th century, many of our rivers, streams, and lakes were much like they are now, were places for vacations while escaping the burden of the office. Looking at Grover Cleveland you wouldn’t think of him as an outdoorsman, but, he was an avid camper, hunter and but mostly a fisherman. As a matter of fact, he was such a passionate angler that the press often accused him of spending too much time on the water and not enough time at the White House.
He defended himself and the honor of all fishermen accused of being lazy in the Saturday Evening Post when he wrote, "What sense is there in the charge of laziness sometimes made against true fishermen? Laziness has no place in the constitution of a man who starts at sunrise and tramps all day with only a sandwich to eat, floundering through bushes and briers and stumbling over rocks or wading streams in pursuit of elusive trout. Neither can a fisherman who, with rod in hand, sits in a boat or on a bank all day be called lazy—provided he attends to his fishing and is physically and mentally alert at his occupation.”
Cleveland also published a book in 1901, called Fishing and Shooting Sketches, displaying his humor and love of the outdoors. He would write, "In these sad and ominous days of mad fortune chasing, every patriotic, thoughtful citizen, whether he fishes or not, should lament that we have not among our countrymen more fishermen."

Theodore Roosevelt 1901 to 1909 He would be arguably our most adventuresome president. A cowboy, a soldier. a big game hunter and a river explorer, Roosevelt lived what he preached the “strenuous life.”

Library of Congress

"The man who does not shrink from danger," wrote Roosevelt, "From hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”
A fierce naturalist and warrior for wildlife and wild places he left an enduring legacy through policy and legislation still felt today. As president, he designated five national parks and created programs that would protect 230 million acres of land.
"All life in the wilderness is so pleasant that the temptation is to consider each particular variety, while one is enjoying it, as better than any other," he said "A canoe trip through the great forests, a trip with a pack-train among the mountains, a trip on snow-shoes through the silent, mysterious fairy-land of the woods in winter--each has its peculiar charm."
After losing the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt accepted an opportunity to explore an uncharted tributary of the Amazon: the mysterious Rio da Dúvida, or River of Doubt. Despite little experience with the South American jungle, the burly 55-year-old ex-president called it his “last chance to be a boy,”
Traveling along the winding jungle waterway, the expedition was plagued by tropical illnesses, lack of supplies, alligators, piranhas, venomous snakes, and hostile native tribes, but mostly miles of tortuous rapids.
Roosevelt's crew were forced to either portage their boats on their backs through the dense jungle or shoot the whitewater rapids in their canoes. On one such occasion, one crewman drowns after attempting to run a waterfall.
Injured and sick Roosevelt finished the two-month river odyssey more dead than alive and never quite recovered. He died in his sleep in 1919 at the age of 60, but by then, the river of Doubt had a new name. It's now called the Roosevelt River.

Wisconsin Historical Society

Calvin Coolidge 1923 to 1929 Silent Cal as they called him, loved the quiet tranquility of the water. In the summer of 1928, he escaped to Wisconsin's Brule River where he called the Cedar Island Lodge his "Summer White House."
Accompanied by his Indian guide, John LaRock, he could while away the hours fishing from his canoe which he appley named "Beaver Dick." It was a much more innocent time back then, so you'll have to take our word for it and not Google search this, but it was said he named it after the legendary mountain man Richard “Beaver Dick” Leigh who lived in the Tetons and Yellowstone area in the 1860s.
For Coolidge who had decided not to run for re-election as president and the canoeing and fishing seemed to take over his time that summer.
“These are true outdoor sports in the highest sense," said Coolidge, "And must be pursued in a way that develops energy, perseverance, skill, and courage of the individual."
However, many denounced his passion for paddling and fishing while ignoring his presidential duties. The nearby Duluth Herald reported, “Paddling a canoe up the Brule river is more interesting to President Coolidge than the Democratic national convention which opened at Houston today. Attention to business routine and recreation are again on the schedule today, with the president more anxious to master the paddling of a canoe against the Brule rapids than in learning what is going on at the … convention.”
When he left later that summer, he told the people he hoped to return someday but never did. He died a few years later during the height of the Great Depression and the birch bark canoe the Beaver Dick floated away into history.

Jimmy Carter 1977 to 1981 In 1974, the strumming and picking of Dueling Banjos were still reverberating through the hills along Georgia's Chattooga River when Carter and his paddling partner Claude Terry canoed its free-flowing whitewater that was the backdrop to the movie, Deliverance.
Having grown up along a small creek in rural Georgia, Carter came to appreciate the water, but it was his time on the Chattooga that gave rebirth to his passion for wild rivers.
"The Chattooga was the first time I ever risked my life, I would say, in going down a wild river," Carter said in the short film Wild President by NRS and American Rivers celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Courtesy of  Doug Woodward and American Rivers

While governor of Georgia, Carter says he learned all he could about canoeing and kayaking from Terry, the co-founder of American Rivers and capped off the training by making the first tandem canoe descent over Bull Sluice Rapid, one of the river's prominent Class IV rapids.
"There is a religious experience in coming over top of a huge rapid and burying your bowman’s face down until you maybe can’t see him,” Terry recalled in the film about their adventurous canoe run.
"I think it gave me a sense of heroism in confronting the awe-inspiring power Chattooga," Carter would add.
That experience transformed his life and shape his political career, just as it did Teddy Roosevelt's. He became a staunch supporter of the environmental causes and protector of wild rivers. Shortly after the river run, Carter successfully pushed to designate 57 miles of the Chattooga as Wild & Scenic.
As president, his administration designated more than 40 new Wild and Scenic Rivers, protecting over 5,300 miles of what can be thought of as our National Parks for rivers.
“My motivation was trying to preserve the beauty of God’s world,” said Carter said in the film, “I think it’s very important for all Americans to take a stand, a positive stand, in protecting wild rivers. I hope that all Americans will join together with me and others who love the outdoors to protect this for our children and our grandchildren.”

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LIGHTS, CAMERA, AND RIVER ACTION: Six Hollywood Movies Featuring Action-Packed Whitewater Scenes

Flim makers have had a fascination with using rivers as a location throughout cinematic history. They have woven timeless stories around these waterways that have both enthralled us and haunted us. How can we ever forget such movie classics as The Bridge of the River Kwai, Cape Fear, Apocalypse Now, and A River Runs Through It?
These flowing streams not only serve as daunting obstacles in the struggle between man and nature, but also as stunning backdrops. They showcase our leading star's perilous journey through rough and churning waters on a voyage that will lead them to either triumph or transformation.
Humphrey Bogart, who won his only Oscar for his role in The African Queen, uttered one my favorite river movies lines: "I don't blame you for being scared - not one bit. Nobody with good sense ain't scared of white water".
But we're glad to be onboard this trip. We have enthusiastically embraced the river, just as Katharine Hepburn's character did when she replied: "I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!"
So as the 91st Academy Awards are quickly approaching, here is a list of my favorites, involving some action-packed whitewater scenes and of course plenty of river time.

The African Queen (1951)
Arguably one of the greatest river movies of all time, as Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, take on the jungle, the rapids, and the German Navy in this classic movie adventure.

Filmed on the Ruiki River, in the heart of the Belgian Congo at Murchison Falls near Lake Victoria in Uganda, just making this movie was a monumental test of endurance for the cast and crew. They endured sickness, spartan living conditions, and even had brushes with wild animals and poisonous snakes while on location.
The African Queen deck was tight and too small to shoot on, given the size of the bulky Technicolor cameras. While on the river, most of the filming had to be done on a sprawling raft mock-up in order to shoot the close-ups. The cumbersome raft (built over three large canoes) would get stuck on submerged logs, while cameras and lights would get caught in the overhanging foliage of the jungle.

"The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare”, wrote Hepburn in her 1987 memoir The Making of The African Queen. “The engine on the Queen would stop. Or one of the propellers would be fouled up by the dragging rope. Or we would be attacked by hornets.”
The scenes considered too dangerous to shoot on the river were shot in studio water tanks in Isleworth Studios, Middlesex.
And in the days before CGI, the dramatic sequence of the African Queen going over a waterfall and through rapids was actually an eight-foot model boat shot through a telephoto lens. Flim makers layered their footage, incorporating the location sequences with the miniature boat careening over a waterfall.


The River of No Return (1954)
Riding the wave of the success of The African Queen, moviegoers returned to theaters to journey downriver again, but this time with blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe rocking the boat.
While trying to start a new life together with his son after being released from prison, Robert Mitchum works his farm along the river, only to have Monroe and her low-life gambler fiance wash up along its shores.

On the run, the gambler knocks out Mitchum, steals his horse and rifle, and leaves the three stranded and surrounded by hostile Indians, with only one escape.
"The Indians call it the River of No Return,"  Mitchum's character says as they head into a series of treacherous rapids.  "From here on, you'll find out why."
Including the raft trip down the river, the film is an action-packed western with mountain lions, gunfights, and Indian attacks, but Monroe is still given time to serenade us with four songs, including the movie's willowy title tune.
Flimed in British Columbia on the Bow River, the production was plagued with problems, with the insistence from the director that the cast would perform many of their own stunts. In one incident, Monroe's hip waders filled with water, dragging her under and nearly drowning her after slipping on a rock in the river. Mitchum and others jumped to her rescue, but her ankle was injured as a result.
Another mishap occurred when Monroe and Mitchum's raft became broached on the rocks in the middle of the river, nearly capsizing before some quick thinking stuntmen saved the day and pulled them off the rocks.
It was much safer but not much drier for them while filming the remaining scenes indoors in Los Angeles. Onboard a hydraulic platform in front of a giant screen, Monroe and Mitchum clung to rafting props, while men stood to the sides and splashed them with buckets of water.

Deliverance (1972)

Even people who have never seen the film have encountered Deliverance's legacy, especially those who are connected to the canoe and kayak community. From bumper stickers and T-shirt reading, ‘Paddle faster, I hear banjos,’ to the hearing the iconic movie line "squeal like a pig,” the will film will forever as cause us to "squirm with angst."

It's a Heart of Darkness-like voyage into the rural backwoods of the south, as four suburban Atlanta men take a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the Georgia Mountain's wilderness. Burt Reynolds' character calls it the “the last wild, untamed, unpolluted, unf*cked-up river in the South." But time is ticking. In a short time the river, the rapids, and even the town will be flooded over with the imminent construction of a dam.
After a bumpy ride through rapids, the light-hearted adventure turns to horror when they encounter a pair of dangerous mountain men. Separated from the others, John Voight's character was tied to a tree and could only watch helplessly as his canoe partner Ned Beatty is violently raped by one of the men. That attack sets off a chilling sequence of events, including a disastrous turn through whitewater that challenges the canoeist's moral codes as they fight to survive.
Flimed on Northern Georgia's Chattooga River, the actors who performed their own stunts spent two weeks learning to canoe the rapids.
"We rehearsed for quite a long period," director John Boorman, told The Guardian in a 2017 interview, "Because we had to get the actors up to scratch in archery and canoeing. I had already been down the Chattooga, a ferocious river, to make sure it was safe."
In the scene where the canoe broke in two (five were actually destroyed during filming), Boorman coordinated a release of water from the upstream Tallulah Falls dam.

"I got them to close all the sluice gates upstream, so only a trickle came down," Boorman recalled in the interview, "That let us build rails on the riverbed, so we could mount the canoe on them, and trigger the breakup later. When we came to shoot, I was down at the bottom of the cataract on the phone to the dam. But I got impatient and got them to open all the gates. We just about survived the avalanche of water."
While Boorman was down below, tough-guy Reynolds (who nixed using a dummy in the shot because the stunt coordinator thought it looked too phony), requested to have the scene re-shot with himself going over the falls instead.
"I dream sometimes of the water coming," years later Reynolds told the Hollywood Reporter, "I looked around and there was a tidal wave coming at me. I went over the falls and the first thing that happened I hit a rock and cracked my tailbone, and to this day it hurts. Then I went down to the water below and it was a whirlpool. I couldn’t get out and a guy there said if you get caught, just go to the bottom. You can get out but you can't swim against it. So I went down to the bottom. What he didn’t tell me was it was going to shoot me up like a torpedo. So I went out."
Years before the phrase "wardrobe malfunction" would become popular, Reynolds would have one while caught in the force of that churning whirlpool.
"They said later that they saw this 30-year-old guy in costume go over the waterfall and then about fifteen minutes later they saw this nude man come out," Reynolds recalled in the interview, "It had torn everything—my boots and everything off."
For more about the movie see Canoe and Kayak Magazine article Summer of Deliverance.

River Wild (1994)

We don't think of Meryl Streep as an action star, but when she says "We're are risking death a number of times on this trip", we know we're in for a wild ride. called the Gauntlet. "It's off the scale," Streep's character says. "One man was killed, and another one paralyzed for life. The Rangers no longer allow anyone to try it."
She stars as a suburban mom and former white-water rafter who, while trying to save her marriage, battles wits with an evil Kevin Bacon and runs a dangerous stretch of river
Many of the movie's whitewater scenes were filmed on Montana's Kootenai River, while other scenes were shot on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, the Colorado River in Utah, and Oregon's Rogue River.
While most of the dangerous river scenes did require expert stunt doubles, Streep did several of her own stunts in the film on some milder river sections, but even those had some peril when the star was swept off the raft into the river.
''Actually, I was really very quiet and not scared, which is not at all how I thought I'd react under these circumstances", Streep told the New York Times in 1994. ''I remember sinking down to the bottom with this powerful and freezing water pulling me in deeper."
Wearing a PFD, she was rescued by a hired kayaker after the river pushed her 500 yards downstream.

The White Mile (1994)
Like The Titanic and A Perfect Storm, we have no doubts about the fate of the rafters. But it's hard to look away as we watch their misguided steps that lead to disaster. In the end, five men are killed, setting up moral crises within their corporate world when the surviving relatives file a liability suit against the firm.

Loosely based on a true story, the movie depicts an advertising agency taking 11 executives rafting on Canada's Chilko River. On a Class V section of the river known as the White Mile, the rafters suffer catastrophe after their raft capsizes, tossing them all into the raging current.
A not-so-nice Alan Alda stars as a hard-charging and unrepentant advertising executive who bullies not only his colleagues and clients into the male-bonding trip, but also the raft guide by piling too many men into the raft.
During filming, however, California's South Fork of the American River (standing in for the Chilko River) dished out more than a few licks on Alda.
In a 1994 interview with St Louis Post-Dispatch, Alda tells how he and co-star Robert Loggia were struggling to stay afloat in the rapids while shooting one of the extremely edgy and authentic whitewater sequences above a big drop in the river.
"We didn't go over, but we came close enough I remember thinking to myself," recalled Alda "When the hell are they going to come out here with one of those kayaks?' Everybody thought the scene was going great and they weren't going to interrupt it. We had gone twice as far they said we would before they stopped us. And we were heading for the waterfall!"

Without A Paddle (2004)
While Deliverance and The White Mile made us all cringe, the trio in Without A Paddle can only make us smile at their awkward ineptness on the wild river.

When asked if he had done any paddling before, Dax Shepard's character boasts with confidence. When pressed by the outfitter, "So... are you a Class... 4,5?", Shepard's character gloats, "Why don't you try to put those numbers together. Yeah. I shot a Class 45, and haven't lost a man yet."

In search of legendary skyjacker D.B. Cooper's loot in the Oregon wilderness, the three childhood buddies encounter a bear, a pair of sexy treehuggers, a couple of bumbling but well-armed pot farmers and, with a nod to Deliverance, even wild-bearded Burt Reynolds.
Shot in New Zealand, the producers use sections of the Waikato River and Wellington’s Hutt River for the boating scenes and South Auckland’s Hunua Falls for our hapless canoeist's trip over the falls. The actors performed many of their own stunts, including paddling their canoe through some hurtling rapids.
"We capsized that boat more times than I care to relate to you," actor Seth Green told The Morning Call in 2004 interview.

And some of my other favorites include
Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown
Whitewater Summer
The River Why
Rooster Cogburn and The Lady
A River Runs Through It
Black Robe

For more about river movies checkout Canoe and Kayak Magazine article Between the Frames.

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