A view of the lock at The Dalles Dam as the Shaver Transportation tugboat Lincoln, pushing four barges loaded with 13,000 metric tons of wheat, approaches in early August. Mount Hood is in the distance.

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A journey down the Snake and Columbia
August 26, 2022 1 a.m.

A journey down the Snake and Columbia

PORTLAND, Ore. — In 1976, Herschel Slavens, then nearly 80, sat down to write about his life, including the time he found himself nearly penniless and looking for work in the early 1920s. “We didn’t have hardly any money so we stopped in Kennewick, Washington, and I got a job working for my cousin … who had a trucking company hauling wheat from a field to a warehouse on the Columbia River,” Slavens wrote in an unpublished memoir he shared with members of his family.