Shaver Transportation senior captain and tugboat pilot Troy Moore in the wheelhouse of the tugboat Lincoln during a voyage down the Snake and Columbia rivers in early August. With 22 years of experience as both a deckhand and a captain, Moore knows his way around the rivers. “This is a nice tow. It’s little,” Moore said of the four barges carrying roughly 13,000 metric tons of wheat he was pushing down the river to Portland.

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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… who had a trucking company hauling wheat from a field to a warehouse on the Columbia River,” Slavens wrote in an unpublished memoir he shared with members of his family.