Inside the locks of the John Day Dam. It takes about 30 minutes for the tow — the name given to the assembly of tugboat and barges — to transit a dam lock going downstream.

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… who had a trucking company hauling wheat from a field to a warehouse on the Columbia River,” Slavens wrote in an unpublished memoir he shared with members of his family.