Journey down the Santee
Part 1: Tom & Huck set out
By John Cely
jecely@sc.rr.com

In 1966, Heyward Douglass was a daring river runner who boated with John Cely from Columbia to Murrell's Inlet. Today he is a pilot for Clemson University.

In May of 1966 my friend Heyward Douglass and I made a float trip down the Santee River. We put in at the old Sawdust Pile landing, sometimes known as Trezevant's, just below the confluence of the Wateree and the Congaree, and took out four days later at McClellanville. We stayed the whole way in the Santee rather than going through the locks at Lake Moultrie and then on to Charleston via the Cooper River.

This trip had its roots with Huckleberry Finn's raft trip down the Mississippi, but what really fired us up was a chapter in Roger Tory Peterson's book, Birds Over America . Peterson, the most famous ornithologist and naturalist of the 20th century, spent 10 days floating the Santee in a rubber raft looking for the ivory- billed woodpecker in 1937.

Although Peterson did not find an ivory- bill, he was very impressed with the bottomland forests of the Santee before the loggers ripped them up. He described the vast swamps in his book as "known only to a few men besides a handful of hogherders and trappers since the historic days of Marion, the Swamp Fox." Peterson was awed by the tremendous size of the forest giants - "sweet gums 14 feet in circumference and loblolly pines with a girth of 16 feet, and some of the cypresses had swollen buttresses that measured over 30 feet!"

Before construction of the Santee- Cooper Project in 1939, the Santee River was the fourth largest river system in the Eastern United States. This photo by John Cely shows it was still a wild river in 1966.

Heyward and I had both started birding at an early age, and the thought of following in the trail of the great Peterson was almost as exciting as finding an ivory- billed woodpecker.

We had a few discoveries and adventures along the way, including the first record of nesting redstart warblers in the S.C. Coastal Plain, an unhappy encounter with a park ranger at Santee State Park, the line on my jungle hammock snapping in the middle of the night while camped on the edge of Lake Marion, and a mad dash across the rough waters of Lake Marion in a seven- horsepower Johnson outboard with no lifejackets. It must be true what they say about God looking after teenage boys, otherwise neither of us would have made it to maturity.

The real adventure started when we got to the Lake Marion dam. It was a long portage from there to Wilson's Landing below the dam, but a kind Santee- Cooper Authority employee took pity on us and hauled our boat, motor, and provisions down to the put- in. We were told to be on guard for shallow water, limestone rocks, and even rapids.

The reason more boaters don't use the lower stretch of the Santee is that most of the water had been diverted to the Cooper River. The average flow of the mighty Santee had been reduced from 15,000 cubic feet per second before the dam to 500 feet per second afterward. We passed sandbars so large they looked like hills and without the scouring action of regular river flow, had a young forest of willows, sycamore, and cottonwood growing on them.

We had an old 1921 topographic map that showed the Santee before the lakes were built and featured such landmarks as Black Oak Island, the Santee Canal, Gaillard Island, Little River, and two features in the Santee Swamp that really caught our eye, Porcher's Embankment and Sinkler Dam. Both were antebellum dikes constructed with slave labor one shovel at a time. Porcher's Embankment was especially impressive on our map, measuring five- and- a- half miles long. This may have been the single largest reclamation project of its kind in S.C. until the Santee dam, nearly eight miles long, was built 100 years later.

(Next week: Porcher's Embankment)