(Up Salt./Shit Creek/River) "Without a Paddle" (1911)

[Jonathon Green]

The CASSELL DICTIONARY OF SLANG has this from
> "1930s+."


And, as subsequent researches for citations for my 'historical' work have
proved on more than one occasion, the CDS is wrong (CDS II, coming next
year if my wretched publishers permit, will be better)..

I offer:

1911 _Out West_ Oct.  241: ‘Up the flume’ was handed down to us by the
forty-niners, as was ‘petered out;’ ‘up Salt Creek,’ a synonymous
expression, defies research

1925 Hemingway _Selected Letters_ (1981) 22 April The stuff is so tight
and hard and everything hangs on everything else and it would all just be
shot up shit creek.

Dos Passos, in _The 42nd Parallel_ (1930, part one of _USA_) also has a
paddlefree 'shit creek'; the context is 1900s-10s; whether he used only
properly contemporary slang, I cannot say.

JG