Salmon
sam'un, a large family of fishes, including the trout. The salmon of literature, the "King" of learned Izaak Walton, is from two to four feet long and weighs from two to four feet long and weighs from five to twenty-five pounds. A single fish has been known to weigh eighty-three pounds. It is bluish-black above and silvery below,--a noble fish in all respects, brilliant in color, perfect in form, and matchless in courage. It is an inhabitant of the deep sea ascending suitable Atlantic rivers from New York to France northward to spawn. No water is too far from the sea if there is a way to it. Salmon are famous for leaping falls, going over a ten foot dam with ease and ascending waterfalls to a much greater height. They seek a gravelly, clear, cool shallow, as remote from the ocean as possible, where they plow slight furrows in the sand working two and two. The male and female shed their spawn into the same furrow for several days in succession; then they make their way down stream by easy stages to the deep sea again. They gather in the estuaries of our rivers in early spring floating up and down with the tide. At this season they are taken with nets and sent to market on ice. In July they being the ascent of our American rivers (later in Europe), and are gone several weeks. After their return, they stay in brackish water for a while and then retire to the deep sea for winter.
The Ouananiche (win-nan-nish'), the land-locked salmon of the Saguenay River and other Quebec waters, is of a beautiful peacock blue when taken from the water. Like the ocean salmon, it rises to a fly. It weighs up to four pounds and is a tremendous fighter. When hooked, it leaps several times from three to twelve feet high. Stout tackle and skill are required to land the Ouananiche. Another fresh water fish is the Sebago salmon found in Sebago Lake and other Maine waters. It attains an extreme weight of fifteen pounds. The Atlantic salmon is capable of swimming twenty miles an hour. By attaching numbered metal tags to salmon and releasing the fishes, the Board of Scotland has found that salmon return to the same spawning ground, season after season, like birds to their nests.
The salmon of the Pacific require a special account. Between Sacramento and Kamchatka there are five species. Named in order of food value, they are the Quinnat or Chinook, the blueback or sockeye, the silver or Coho, the humpback, and the dog salmon. They dwell in the Pacific leading an unknown life. After they have reached maturity the early spring finds them desirous to spawn. They begin the ascent of rivers and streams in search of cool, fresh water. If the head of the stream be warmer than 54 deg., the salmon wait for the temperature to fall. They ascend the Yukon and Columbia rivers for a distance of 1,000 miles. As soon as they leave salt water they cease to eat; possibly fresh water food does not agree with them. They begin to lose fat, the flesh fades from salmon color to white, the skin thickens, the scales sink slowly out of sight in the skin, the digestive organs shrivel up for want of use, the body becomes slabsided and thin. Having spawned, both male and female become covered with blotches of fungus and float idly away. Whether spawning takes place near the sea or a thousand miles away from it, this is the last act of the salmon's life. Not an adult salmon every returns to the Pacific. This is true of all Pacific species.
Actual spawning lasts from August to October according to distance from the sea. The eggs hatch in fifty days. The young fry are provided with egg sacs from which they absorb nourishment for sixty days. They stay that length of time on the spawning grounds. They then begin to feed on fresh water food like minnows, and float leisurely toward the sea--a trip it may be of months, or a year. When they reach salt water they are four or five inches long.
When spring salmon enter the rivers from the ocean, fat, plump, and tender, they furnish food for man, bird, and beast. Salmon fresh and salmon smoked and dried form a large part of the food of the Chinook and other Pacific Indians. Fishing birds gorge themselves till they are almost too heavy to fly. Even ducks and teal come in for a share, and the bears of Alaska grow big and fat on the salmon they have caught "with the hooks that Nature gave them."
In their hurry to reach spawning grounds the salmon not infrequently crowd upon each other at narrows or other obstructions in such masses as to force a ridge of thousands of flapping salmon above the water. At such places twenty and fifty pound fellows may be thrown from the water with a pitchfork. Enormous numbers are taken at this season for canning. Long seines are drawn through the water, resulting sometimes in incredible hauls. Writers with opportunity to know state that 10,000 blueback salmon are not an unusual haul. Schools of 25,000 and 50,000 have been swept ashore. One writer asserts that 100,000, a tenth of a million, of five-pound blueback salmon were imprisoned by a seine in the Yukon in 1896. Sixty thousand were used and the rest liberated. Another means of taking salmon is the fish wheel. A large wheel like the stern wheel of a steamboat is provided with nets instead of paddle blades. The wheel is fixed in the stream where the salmon are running. The current of the river turns the wheel. The salmon are scooped up by the paddle nets and drop into a shute at the center of the wheel, thence into a fishbox set to receive them. One wheel in the Columbia has been known to take eighty-four tons of salmon a day.
It is difficult to get statistics for the entire salmon catch of any one year. The United States census reports the Pacific catch for 1899 at 248,627,065 pounds, worth $10,278,498 at wholesale. These figures do not include Canadian fish. The salmon industry is worth twice that sum annually to the United States. American canned salmon are on the market the world over.
There has been terrible waste in the salmon industry. More fish are caught than can be cared for. The owner of a canning establishment on Prince William's Sound states that he was obliged to throw away 60,000 fish on one occasion and 10,000 on another,--a waste of 700,000 pounds of fish. Inasmuch as the salmon, however fine in condition, are within a few weeks or, at most, months of a natural death, the waste may not at first seem a matter of importance, but the fact is that such large and wasteful catches diminish the supply of spawn. Many of the small rivers have been so obstructed by dams and nets that no fish at all have been able to ascend and spawn. A general falling off in the number of salmon is noticeable. It is evident that more intelligent methods must be observed or the Pacific salmon will follow the buffalo and the pine forest into the past.