Pacific Salmon

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', 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 ever 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 chute 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 a day, but by far the largest number are caught in traps or pounds which consist of a series of nets so laid and fastened to stakes on the bed of the river or bay that they lead the fish into a trap from which they cannot escape. The traps are used almost exclusively in the Alaskan fisheries.

Salmon packing has become one of the most important industries on the Pacific coast, and during the season it furnishes employment to over 20,000 people. The fish are cleaned, dressed and cut into pieces, which are placed in cans and thoroughly cooked by steam before the cans are closed. In small canneries the work is done by hand, but in the large canneries it is done by machinery. The wasteful practices, common in the early history of the industry, have given place to scientific methods and there seems to be little or no danger of diminishing the yearly supply of this excellent food fish.

In 1918 the salmon packed on the Pacific coast of North America amounted to 9,692,300 cases, distributed as follows: Alaska, 6,677,567 cases; British Columbia, 1,616,157; Puget Sound, 624,198; Columbia River, 591,381. The value of the Alaska pack was $51,041,949. This is more than four times the value of the gold mined in the territory for the same year.

Rev 2002-01-15