Forgotten Treasures #20: THE STORY OF A SALMON

From "Science Sketches" by David Starr Jordan
Fourth Edition
A. C. McClurg and Company
Chicago
1911

[Pre-amble: The current selection was not my first choice for this edition
of the Forgotten Treasures series. That was, "How the Trout Came to
California," whose name is very misleading, it being a treatise on the
taxonomy and distribution of the various subspecies and regional types of
salmonids in North America, from waters draining the eastern slopes of the
Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. Personally, I found it fascinating
from a historical perspective in that it provides many hints (as opposed to
explicit statements) about the relatively sophisticated methods and
reasoning that went into taxonomic classification a century ago, before the
advent of modern laboratory techniques in general, and DNA profiling in
particular. However, the mere existence of 23 footnotes to the chapter
should be sufficient to explain why I decided to have mercy on whatever
readers lack the self-discipline to go elsewhere for their reading.

David Starr Jordan, all but forgotten today except perhaps in parts of
Indiana and California.....and in the mind of our own estimable Mr.
Axelrad.....was the preeminent American ichthyologist of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, the heir apparent to no less a giant than the great
Louis Agassiz, of whom he was a student. An extraordinarily prolific
writer, he had over 2,000 published works to his credit. He was also a
president of Indiana University and, later, president of the California
Academy of Sciences and the first president of Stanford University. In
addition he was a highly active and respected peace activist, as well as a
strong proponent of the eugenics movement. ws]

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THE STORY OF A SALMON.

In the realm of the Northwest Wind, on the boundary-line between the dirk
fir-forests and the sunny plains, there stands a mountain,--a great white
cone two miles and a half in perpendicular height. On its lower mile the
dense fir-woods cover it with never-changing green; on its next half-mile a
lighter green of grass and bushes gives place in winter to white; and on its
uppermost mile the snows of the great ice age still linger in unspotted
purity. The people of Washington Territory say that their mountain is the
great "King-pin of the Universe," which shows that even in its own country
Mount Tacoma is not without honor.

Flowing down from the southwest slope of Mount Tacoma is a cold, clear
river, fed by the melting snows of the mountain. Madly it hastens down over
white cascades and beds of shining sands, through birch-woods and belts of
dark firs, to mingle its waters at last with those of the great Columbia.
This river is the Cowlitz; and on its bottom, not many years ago, there lay
half buried in the sand a number of little orange-colored globules, each
about as large as a pea. These were not much in themselves, but great in
their possibilities. In the waters above them little suckers and chubs and
prickly sculpins strained their mouths to draw these globules from the sand,
and vicious-looking crawfishes picked them up with their blundering hands
and examined them with their telescopic eyes. But one, at least, of the
globules escaped their curiosity, else this story would not be worth
telling. The sun shone down on it through the clear water, and the ripples
of the Cowlitz said over it their incantations, and in it at last awoke a
living being. It was a fish,--a curious little fellow, not half an inch
long, with great, staring eyes, which made almost half his length, and with
a body so transparent that he could not cast a shadow. He was a little
salmon, a very little salmon; but the water was good, and there were flies
and worms and little living creatures in abundance for him to eat, and he
soon became a larger salmon. Then there were many more little salmon with
him, some larger and some smaller, and they all had a merry time. Those who
had been born soonest and had grown largest used to chase the others around
and bite off their tails, or, still better, take them by the heads and
swallow them whole; for, said they, "even young salmon are good eating."
"Heads I win, tails, you lose," was their motto. Thus, what was once two
small salmon became united into a single larger one, and the process of
"addition, division, and silence" still went on.

By-and-by, when all the salmon were too large to be swallowed, they began to
grow restless. They saw that the water rushing by seemed to be in a great
hurry to get somewhere, and it was somehow suggested that its hurry was
caused by something good to eat at the other end of its course. Then they
all started down the stream, salmon-fashion,--which fashion is to get into
the current, head up-stream, and thus to drift backward as the river sweeps
along.

Down the Cowlitz River the salmon went for a day and a night, finding much
to interest them which we need not know. At last they began to grow hungry;
and coming near the shore, they saw an angle-worm of rare size and beauty
floating in an eddy of the stream. Quick as thought one of them opened his
mouth, which was well filled with teeth of different sizes, and put it
around the angle-worm. Quicker still he felt a sharp pain in his gills,
followed by a smothering sensation, and in an instant his comrades saw him
rise straight into the air. This was nothing new to them; for they often
leaped out of the water in their games of hide-and-seek, but only to come
down again with a loud splash not far from where they went out. But this
one never came back, and the others went on their course wondering.

At last they came to where the Cowlitz and the Columbia join, and they were
almost lost for a time; for they could find no shores, and the bottom and
the top of the water were so far apart. Here they saw other and far larger
salmon in the deepest part of the current, turning neither to the right nor
to the left, but swimming right on up-stream just as rapidly as they could.
And these great salmon would not stop for them, and would not lie and float
with the current. They had no time to talk, even in the simple
sign-language by which fishes express their ideas, and no time to eat. They
had important work before them, and the time was short. So they went on up
the river, keeping their great purposes to themselves; and our little salmon
and his friends from the Cowlitz drifted down the stream.

By-and-by the water began to change. It grew denser, and no longer flowed
rapidly along; and twice a day it used to turn about and flow the other way.
Then the shores disappeared, and the water began to have a different and
peculiar flavor,--a flavor which seemed to the salmon much richer and more
inspiring than the glacier-water of their native Cowlitz. There were many
curious things to see,--crabs with hard shells and savage faces, but so good
when crushed and swallowed! Then there were luscious squid swimming about;
and, to a salmon, squid are like ripe peaches and cream. There were great
companies of delicate sardines and herring, green and silvery, and it was
such fun to chase and capture them! Those who eat sardines packed in oil by
greasy fingers, and herrings dried in the smoke, can have little idea how
satisfying it is to have a meal of them, plump and sleek and silvery, fresh
from the sea.

Thus the salmon chased the herrings about, and had a merry time. Then they
were chased about in turn by great sea-lions,-swimming monsters with huge
half-human faces, long thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea-lions
liked to bite out the throat of a salmon, with its precious stomach full of
luscious sardines, and then to leave the rest of the fish to shift for
itself. And the seals and the herrings scattered the salmon about, till at
last the hero of our story found himself quite alone, with none of his own
kind near him. But that did not trouble him much, and he went on his own
way, getting his dinner when he was hungry, which was all the time, and then
eating a little between meals for his stomach's sake.

So it went on for three long years; and at the end of this time our little
fish had grown to be a great, fine salmon of twenty-two pounds' weight,
shining like a new tin pan, and with rows of the loveliest round black spots
on his head and back and tail. One day, as he was swimming about, idly
chasing a big sculpin with a head so thorny that he never was swallowed by
anybody, all of a sudden the salmon noticed a change in the water around
him.

Spring had come again, and the south-lying snow-drifts on the Cascade
Mountains once more felt that the "earth was wheeling sunwards." The cold
snow waters ran down from the mountains and into the Columbia River, and
made a freshet on the river. The high water went far out into the sea, and
out in the sea our salmon felt it on his gills. He remembered how the cold
water used to feel in the Cowlitz when he was a little fish. In a
blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it; he wondered whether the
little eddy looked as it used to look, and whether caddis-worms and young
mosquitoes were really as sweet and tender as he used to think they were.
Then he thought some other things; but as the salmon's mind is located in
the optic lobes of his brain, and ours is in a different place, we cannot be
quite certain what his thoughts really were.

What our salmon did, we know. He did what every grown salmon in the ocean
does when he feels the glacier-water once more upon his gills. He became a
changed being. He spurned the blandishment of soft-shelled crabs. The
pleasures of the table and of the chase, heretofore his only delights, lost
their charms for him. He turned his course straight toward the direction
whence the cold water came, and for the rest of his life never tasted a
mouthful of food. He moved on toward the river-mouth, at first playfully,
as though he were not really certain whether he meant anything after all.
Afterward, when he struck the full current of the Columbia, he plunged
straightforward with an unflinching determination that had in it something
of the heroic. When he passed the rough water at the bar, he was not alone.
His old neighbors of the Cowlitz, and many more from the Clackamas and the
Spokan and Des Chûtes and Kootanie,--a great army of salmon,--were with him.
In front were thousands pressing on, and behind them were thousands more,
all moved by a common impulse which urged them up the Columbia.

They were swimming bravely along where the current was deepest, when
suddenly the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb about their
noses and under their chins. They changed their course a little to brush it
off, and it touched their fins as well. Then they tried to slip down with
the current, and thus leave it behind. But, no! the thing, whatever it was,
although its touch was soft, refused to let go, and held them like a fetter.
The more they struggled, the tighter became its grasp, and the whole
foremost rank of the salmon felt it together; for it was a great gill-net, a
quarter of a mile long, stretched squarely across the mouth of the river.

By-and-by men came in boats, and hauled up the gill-net and the helpless
salmon that had become entangled in it. They threw the fishes into a pile
in the bottom of the boat, and the others saw them no more. We that live
outside the water know better what befalls them, and we can tell the story
which the salmon could not.

All along the banks of the Columbia River, from its mouth to nearly thirty
miles away, there is a succession of large buildings, looking like great
barns or warehouses, built on piles in the river, high enough to be out of
the reach of floods. There are thirty of these buildings, and they are
called canneries. Each cannery has about forty boats, and with each boat
are two men and a long gill-net. These nets fill the whole river as with a
nest of cobwebs from April to July, and to each cannery nearly a thousand
great salmon are brought every day. These salmon are thrown in a pile on
the floor; and Wing Hop, the big Chinaman, takes them one after another on
the table, and with a great knife dexterously cuts off the head, the tail,
and the fins; then with a sudden thrust he removes the intestines and the
eggs. The body goes into a tank of water; and the head is dropped into a
box on a flat-boat, and goes down the river to be made into salmon oil.
Next, the body is brought to another table; and Quong Sang, with a machine
like a feed-cutter, cuts it into pieces each just as long as a one-pound
can. Then Ah Sam, with a butcher-knife, cuts these pieces into strips just
as wide as the can. Next Wan Lee, the "China boy," brings down a hundred
cans from the loft where the tinners are making them, and into each can puts
a spoonful of salt. It takes just six salmon to fill a hundred cans. Then
twenty Chinamen put the pieces of meat into the cans, fitting in little
strips to make them exactly full. Ten more solder up the cans, and ten more
put the cans into boiling water till the meat is thoroughly cooked, and five
more punch a little hole in the head of each can to let out the air. Then
they solder them up again, and little girls paste on them bright-colored
labels showing merry little cupids riding the happy salmon up to the cannery
door, with Mount Tacoma and Cape Disappointment in the background; and a
legend underneath says that this is "Booth's" or "Badollet's Best," or
"Hume's" or "Clark's" or "Kinney's Superfine Salt Water Salmon." Then the
cans are placed in cases, forty-eight in a case, and five hundred thousand
cases are put up every year. Great ships come to Astoria, and are loaded
with them; and they carry them away to London and San Francisco and
Liverpool and New York and Sidney and Valparaiso; and the man at the corner
grocery sells them at twenty cents a can.

All this time our salmon is going up the river, eluding one net as by a
miracle, and soon having need of more miracles to escape the rest; passing
by Astoria on a fortunate day,--which was Sunday, the day on which no man
may fish if he expects to sell what he catches,--till finally he came to
where nets were few, and, at last, to where they ceased altogether. But
there he found that scarcely any of his many companions were with him; for
the nets cease when there are no more salmon to be caught in them. So he
went on, day and night, where the water was deepest, stopping not to feed or
loiter on the way, till at last he came to a wild gorge, where the great
river became an angry torrent, rushing wildly over a huge staircase of
rocks. But our hero did not falter; and summoning all his forces, he
plunged into the Cascades. The current caught him and dashed him against
the rocks. A whole row of silvery scales came off and glistened in the
water like sparks of fire, and a place on his side became black-and-red,
which, for a salmon, is the same as being black-and-blue for other people.
His comrades tried to go up with him; and one lost his eye, one his tail,
and one had his lover jaw pushed back into his head like the joint of a
telescope. Again he tried to surmount the Cascades; and at last he
succeeded, and an Indian on the rocks above was waiting to receive him. But
the Indian with his spear was less skilful than he was wont to be, and our
hero escaped, losing only a part of one of his fins; and with him came one
other, and henceforth these two pursued their journey together.

Now a gradual change took place in the looks of our salmon. In the sea he
was plump and round and silvery, with delicate teeth in a symmetrical mouth.
Now his silvery color disappeared, his skin grew slimy, and the scales sank
into it; his back grew black, and his sides turned red,--not a healthy red,
but a sort of hectic flush. He grew poor; and his back, formerly as
straight as need be, now developed an unpleasant hump at the shoulders. His
eyes-like those of all enthusiasts who forsake eating and sleeping for some
loftier aim-became dark and sunken. His symmetrical jaws grew longer and
longer, and meeting each other, as the nose of an old man meets his chin,
each had to turn aside to let the other pass. His beautiful teeth grew
longer and longer, and projected from his mouth, giving him a savage and
wolfish appearance, quite at variance with his real disposition. For all
the desires and ambitions of his nature had become centered into one. We
may not know what this one was, but we know that it was a strong one; for it
had led him on and on,--past the nets and horrors of Astoria; past the
dangerous Cascades; past the spears of Indians; through the terrible flume
of the Dalles, where the mighty river is compressed between huge rocks into
a channel narrower than a village street; on past the meadows of Umatilla
and the wheat-fields of Walla Walla; on to where the great Snake River and
the Columbia join; on up the Snake River and its eastern branch, till at
last he reached the foot of the Bitter Root Mountains in the Territory of
Idaho, nearly a thousand miles from the ocean which he had left in April.
With him still was the other salmon which had come with him through the
Cascades, handsomer and smaller than he, and, like him, growing poor and
ragged and tired.

At last, one October afternoon, our finny travellers came together to a
little clear brook, with a bottom of fine gravel, over which the water was
but a few inches deep. Our fish painfully worked his way to it; for his
tail was all frayed out, his muscles were sore, and his skin covered with
unsightly blotches. But his sunken eyes saw a ripple in the stream, and
under it a bed of little pebbles and sand. So there in the sand he scooped
out with his tail a smooth round place, and his companion came and filled it
with orange-colored eggs. Then our salmon came back again; and softly
covering the eggs, the work of their lives was done, and, in the old salmon
fashion, they drifted tail foremost down the stream.

They drifted on together for a night and a day, but they never came to the
sea. For the salmon has but one life to live, and it ascends the river but
once. The rest lies with its children. And when the April sunshine fell on
the globules in the gravel, these were wakened into life. With the early
autumn rains, the little fishes were large enough to begin their wanderings.
They dropped down the current in the old salmon fashion. And thus they came
into the great river and drifted away to the sea.

END THE STORY OF A SALMON
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Wolfgang

This work is in the public domain. To the best of my knowledge, its
inclusion here violates no U.S. or other copyright laws.