322 

 R. H. BAILEY 

 I go back to a time when I talked to the old timers in 

 Skagit County way back in '22 and '23 who have got 

 oysters from great reefs of native oysters in both 

 Samish and Padilla Bay, the Indians brought in these 

 Olympia type oysters. And then we came down, as I said 

 in my statement, to the late 20's when these scattered 

 oysters, Olympia oysters, disappeared. 



And then after I had planted a half million 

 dollars worth of seed oysters in Padilla and built the 

 largest cannery in the United States for oysters, we woke 

 up in late '34 and found out something was the matter. 

 As you would open a bushel you are supposed to get a 

 gallon of good oysters, sometimes as many as five quarts. 

 To get a gallon you would have to open two or two and a 

 half bushels. Commercially you are sunk; the mathematics 

 of it, you don't have a chance. 



We did continue to pack an oyster soup. 

 We packed 3,000 cases a day of an oyster soup, sold it 

 across the United States. The time came two years later 

 when we couldn't even pack the oysters. They were worth- 

 less . 



At the time we sued the mills in 1939, 

 the pulp mills made their own pickup tests, how many 

 oysters we got on these beds. It went to the measure of 



