ALASKA FISHERY AND FUR-SEAL INDUSTRIES, 1920, 149 
had all been derived from eggs deposited in the Yukon gravels 
before ever the cannery was established. There could be no ques- 
tion, therefore of impairment of the run having resulted in 1919 from 
previous cannery operations. 
The only possible effect of the Carlisle cannery up to the present 
time has been to diminish, by the number of salmon captured, the 
runs which enter the river and are available to the native and white 
inhabitants of the valley. In 1919 the company reported the capture 
of 101,107 king salmon and 357,081 small salmon, largely chums. If 
these had been captured upriver and dried, the king salmon would 
then have averaged about 5 pounds each and the chums 1} to 14 
pounds. Adopting the lower figure, the cannery pack, dried, would 
have amounted to 252 tons of king salmon and 223 tons of the smaller 
varieties, or 475 tons altogether. This is held to be more than twice 
any possible estimate of the amount of dried salmon actually put up 
during that season on the entire river. 
If the 100,000 kings and the 350,000 chums taken by the cannery 
had been permitted to ascend the river, to what extent, we may ask, 
would the situation have been helped? It would depend on the size 
of the run and the proportion which, under the conditions of 1919, 
would escape capture at the hands of the river fishermen. If the 
fishing camps along the river were catching 50 per cent of the run, 
the cannery fish would have added some 235 tons, and the catch 
would thus have been more than doubled. If they were capturing a 
third of the run, the cannery fish would have increased their small 
catch by over 150 tons. 
Data for such an estimate are not available. In the muddy waters 
of the Yukon the schools of salmon are invisible, and no direct 
estimate can be formed of their numbers. There is abundant evi- 
dence, however, that a large majority of the king salmon running in 
1919 were captured in nets or encountered nets and escaped from 
them on the way into the river. White fishermen and natives, prac- 
tically without exception, including those who felt no hostility to the 
cannery, agreed that the king salmon averaged smaller in size than 
ever before and that the relatively few larger individuals were net 
marked in the majority of cases. The same fishermen, operating in 
the same localities in 1920, state almost without exception that the 
king salmon in 1920 averaged large in size, and the number of net- 
marked fish was so small as to be negligible. 
Many opportunities have occurred to observe elsewhere salmon 
caught in wheels or traps above a district heavily fished with gill 
nets. The results are always the same. The smaller salmon filter 
through the nets, which screen out the larger sizes, leaving the 
average size of the escaping fish always greatly diminished. And 
many of the fish escape through the web after being temporarily 
captured, the twine having become so tightly constricted about the 
body as to leave permanent marks that can not be mistaken. At the 
rack which was maintained in Wood River above the Nushagak fish- 
ing district there was opportunity to examine the fish escaping 
from gill nets that were capturing from 75 to 90 per cent of the 
running fish, but never were the escaping sockeyes so extensively 
net marked as the Yukon king salmon are credibly reported to 
have been in 1919. 
