742 REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF FISH AND FISHERIES. 



United States Commissioner of Fish and Fislieries for a sum of money 

 for tlie purpose of making repairs. This being furnished out of the de- 

 ficiency appropriation voted by Congress in the spring of 1878 for the 

 propagation of food fishes, I went to the McCloud Eiver in May and im- 

 mediately entered upon the work of putting the fishery in repair. There 

 was an immense deal of work to be accomplished to set things to rights, 

 and to get the place ready for the season's operations in hatching salmon- 

 eggs. The main things to be done were to place the old buildings as they 

 were before the freshet, to build a new building to serve both for a dwell- 

 ing-house and a post-office, to replace the fences and flumes, to build the 

 spawning-house and the corrals for the parent salmon, to repair the 

 current wheel and the two flat-boats that it rested on and to put them 

 in place in the river, to build a solid wall of rock from the high land to 

 the river to protect the buildings against the force of the current in 

 future floods, to build the rack, «&c., and to reconstruct almost the whole 

 of the interior of the lower j)art of the hatching-house, every portion of 

 which was swept away so clean that not a single thing was left in it, not 

 even the heavy grindstone. In order to make as rapid progress as pos- 

 sible, I put on a large force of men at once, and began work simultane- 

 ously on several of the undertakings just mentioned. The getting out 

 of the timbers for the buildings, for the hatching-house floor, for the 

 fences, and for general purposes, occupied the time of most of the men 

 for two or three weeks. As we have no horses at the fishery, it becomes 

 necessary to cut our timbers somewhere on the river above us. The first 

 year that we settled here we found enough suitable trees close by, but 

 each subsequent year we have had to go higher and higher up the river, 

 tUl this year we found it necessary to go nearly four miles up to find 

 such timbers as we required. This involved the consumption of a good 

 deal of time, not only in getting the timber but especially in floating it 

 down to the fishery, the river being tortuous in its course and very rapid. 

 It was over a month before all the timbers were delivered at the places 

 where they were wanted, and if it had not been for the very efiQcient 

 help of the Indians, who seemed as ^uuch at home in the water as on 

 the land, we probably should not have succeeded in getting the logs 

 down the river at all. As soon as the timbers were ready, we built the 

 bridge and rack across the river to obstruct the ascent of the salmon. 



The demand for California salmon-eggs being now very large, I wished 

 to take ten million eggs or more this season, and was, consequently, 

 'anxious to get the rack in as soon as possible. The water was still much 

 higher than usual, and the dif&citilt undertaking of bridging the stream 

 was made still more difficult this year by the high water. By the 10th 

 of July, however, it was accomplished, and the river was closed to the 

 upward migration of the salmon. I was the more willing to close the 

 stream as early as this because vast numbers of full-grown salmon, taking 

 advantage of the high water in the Sacramento Eiver, had escaped the 



