PACIFIC COD FISHERIES. 31 
were offered on the street by Frank Bates, a broker, but the trade was filled 
up by the old companies, and the fish found such slow sale that the whole 
eargo was bought in by this company at a very low price. We later took over 
the station, and the schooner and the business was entirely closed out. Like a 
butterfly, it lived but one summer. 
In 1894 a Capt. Jorgenson bought the condemned steamer Salinas, converted 
her into a three-masted schooner, rechristening her the Uranus, and sent her 
codfishing. He did fairly well for two years then, with the backing of the 
firms outfitting him, he added the W. F. Harriman, also a condemned hull 
refitted. At the end of the third year his whole outfit passed into the hands of 
those who had been backing him, and he was known in the codfish business no 
more. 
Young Duggan (1902) had a short and inglorious career as a codfish man, and 
some of the money that his father made in the shirt business went to pay what 
it cost the young man to listen to the siren song of the wily promoter. The 
schooner J. G. Wall went to the Bering Sea under the joint command of Capt. 
Dollard (the promoter) and Henderson (an experienced codfisher). We bought 
their season’s catch, and it lasted us just three days. One season was enough 
for Mr. Duggan. 
Undoubtedly the most picturesque figure in the whole line was Nick Bichard. 
A native of the Isle of Jersey, a pioneer shipowner and merchant of San 
Francisco, he accumulated a fortune during the days of the Civil War and was 
early in the codfish business with quite a fleet of old vessels, both large and 
small, and for many years he was a prominent factor in the business. A large, 
swarthy man, erratic in speech and action, mixing codfish, coal, lumber, and 
junk, keeping most of his books in his head, he never knew what his cargoes 
cost him nor what they sold for. The codfish business absorbed more and 
more of his capital; then his real estate, two fine water lets on Stuart Street, 
the gore lot at California and Market Streets, and other property went the 
Same way; the old vessels wore out and were lost and he finally died peace- 
fully in the night of heart failure, leaving barely enough to bury him. 
Chief among the old-timers and of those most largely interested and longest 
in the business was the firm of Lynde & Hough, two enterprising Yankees 
of the old school who started in Sacramento in pioneer days, came down to San 
Francisco, were in the commission business and, from selling codfish on com- 
mission, drifted into the cod-fishing business [in 1865] itself. They were for 
many years among the heaviest operators in codfish and, in addition, they dealt 
in all other kinds of sait fish, cornered the honey market, dipped into sealing in 
the Straits of Magellan, South Sea Island trading, fishing and trading stations 
in Alaska, salmon fishing, freighting, running a coasting passenger steamer, and 
anything else that promised a dollar, including “ Okhotsk Sea Cod Liver Oil ” 
and “ Dr. Fisherman’s Lotion for Man and Beast.” They and their surviving 
partner, L. HE. Noonan, were well and favorably known from Alaska to South 
America and from Hawaii to Australia and the Orient. Their last venture 
was codfish mixed with mining, and finally both of the senior partners died, 
leaving no money but various debts behind them. Their location at California 
City was sold to the United States Navy Department for a coaling station, and 
their vessels and cod-fishing business were merged into the Union Fish Co. 
L, E. Noonan was connected with the Lynde & Hough company for nearly 40 
years, at first as general factotum and handy-man-ready-for-anything. He ran 
the fish yard, outfitted the vessels, hired captains and crews, packed and re- 
packed salmon and mackerel, bought and sold on the street. Later he acquired 
