18 Report of the American 



to tall back upon when in want of something better were bacon, potatoes 

 and baked beans. We had no fresh domestic meat whatever. 



GAME. 

 The McCloud region is a good game country. Deer are very abun- 

 dant, especially after the snow on the mountains had driven them down 

 into the valleys. Black and cinnamon bears are quite common, and it 

 was not unusual to see the track of a grizzly bear, though we did not 

 encounter one. California lions are occasionally seen. Quails, gray 

 squirrels and jack rabbits were quite common and not very timid. 

 Indeed, a bevy of thirty or forty quails, and often more, used to feed 

 around the house every day, and several gra}' squirrels came regularly to 

 our table at every meal to be fed. Our Indians could almost always go 

 out and get a deer of a morning or afternoon, and any one is sure to get 

 a bear or two who makes a day's regular hunt for one ten miles up the 

 McCloud river in October. 



FROM THE ]9th OP AUGUST TILL THE EGGS WERE SHIPPED. 



To resume the thread of my story, by the 19th of August we turned 

 the water through the hatching house, and had the pleasure of seeing 

 what I had long looked forward to, a successful hatching apparatus in 

 perfect working order in the salmon breeding regions of the Pacific slope. 

 There seemed to be something in the very sound of the rippling and 

 plashing water to exhilarate our spirits, as it leaped through the troughs 

 for the first time. I celebrated the day b}- collecting our whole force of 

 whites and Indians at sunset and raising a large American flag over the 

 camp. 



We continued to catch more salmon, and to build more corrals for 

 them, and to extend the operations for hatching the eggs. The female 

 salmon now begins to show every sign of being nearly ready to spawn, 

 and we were daily expecting to find some ripe eggs. We remained, how- 

 ever, in this not unpleasant state of excitement and anticipation until 

 the 26th of August, when we took the first ripe salmon eggs of the sea- 

 son, numbering 23,000. 



Now came a new and unexpected drawback. The salmon confined in 

 the corrals had been literally wearing themselves out in their frantic 

 endeavors to ascend the river. Every moment, day and night, impelled 

 by their irrepressible instinct, they kept jumping and lashing themselves 

 against the sides of the enclosures, and now comparativel}^ exhausted by 

 their efforts and bruises they were beginning to die from the effect of 

 them. Fortunately there were enough more in the river to get eggs from, 

 for had we depended on our stock on hand when the first eggs were taken 

 we should have obtained a ver}' meagre suppl}'. As it was, I kept on fishing 



