i88o3 About Puget Sound 



of their educated men are at least half white. The 

 conservative among them, however, still cling to 

 primitive methods. One night I watched an old- s'lwash 

 time "medicine man" in the tent of a fever-stricken ^''}^'^^^°-- 

 Siwash. After many incantations he succeeded in 

 materializing the malady in his own mouth in the 

 form of a little trout which he then spat out, re- 

 lieving the patient and effecting a cure. If lizards 

 had been available about Cape Flattery, he would 

 probably have used one of them, as is said to be the 

 custom farther south. 



While not required by our instructions to do so, 

 we nevertheless inspected the (Canadian) fisheries 

 of Fraser River, one of the great salmon streams 

 of the world. There the Red Salmon or Blueback 

 — locally "Sockeye"^ — predominates. I should 

 here explain that the relative abundance of this 

 form in the Columbia and Fraser rivers is due to 

 the multitude of lakes tributary to the latter, for the 

 Red Salmon spawns only in a stream above a lake 

 in which the young always spend the first year.^ 



At Victoria on Vancouver Island we remained for Victoria 

 a time, studying the fishes which swarm in the 

 fine rock-bound, landlocked harbor. This ultra- 

 conservative city imagined itself a bit of England 

 dropped on a distant shore. But Vancouver, a 

 frontier village on the mainland, became typically 

 Western, with nothing to differentiate it from a 

 frontier village of our own Northwest. Since that 

 day it alone of the Canadian towns on Puget Sound 



^ "Sockeye" is a corruption of the Chinook name, which sounds rather like 

 Sukkegh. 



* It may also be noted that in numerous lakes of Idaho, Washington, and 

 northern Japan many individuals never descend to the sea, remaining land- 

 locked all their lives and rarely attaining more than a foot in length. 



C 225 : 



