304 Reminiscences of 



water when they are feeding, as they would a spoon 

 or even a rag, as they will any small object moving 

 from, or by them, and I have several times, when 

 trolling for them with fresh fish bait, had my leaden 

 sinkers taken off by them. 



Among the Pacific salmon there are five varieties, 

 classified one hundred and fifty years ago under the 

 head of Oncorhynchus, by Steller, an eminent Russian 

 scientist, which designation has abided. 



These salmon are distinct from the Atlantic 

 salmon (Salmo Solar) in some minor particulars. 

 The Pacific salmon has from fourteen to twenty bone 

 rays in the anal fin, to nine or ten in the Atlantic. It 

 has more gill rakers, larger scales, and has more or less 

 of brown spots about the head and back. It has the 

 usual silver white color, but at the head a peculiar 

 lustrous steel color, as one might suppose to come from 

 burnishing a metal of mixed lead and silver, a pale olive 

 cast peculiar to this fish. This description applies 

 to the principal salmon, the Chinook or king salmon 

 so plentiful, and more extensively used in canning than 

 any other. This salmon at the Columbia River has an 

 average weight of twenty-one pounds, while the same 

 fish from the Sacramento River averages from sixteen 

 to seventeen pounds. 



Of the four remaining Pacific salmon the blue-back 

 (0. Onerka) is the next important for canning, mod- 

 erate in size, averaging from five to eight pounds, 

 being of red color and good flavor. This salmon 

 is prominent at the Fraser and Yukon rivers, and 

 ascends to the limit of those streams, and is domes- 

 ticated more or less in Lake Whatcom, hundreds of 

 miles from the sea in Washington, where it is always 



