(13) 



the finest procured were carried from the headwaters of Tow 

 river at the base of Mitchell's peak directly up the side of the 

 Blue Ridge within three hundred yards of the Pinnacle. I 

 was accompanied by a small party and we relieved each other by 

 turns. These fish we carried on our shoulders four miles up the 

 Ridge and three miles down accomplishing a trip in ten hours 

 and thirty minutes. On an average the water was renewed every 

 seven minutes and when it is remembered that we had to wade 

 the streams and follow a course that only men reared in those 

 mountains could follow, it may well be realized that in conjunc- 

 tion with the highest summer heat ever known there, that the 

 undertaking was of a severe nature. 



Owing to the streams being ''fished out" at so late a season as 

 July 3rd and fish being scarce, and the high summer heat and 

 slow transit over the rocky and in many places nearly impassable 

 roads, I could not get any vast number, and of those I did get* 

 many were lost through the last mentioned agencies. I secured 

 over 2000 fish, but from deaths from various causes, including 

 injuries in the brain from the hook, they only numbered 1400 

 in September. Since then the deaths have ceased. For 

 the purpose of sortin or these I built three cheap ponds for their 

 accommodation. I began to take ova from these on the 29th 

 day of October at the Salmon Hatchery at Swannanoa Gap. I 

 +ook but ten thousand, when the fish became so wild that they 

 would no longer enter the spawning races, and I was obliged to 

 stop. It was not advisable to net them owing to the fact that 

 the Salmon from California were hatched in the house below, 

 and I deemed it unsafe to stir up the bottom and send down an 

 epidemic producing volume of impure gases which had form- 

 ed from waste meats in feeding the trout previously. I do not 

 know what number were left in the trout but probably sixty 

 thousand. Young trout have just hatched from those eggs. 

 Besides these the 50,000 trout eggs ordered from New 

 Hampshire are now hatched, save 10,000 which became solidly 

 frozen up in the cold weather from January 2nd to 8th They 

 are yet on hand at the Hatchery at Swannanoa Gap, being too 

 young to go into the streams. 



