362 GAME FISH OF NORTH AMERICA. 



April. "With these salmon comes a large species of trout, known 

 here as salmon trout, which have similar habits, and return to the 

 sea about the same time. This last fish is long, round, and com- 

 paratively slender, with a small head, and ranging as high as seven- 

 teen pounds in weight. One of these weighing only eight pounds, 

 caught in good condition last spring, measured thirty-two and a 

 quarter inches in length. Any salmon of the same length would 

 weigh from twenty to thirty pounds. I am thus particular, as some 

 parties here claim the fish for a variety of salmon instead 0/ a trout. 



" The first run of Sacramento salmon arrive in San Francisco 

 about the first of January. They remain within the influences of 

 tide water until April and May, when the waters of the river hav- 

 ing cleared, from the ending of the rains, they proceed to the Up- 

 per Sacramento and its tributaries to spawn. A second run of 

 salmon comes in from sea in May, and goes up the Sacramento 

 without remaining in the bay. These fish ascending the river are 

 found in July and August in the vicinity of Mount Shasta in pools, 

 awaiting their time to spawn, and can then be caught with hook 

 and hne. During the months of January, February, March, and a 

 portion of April, salmon are caught in the bay and rivers in un- 

 usual numbers, the cause of which I will explain further on. In 

 these months at least ten thousand were caught by hook and line 

 from the railroad pier at Oakland, three miles from this city. An 

 unknown number, but probably half as many more, were taken at 

 other points around the bay. These fish ranged from one to fifteen 

 pounds each. The sport being a new one, and prosecuted mostly 

 by novices with insufficient tackle and from a pier fifteen feet above 

 the water, the largest fish were almost always lost after being 

 hooked. When you consider that the hooks were on single and 

 generally inferior gut, on Hnes attached to stiff bamboo rods without 

 reels, scores of fishermen, almost elbowing each other, with open 

 piling beneath them coated with mussels, you will readily under- 

 stand that only the smaller fish were likely to be taken, 



" As before stated, the number of salmon in the bay has be- 

 come unusually large. This comes from the close season in 1873 

 (the first we ever had) from August first to November first, and the 

 putting into the McCloud River the same year of four hundred 

 thousand young salmon, artificially hatched out by United States 



