THE TROUT AND SALMON OF THE PACIFIC COAST 



By DAVID STARR JORDAN". 

 With drawings from nature by Sekko Shiniada. 



TROUT. 



It is now just a hundred years ago that Meriwether Lewis and 

 William Clark, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, the Roosevelt of those 

 days, crossed the great divide and explored the waters which we now 

 call Columbia. 



It was in the headwaters of the Columbia that these explorers first 

 met with the true trout in America. William Clark, who was a judge 

 of fine fishes, found it good, and thirty years later, when Sir John 

 Richardson published his noble work on the animals of the North, 

 "Fauna-Boreali- Americana," he named this Columbia River trout 

 Salmo clarkii. 



His specimens came from Astoria, where they were collected by the 

 enthusiastic surgeon-naturalist, Dr. Gairdner, then an employe of the 

 great fur compauy. a man worthy of remembrance in the annals of the 

 good men who knew fish. 



The word trout is of French origin, truite in modern French, and 

 still earlier from the late Latin word trutta, which becomes trucha in 

 Spanish-speaking countries. In Europe, the name trout in all its forms 

 is used for black-spotted fishes only, those with red spots, as we shall 

 see later, being called by other names. 



All the true trout have come to America from Asia, and none have 

 naturally crossed the great plains. For in the Great Lake region, the 

 Alleghanies and the valley proper of the Mississippi the true trout are 

 unknown. 



But in northern Europe, Siberia, southern Alaska, and throughout 

 the Rocky Mountain region and the waters to the westward, trout are 

 everywhere. Their original parentage, no doubt, w r as from some sort 

 of land-locked salmon; their original birthplace being perhaps not a 

 thousand miles from the Baltic Sea. Since that time of their birthday, 

 very long ago, trout have traveled up and down the rivers, dow r n into 

 the sea and up another river, until they have reached from Scotland 



