94 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



River a salmon cannery, which has been worked to the full limit 

 of demand ; and a smaller, similar factory is located at the head of 

 this inlet, in the Kaknoo estuary. 



The finest salmon known to man, savage or civilized, both in 

 flavor and size combined, is that giant fish which runs in especial 

 good form and number into Cook's Inlet, and which the Russians 

 called the " chowichah ; " * they are most abundant during the sum- 

 mer neap-tides, but they are not as numerous as are the several other 

 varieties of smaller and far less palatable salmonidse, which also run 

 up here with them. The average length of these superb chowichah 

 fish is four feet, and a weight of fifty pounds is a low medium. 

 They appear regularly on the 20th and 22d of every May, running 

 in pairs, refusing the hook, though hugging the shore lines. Our 

 people catch them in floating gill-nets, and in weirs of brush and 

 saplings of wicker-work woven with spruce-roots and bark, which 

 are erected on the mud-flats at the river mouth, during low tide. 



The king salmon, however, is erratic in running to any one 

 spawning spot, and in this respect differs from all the rest of its 

 family, which is remarkably constant in annually returning to the 

 same spawning ground. But the abundance of salmon which we see 

 in their reproductive periods of each year, ascending every river 

 and possible rivulet that communicates with the sea in Alaska south 

 of Bering's Straits, is a never-failing source of wonder and de- 

 light to the white visitor and a measure of infinite creature-comfort 

 to his physical being while sojourning here. Also, the pleasant 

 thought constantly arises that when we shall have a populous em- 

 pire on the Pacific slope, as we have now in the Mississippi Valley 

 and east of the Alleghanies, what a handsome use we will make of 

 this waste of fish-food wealth f which we now observe in the vast 



* Oncorynchus chouicTia examples of this species have a recorded weight 

 of one hundred pounds each, and six feet in length ; it is also abundant in the 

 Yukon and Kuskokvim Rivers. 



f Dr. T. H. Bean, who, as a trained ichthyologist, passed the season of 

 1880 investigating the fish of Alaska by cruising throughout its waters, says : 



"The greatest fish-wealth of Alaska, so far as the shore fisheries are con- 

 cerned, lies in the abundance of salmon of the genus Oncorhynchus, which is 

 represented by five species chouicJia, beta, kisutch, nerka, and gorbuscha. 

 The first three of these are the largest, the whole series being named in the 

 order of their size. 0. chouiclia is the giant of the group, and is the most 

 important commercially ; it attains to its greatest size in the large rivers, 



