150 
doubtless, just as ridiculous, just as foolish and crazy, as 
the formation of a park for the preservation of the buf- 
falo would have been thought thirty years ago. It is 
nothing less than the creation of a national park for the 
preservation of our salmon. 
I hear already from all directions the question, “What 
do the salmon need a park for? Are there not plenty of 
places of safety for them already in all the rivers and 
streams of this country, not to mention the pathless ocean 
where man cannot follow them ?” 
It looks so at first sight, I admit; but let us try to find 
these places of safety if they exist, and then see how it 
looks. We certainly cannot find them on the Atlantic 
coast, where the scanty yield of the only two American 
salmon rivers—the Kennebec and Penobscot—is only a 
drop in the bucket compared with the total consumption 
of salmon. Passing over to the Pacific coast we find only 
the Sacramento, the Columbia and the lesser streams on 
the Washington and Oregon coast, and in all these the 
salmon are about as safe as the fur seals were last year in 
Behring Sea. 
I will say from my personal knowledge that not only 
is every contrivance employed that human ingenuity can 
devise to destroy the salmon of our West coast rivers, but 
more surely destructive, more fatal than all is the slow 
but inexorable march of those destroying agencies of 
human progress, before which the salmon must surely 
disappear as did the buffalo of the plains and the Indian 
of California. The helpless salmon’s life is gripped be- 
tween these two forces—the murderous greed of the fish- 
ermen and the white man’s advancing civilization—and 
what hope is there for the salmoninthe end? Protective 
laws and artificial breeding are able to hold the first in 
check, but nothing can stop the last. 
To substantiate this statement, which may seem exag- 
gerated, let me inquire what it was that destroyed the 
salmon of the Hudson, the Connecticut, the Merrimac 
