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and the various smaller rivers of New England, where 
they used to be exceedingly abundant? It was not over- 
fishing that did it. If the excessive fishing had been all 
there was to contend with, a few simple laws would have 
been sufficient to preserve some remnants, at least, of the 
race. It was not the fishing, it was the growth of the 
country, as it is commonly called, the increase of the 
population, necessarily bringing with it the development 
of the various industries by which communities live and 
become prosperous. It was the mills, the dams, the 
steamboats, the manufacturers injurious to the water, and 
similar causes, which, first making the streams more and 
more uninhabitable for the salmon, finally exterminated 
them altogether. In short, it was the growth of the 
country and not the fishing which really set a bound 
to the habitations of the salmon on the Atlantic 
coast. 
Let me illustrate this same statement more in detail by 
presenting the testimony of the salmon rivers of the Pacific 
coast. Take for an example the Sacramento. When 
the first rush of Gold seekers came to California in 1840, 
every tributary to the Sacramento was a fruitful spawning 
ground for salmon and into every tributary countless shoals 
of salmon hastened every summer to deposit their eggs. 
When the writer went to California in 1872, only twenty- 
three years later, not one single tributary of the Sacra- 
mento of any account was a spawning ground for the 
salmon except the McCloud and Pit rivers in the extreme 
northern part of the State, where the hostility of the In- 
dians had kept white men out. It was not fishing by any 
means that had caused the disappearance of the salmon, 
for the miners did very little fishing in those times; but it 
was the debris from the quartz mines which drove the 
salmon out, ruining the spawning grounds and rendering 
the river uninhabitable for the salmon. 
This was in 1872. In 1878 the writer took 14,000,000 
of salmon eggs from the summer run at the U. S. Sal- 
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