THIRTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 25 
concludes, “that there is a very large per cent. of profit in artificial 
fish-culture, when conducted under circumstances as favorable as 
these.” 
What man has done man may do, and what has been done in 
the Sacramento can be duplicated in the Columbia, and in as 
much larger proportion as the Columbia is larger than the Sacra- 
mento. . 
An effort was made in 1877 to hatch salmon on the Clackamus 
river, a tributary of the Columbia. 
This location seemed to combine every advantage for the 
hatching of salmon on a large scale. The river heads, as you 
are aware, in the perennial snows of Mt. Hood, and the coldness 
of its snow-fed waters is very attractive to the ascending salmon. 
Just above its mouth, on the Wilhamette, into which it empties, 
are the impassable falls of Oregon City, which prevent the sal- 
mon from going up the Wilhamette any further, and naturally 
turns them back into the Clackamus, if they missed that 
river in the first place. Then, if necessary, the Clackamus can 
be so obstructed that every salmon coming up can be stopped in 
front of the fishery. The river is a favorite resort of the salmon, 
as it must necessarily be, with its cold, clear, and swift running 
water; and before canning on the Columbia began, the Clacka- 
mus was famous for its hundreds of thousands of magnificent 
spring salmon that used to swarm up its channel to spawn. 
But the establishment of the stationcame too late. Already— 
this was in 1877—there were fifteen or twenty canneries on the 
Columbia below the mouth of the Wilhamette, and with their 
thousand miles, or nearly, of drift nets waylaying the ascending 
fish, the main river became so depleted of parent salmon, that 
those that reached the Clackamus in 1877, were but a sorry frag- 
ment of the immense shoals that originally came up the stream 
to spawn. 
It was too late. Had the station been established twelve 
years before, twenty million eggs of the best variety of salmon 
in the Columbia river could have been taken there every year. 
The time has now gone by for that, and only a few million eggs 
can be taken in a season on the Clackamus, until some legisla- 
