CHAPTER XVI 

 THE TROUT OF THE GREAT WEST 



T is now just a hundred years ago that Meri- 

 wether Lewis and William Clark, encouraged by 

 Thomas Jefferson, the Theodore Roosevelt of 

 those early days, crossed the great divide, and 

 explored the waters which we now call Columbia. 



It was in the headwaters of the Columbia that these ex- 

 plorers 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 col- 

 lected by the enthusiastic surgeon-naturalist, Dr. Gairdner, 

 then an employee of the great fur company, 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 



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