THE OREGON SPORTSMAN - 105 
“ANGLING EXTRAORDINARY” 
Emerson Hough, novelist, and writer, recently visited the Rogue 
-River Valley on a fishing trip. His impressions are recorded in the 
following article in the Saturday Evening Post, entitled, ‘‘ Angling 
Extraordinary: ’’ 
Without sodium chloride life would not amount to much. There 
would be no sort of cooking that would ever get an encore. There 
would be no packing or canning industry, and not very much commerce 
of any sort. The codfish would pass away. The mackerel would no 
longer delight the palates of those who dwell far from the stern and 
rock-bound coast. - Without salt the waste of the world would be so 
enormously increased that the world could not carry its own industrial 
burdens. Salt is a part of us as well as a part of the things we use. 
From deer to diva, all the world needs salt. Doctors use it to infuse 
life into a waning circulatory system. Indeed, science figures out now- 
adays that it can nearly produce life itself by means of certain saline 
reactions, 
Give a horse a taste of rock salt and he becomes friskier, Cattle 
require salt occasionally. Deer and mountain sheep will go any dis- 
tance to a salt lick. Even the cold-blooded and somewhat unintel- 
lectual fish family seems to have sense enough to go once in a while 
to the sea when it has the chance. The strongest, gamest, handsomest 
and most toothsome of all our fishes are those that make the journey 
to the sea. Not without reason is the salmon called the king of fishes. 
He has tasted the revivifying salt. 
There are salmon that never get to the sea, yet still remain good 
examples of the salmon family. The ouananiche, the land-locked salmon 
of certain Eastern lakes, is such a salmon; a good fish and active, 
but one that does not attain a quarter of the weight of members of 
the family which make the pilgrimage to the salt waters. A salmon 
somewhat similar to the land-locked salmon of the East is the steel- 
head of certain Western rivers; but the steelhead, though he can live 
the year round in fresh water, is at his best when, like the salmon, he 
can make the pilgrimage to the ocean and back again to the fresh- 
water rivers. Unlike the salmon, he does not die after spawning. 
There is no gamer fish that swims than this same hammered-down, 
compact salmon. No matter what the scientists call him, he is a 
small and lusty trout, of bold fresh-water rivers, that has gone to sea 
and returned better for it. 
The greatest of all steelhead rivers is the Rogue River, of Oregon. 
The fish there run up to ten or twelve pounds at times. The Rogue 
River itself is one of the most beautiful rivers in all the world and 
passes through a mountain valley that is fairly to be called one of the 
beauty spots of the earth’s surface. The river is a bold, rushing tor- 
rent, with alternating rapids and pools—indeed, an ideal salmon river. 
It has salmon also—the silver salmon of the sea—running in weight 
up to forty, fifty or sixty pounds. If these fish would take the fly— 
if by any process of human ingenuity they could be coaxed to learn 
that habit—at once Oregon would spring into a fame that would 
reach to all the corners of the world. There is not a more perfect 
salmon river out-of-doors than the Rogue River; and, after the king 
salmon himself, the steelhead is the one fish that ought to and does 
occupy those waters. 
Time was when the Rogue River produced steelheads in any quan- 
tity desired. Today there are still enough of the fish to offer fairly 
successful angling. There are good seasons and bad seasons, depend- 
