196 



Sierra Club Bulletin. 



Some weeks later I had to go several miles up stream 

 to set my traps, and was delighted to discover a great 

 chain of Alpine lakes feeding the creek. In fact, after 

 exploring the west branch of Cottonwood we counted a 

 total of twenty-one lakes feeding the stream. But there 

 were no trout in them at all ; in fact, none above a series 

 of falls aggregating some fifty feet, which tumbled over 

 the rocks below. 



From some stockmen whom I found riding the range, 

 I learned that the trout found in Cottonwood Creek are 

 not indigenous to the stream, but had been brought there 

 some fifteen years before by some sheep men who had 

 found them in Mulkey Creek, a small tributary of the 

 Kern River, just across the divide, some ten miles to the 

 south of our camp. But a baker's dozen were taken 

 from Mulkey to Cottonwood in an old coffee pot, but 

 there seem to have been sufficient, as the latter creek, at 

 the time of our visit, was fairly swarming with them. 

 However, they were not at all plentiful in the lower 

 courses of the stream below the crossing of the Hockett 

 trail, where it is said the first were planted. 



Mulkey Creek, from which the trout were taken, 

 drains towards the east, while Cottonwood is lost in the 

 desert, or, at highwater, reaches Owens Lake after a 

 series of great falls down the eastern escarpment of the 

 Sierra. In the course of its meanderings the South 

 Fork of the Kern River, a few miles above its junction 

 with Mulkey Creek, comes within a few yards of Volcano 

 Creek, in which are found a slightly different form of 

 Golden trout, and it is easy to believe that at some time 

 a transfer has been made at this point and the variation 

 in species began. 



The Volcano Creek trout has been named Salmo roose- 

 velti by Mr. Evermann in honor of President Roosevelt. 

 It differs from the Whitney and Mulkey Creek specimen 

 in that it has a deeper golden color, and the distribution 

 of speckles is not the same. Neither of these species 



