SALMON FISHERIES OF ALASKA. 
15 
in Yellowstone Park, would have been gone, too, long before this. The Yellowstone National Park 
saved them. It saved the wild race from extinction, and, if nothing else should ever be accomplished 
by the creation of the park, this alone would, in the writer’s estimation, justify its existence. 
But if any one had said thirty years ago, "Let us form a national park in the buffalo region for a 
protection and refuge for the buffalo,” the proposition would have been laughed down from one end of 
the country to the other. It would have been thought a most ridiculous expedient, a scheme too foolish 
and crazy to be even seriously entertained. Nevertheless, the creation of the National Park has accom- 
plished this very object, and has been, I think it may be safely said, the only means of accomplishing 
this most important object, the preservation of the American buffalo. 
Now what this paper is going to propose will appear, doubtless, just as ridiculous, just as foolish 
and crazy, as the formation of a park for the preservation of the buffalo would have been thought 
thirty years ago. It is nothing less than the creation of a national park for the preservation of our 
salmon. 
I hear already from all directions the question “What do the salmon need a park for? Are 
there not plenty of plaices of safety for them already in all the rivers and streams of this country, 
not to mention the pathless ocean, where man can not follow them ? ” 
It looks so at first 'Sight, I admit ; but let us try to find these places of safety if they exist, and 
then see how it looks. We certainly can not find them on the Atlantic coast, where the scanty yield 
of the only two American salmon rivers — the Kennebec and the Penobscot — is only a drop in the 
bucket compared with the total consumption of salmon. Passing over to the Pacific coast we find 
only the Sacramento, the Columbia, and the lesser streams on the Washington and Oregon coast, and 
in all these the salmon are about as safe as the fur seals were last year in Bering Sea. 
I will say from my personal knowledge that not only is every contrivance employed that human 
ingenuity can devise to destroy the salmon of our west-coast rivers, but more surely destructive, more 
fatal than all is the slow but inexorable march of those destroying agencies of human progress, before 
which the salmon must surely disappear, as did the buffalo of the plains and the Indian of California. 
The helpless salmon’s life is gripped between these two forces, the murderous greed of the fishermen 
and the white man’s advancing civilization, and what hope is there for the salmon in the end? Pro- 
tective laws and artificial breeding are able to hold the first in check, but nothing can stop the last. 
To substantiate this statement, which may seem exaggerated, let me inquire what it was that 
destroyed the salmon of the Hudson, the Connecticut, the Merrimac, and the various smaller rivers 
of New England, where they used to be exceedingly abundant? It was not overfishing 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 manufactures 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 1849, every tributary of 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 
Sacramento of any account was a spawning-ground for the salmon except the McCloud and Pitt rivers 
in the extreme northern part of the State, where the hostility of the Indians 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 ddbris 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 
United States salmon station on the McCloud River. In 1883 the Southern Pacific Railroad Company 
(then the Central Pacific) extended their line northward up the Little Sacramento, crossing the mouth 
of Pitt River, into which the McCloud empties, a mile or two above. 
So disastrous to the salmon was the effect of the road building along the Little Sacramento and 
the mouth of the Pitt that that year it was with great difficulty and only by very hard work that we 
