2 
To reduce the cost of living, eat more salmon, especially of the 
cheaper grades, and less meat. Meats spoil quickly in the home. 
Canned salmon will keep indefinitely if unopened. 
Meats are inspected, but they are handled by many persons after 
inspection and are exposed in the market places. Canned salmon 
is sealed against contamination, and from the time that the fish 
enter the cannery fresh from the cold waters in which they were 
taken, are washed, and delivered to the “ iron chink ” which butchers 
them, those packed in tall cans are practically untouched by the 
hand of man. Flat cans are packed by hand, but under the most 
sanitary conditions. The “iron chink” cuts off the heads, tails, and 
fins, dresses the fish at the rate of 3,000 fish per hour, and delivers 
them to a mechanical conveyer, on which they are thoroughly 
washed as they are conducted to the machine which cuts them in 
pieces to fit the sanitary solderless cans into which they are to be 
packed. No foreign or objectionable matter enters the tins, and the 
fish are thoroughly sterilized by cooking after the cans are sealed. 
MAGNITUDE OF THE INDUSTRY. 
The cheapness of salmon is due to their abundance and the use of 
the labor-saving machines warranted by the size of the pack. In 
1913 there were canned on the Pacific coast the equivalent of 
387,045,456 1-pound cans, valued at $38,563,891. This would sup¬ 
ply about 4 pounds of salmon to every man, woman, and child in the 
United States, and if the cans were placed in contact end to end they 
would encircle the earth, with enough to spare to stretch from New 
York to San Francisco. 
To supply the raw material for this enormous pack requires over 
100 million fishes weighing from 3 to 25 pounds or more each, and 
some of them measuring upward of 5 feet in length. Were it not 
that these fishes run into all of the important streams from Monterey 
Bay to the Arctic Circle and are almost incredibly abundant in many 
northern rivers, this great industry, one of the most important on the 
Pacific coast, could not have been developed or have been maintained. 
The drain on nature's bounty has been so great, however, that some 
streams have been depleted and the wealth of others has been threat¬ 
ened, and it has been necessary to sustain runs by artificial means. 
At this point the Federal Government and the States become factors 
in the situation. 
HOW THE SUPPLY IS MAINTAINED. 
Since the addition of man as one of the greatest of the salmon’s 
enemies, natural spawning alone has been unable to maintain the 
supply, and to supplement it the Bureau of Fisheries conducts sal¬ 
mon culture on an extensive scale, operating 24 hatcheries and 
