A Historical Sketch of Fish-culture. 
99 
this wholesale destruction. Our great manufacturing indus¬ 
tries had demanded the erection of mills upon large rivers 
in places where water-power could be utilized, and the 
building of the necessary dams had closed these rivers to 
the ascent of the fish toward their spawning-beds. Our 
factories and saw-mills had polluted the waters with saw¬ 
dust, tan-waste, gas-tar, soap, chemicals and all sorts of 
abomination, so that the fish were poisoned or driven away, 
and our towns had completed the work with their sew¬ 
age. It has been stated that in 1868 there was “not a 
single stream south of the St. Lawrence and the Great 
Lakes, except in the West, which was not practically des¬ 
titute of fish.” On the contrary, the rivers of the Pacific 
Slope, as the Sacramento, the Frazer, the Columbia and the 
Yukon, were annually crowded with salmon. Mr. J. K. 
Lord, author of “The Naturalist in British Columbia,” says 
in that work: “The fish are slaughtered in every possible 
way by numerous savage tribes. They die by myriads after 
the labors of spawning.Yet does this make no 
appreciable difference in the crowds that still come year by 
year. You may kill and kill but still they come in count¬ 
less thousands.” Commenting upon this, the eminent Eng¬ 
lish pisciculturist Mr. Francis Francis says: “But the 
savage does not impede the progress of the salmon by im¬ 
passable barriers: . . . . it is only in Canada and the 
United States that the prolific bounty of nature is forced 
at last to yield to the deadly cunning of man, with his 
dams and his fixed-nets, who by thus hindering and pre¬ 
venting the process of reproduction, does, in effect, emas¬ 
culate the entire salmon race.” 
The mischief had been done before it was suspected, 
and was discovered when it was too late to stop it. Much 
of it might have been avoided. Our industrial interests 
could not be sacrificed, it is true, to our fisheries, but leg¬ 
islation might have prevented a large part of the waste. 
A passage up stream for the salmon might have been af¬ 
forded by the use of fish-ways, and the pollution of the 
