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VOL. LXXXIV 
APRIL, 1915 
No. 4 
The Leaping, Fighting, Impetuous Ouananiche 
Much Misinformation Prevails About him and the Beautiful Environment in Which he Lives—The 
Angler’s Blue Ribbon Prize 
By E. T. D. Chambers, Author of “The Ouananiche and its Canadian Environment,” etc. 
ROM far above the Grand Falls 
of the Hamilton River and from 
the waters of its Ashuanipi 
branch in the interior of Labra¬ 
dor, came the skin of a fish, now 
in my possession, that unfolds a 
novel and interesting story to 
anglers and ichthyologists alike. 
Mr. A. P. Low the late head of the Geological 
Survey of Canada brought it back with him to 
civilization, upon his return from his overland 
trip of 1894-95 to Ungava Bay. In its adipose fin, 
the fish whose skin it was, bore the badge of 
royalty among fishes—the evidence of kinship to 
the kingly family of the salmon. In its shapely 
beauty and brilliancy of coloring, from the deep 
bluish green of its back, through the various 
shades of its silvery sides, to the pure white of its 
under surface, and in the number and disposition 
of its fin rays, it scarcely differed .from a grilse 
of equal size. But its habitat was above a cataract 
having a sheer fall of 300 feet, so that this fish 
could not possibly have been a salmon from the 
sea. The large number and the distinctness of the 
double X marks upon its sides, the large size of 
the eye and of the dark spots upon the gill 
covers,, and the strength and thickness of that 
portion of the body adjoining the caudal fin, all 
stamp it a ouananiche or non-anadromous 
salmon. 
Prior to Mr. Low’s discovery of the ouananiche 
in many of the large rivers flowing into Ungava 
Bay, Hamilton Inlet and the Atlantic Ocean, its 
geographical distribution was popularly supposed 
to be confined to Lake St. John and its tributary 
waters. Now, its Canadian environment is known 
to include the whole Labrador peninsula, except¬ 
ing perhaps that part of its westerly slope drained 
into Hudson Bay; and the angler who would find 
it and fight it under the varying conditions in 
which it may be found, must traverse a vast re¬ 
gion of mountain and lake and forest and stream, 
as practically unknown as the interior of Africa, 
save to the Montagnais and Nascapee Indians, 
whose hunting ground it is. 
For countless ages, no doubt, the aboriginal Red 
Man, with his bone or stone-pointed spear, snatch¬ 
ed from the rapid water in which the fish is found/ 
the biggest specimens that came to the surface in 
the quest of insect food. “Wan-nan!’’ as we pro¬ 
nounce it—“There!” or “Look there!” or “There 
he is!”—they ejaculated, as the fish came to the 
top of the water, and “Wan-nan” thus came to 
signify the name of the fish. Its discovery by 
white men was first announced to the civilized 
world in 1647 by the Jesuit Father DeQuen, the 
first European to set foot upon the shores of Lake 
St. John. In its clear waters he found the fish 
and correctly classed it as a salmon, reporting his 
discovery to his Superior in Paris, in his “Re¬ 
lation” of that year. 
The original French settlers in the land of the 
ouananiche did not confine themselves to the 
largest specimens when capturing the fish for 
food, for not having mainly to depend, like the 
Indian, upon the spear as a means of taking fish, 
they captured all sizes in their nets, and the Red 
Men used their diminutive terminology when de¬ 
scribing the catch, calling it “wannan-iche” or 
little “wannan.” But there is no “w” in the 
French language, its sound being represented by 
the letters “ou”. Thus “Ouananiche” and not 
“wannaniche” is the original written form of the 
fish's name as employed by those who first pro¬ 
duced it on paper, and according to the inflexible 
law of priority in nomenclature, “ouananiche” it 
has remained, and is likely to remain, for it has 
now found a place in the new mammoth lexicon 
of the English language known as the Oxford 
Dictionary, at present in course of publication. 
The ouananiche has been frequently treated, 
within the last quarter of a century, as a new 
fish, and some of the claims to its discovery are 
provocative of mirth. Science classes it—though 
not universally, it must be admitted—as the pure 
and original type of the ordinary Salmo salar— 
the well-known salmon of the North Atlantic 
Ocean and of the coastal streams of northeast 
America. The surmises of some anglers, on the 
other hand, in regard to its origin, are no less 
amusing than was Walton’s respecting “the great 
trout that is near an ell long;” namely—“whether 
this were a salmon when he came into the fresh 
water, and his not returning into the sea hath 
altered him to another color or kind, I am not 
able to say.” 
To quite a number of ardent anglers the 
ouananiche has undoubtedly proved a new 
variety, and this fact, coupled, perhaps, with 
carelessness or meagre powers of observation and 
resultant haste in jumping to conclusions have 
led to the publication from time to time of a 
mass of erroneous information, not only in re¬ 
gard to the identity, ihe origin and the name of 
the fish, but also as respects its habits and geo¬ 
graphical distribution, the alleged difficulty of its 
capture, and in fact upon almost every point of 
the subject upon which it is possible to err. Thus 
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