Cheap Salmon.

Manawatu Herald, Volume III, Issue III, 15 December 1891, Page 2

Cheap Salmon.

" Salmon a halfpenny a piece !" Such is the somewhat startling heading to a paragraph in The Times of a recent date. The abundance of salmon this year on the coasts and in the rivers of British Columbia it appears is so great as to be almost incredible- lheTownsend (Washington) Leader in a recent issue describes the situation in graphic and forcible language. It says : — " The present wonderful run of salmon has so glutted the market that for some time these silver-sided beauties have been selling at 5 Ants apiece ; but the price took a tfrnble recently, and several fishermen sold a boatload of fine salmon, weighing 201 b each at the pitiful sum of 1 cent a piece. One cent for a 201 b silver salmon, the finest quality of that excelleno fish, is the lowest price, perhaps, that a good fish ever sold for in this or any other country ; but salmon are so plentiful that people do not know what to do with them. It is estimated that enough fish could be taken here in one day to fill 1000 barrels. Fishermen say they can make ' big money 'by selling salmon at a cent a piece to the canneries if they will only buy all that they can catch. One man caught

& hoe handle the other day, anil another man claims to have found fcb'em in such numbers in shallow Vater in the Dungeness that he threw them out with a pitchfork, and soon got fish enough to last his family for a month. Old residents say they have never saw such quantities of salmon before, and a full account of of all that one can hear and see about this big run of salmon would sound like the most fabulous of fish stories, and many persons cannot realise the magnitude of the salmon cnteh on | the Sound this season." j