SKETCHES OF TRAVEL X.—SOMETHING LIKE A SALMON RIVER.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 23, 4 June 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL X.— SOMETHING LIKE A SALMON RIVER.

By the Editor

Some things at least come at last to him who has leai ned the ait of hopeful waiting. Many \ears ago, in the dun past ol my life, 1 loaded my boy ish mmd to the riimsoll maik with the stoiy and the legends and lom.ince of Castile and l.eon and the vanished glories of the' da\s ol Old Gianada Befoie many years had passed by 1 realised my early yearnings to press the soil of that fair land—' of chnaliy the old domain '—and feast my e.ves upon its many ' Scenes of beaut y richly fraught With all that makes the glow of lolty thought.' A humbler ambit ie n, that has also witnessed its partial utilisation, foui d a lodging in some brain-cell of mine during the years ol my missionary labors in the Australian bush It was awakened in me by the ever recurrent name ot ' New Westminster, B.C ' (British Columbia) upon the gaily labelled piles of r l mned Salmon that adorned the windows and shelves of country stores, the strange story of its capture and ' manufacture,' and the Irequent appc-aianco of its rich, orange-colored flesh upon the dinner-plate wlun days of fast or abstinence lound me— as the.v olten did— a diner at the wayside inn oi the moie pretentious ca> a\anserai that furnished ' accommodation lot man an' Uiste' in hamlet, village, or minor boi ough town In the lonig, lone evenings 1 often re-ad, among a thousand other thmg-s, seemingly extravagant tales — told as sober, matter-of-fact, too — of the

teeming salmon fisheries in the British Columbian waters of the Fraser ; how its yellow tide is (to use on Irish expression) ' stiff ' with close-crowded, jostling packs of the finny creatures ; how they are ladled out in great netfuls from among struggling myriads whose ranks close up solid again ; and bo on. It was a fantastic epic that circled around the prosaic piles of pink and steel-blue salmon-tins 'way-back, in the lone and spacious West that is the last stronghold of the many-acred squatter in Victoria. The wild romance of war finds, perhaps, its culminating point in the Chinese novel of ' The Flowery Scroll,' which Sir John Bowring has given to 'us in an English dress. Its pig-tailed, slant-eyed hero is a Tamerlane unknown to fame who, with a few hundred indomitable followers, wiped several million Tartar foeinen off the face of the earth in one of the briefest campaigns on record. But sport has its romance as well as war. And it ever seemed to me— unacquainted as I was at the time with the Swarming Life of the northern seas — that the current descriptions of the British Columbian and Alaskan salmon fisheries were greatly overdrawn — that the writers of them were performing the feat of archery commonly known as drawing the long bow, and that they fairly fell under the apologetic raillery of old Le Blanc, who said (with a wink) of the travellers of his day, that ' if they write nothing but what is possible or probable, they might appear to have lost their labor, and to have observed nothing but what they might have done as well at home.' Some day I hoped to see and Judge for myself whether the glittering halo that writers had spun like a glossy gossamer web arodind the salmon-tins from New Westminster was glowing fact or merely the modern counterpart of ' travellers' tales ' such as Mandeville and garrulous, credulous, simpleminded old Webbe gave to the printer in the days when the world was wide. One cannot eat his bread and have it too. It was an overmastering desire which impelled me to pass among old friends in the Old Land the leafy months when summer decks forest and field in its annual new livery of green. Mid-April saw us In Vancomer. And the salmon, alack ! do not ' run ' till August And thus it only remained for me to visit the famous fishing grounds and see the yellow waters of the world's most famous salmon-river and look into the half-deserted canneries that were already beginning their remote preparations for their coming harvest time. One pleasant day found me and my old college friend and travelling companion seated in the electric railway car that runs south-east for twelve miles through the forest from Vancouver to New Westminster. The car was furnished with neat, cane-covered cushions, and was divided by a sliding door into smoking and non-smoking compartments Close to the outskirts of Vancouver the track became a narrow lane through the forest of pines and spruce and DougJas fir. And, so on and on for many a monotonous mile The tallest and most valuable timber had already fallen to the woodman's axe and the great stumps littered the floor of the forest, which was deeply covered with a springy carpet of pine-needles, patterned over with trailing blackberry creepers and — in the spewy spots, and beside the still, yellow pools — with the fat emerald leaves and the showy yellow blossoms of an arum, whose reputation is damned with the unpoetic name of ' skunkreabbage.' All through the forest is the blighted track of the fierce and Devastating Fires that BWeep from time to time through the valuable tim-ber-lands of British Columbia. Where the axe slays its thousands, fire slays its tens of thousands. In the dense, resinous, and highly-inflammable trees of the British Columbian forests fire wreaks far more deadly devastation than among the more resistant hardwoods that grow with plenty of elbow-room, in the open-gladed tim-ber-lands of Australia. To right and left of our track, amid the deep green of the forest, thousands of straight, charred tree-trunk^ rose like tall pillars of coal — looking as gaunt and weird in their way as the ghostly-looking arrays of ring-barked eucalyptus that form such a forbidding feature of the landscape in many parts of the Australian bush. Everywhere, as we passed, a jungle of young forest was rising in a fast and rampant growth. Here and there were little rectangular clearings, with weatherboard cottages and neat gardens— bright with blossom of plum and almond. But the circling treegrowth hugged them round almost so closely that a fire coming that way would lick the little homesteads off the face of the earth. Other such clearings lay farther afield to right and left of the electric railroad—strung together like the knots on a tally-cord by

narrow, muddy, stump-strewn, unformed forest track*. And so on for miles ran the chain of monotony : green trees, massive stumps, charred boles, and dense forest pierced by narrow tracks. Nearing New Westminster we saw- in a large clearing near the iron road the fine Catholic orphanage conducted by the Sisters of Providence. Then the bush thinned out, and we were spinning along at a merry pace down the fertile slopes to the Fraser. Beyond its broad and turbid flood rose other rich riverbanks covered with sparse timber and bearing fruittrees and cereals. A steep and winding descent— taken at a rapid run which seemed to threaten a ' header ' into the rolling Fraser— brought us at the last moment by a sharp sweep to the terminus in the chief thoroughfare of

New Westminster

The city counts some 8000 inhabitants. It ia sixteen miles from the spot where the Fraser empties itself into the Strait of Georgia. The city reclines comfortably on a very manageable and sunny slope that runs up from the Fraser, where it rests, very appropriately, upon the long range of salmon canneries— its chief industry— that lines the river-banks. Like Geelong, New Westminster is a city that has missed its chance. It grew up— or rather sprung up, so sudden was its rise —during the high fever of excitement that accompanied the ' breaking out ' of the gold-diggings on the Fraser Jn 1858. Tn the same year the mountainous mainland on which it stands was made a Crown colony. New Westminster— then a small town of wooden shanties—became its capital. It still remained the capital when British Columbia and Vancouver Island were united under a single government in 1866. The transfer of the capital to Victoria (on Vancouver Island) was a blow from which New Westminster suffers still. Three years ago it passed through the fire— or rather the fire passed through it and reduced it to smoke and ashes. But no western town is of any importance until it has passed through the ordeal of fire New Westminster has a brand new look. Like Vancouver, it is fast substituting brick and stone for weatherboard ; it is growing rapidly ; its broad business streets have an active commeicial look about them ; deep-water shipping lies along its warves ; its great sawmills rip into planks, boards, etc , the massive softwood tree-trunks that are rafted to them down the Fraser, and they are sent to Australia, New Zealand, and other ends of the earth ; and it is the niaiket centre for the great and fast-growing agricultural interests of the rich delta-lands that border Western Canada's greatest salmon-river.

To Tennyson fifty years of Europe ' are better than a cycle of unchanging Cathay. But in these new western lands things move at a merry pace. A generation ago is

Ancient History,

and a pioneer of New Westminster speaks of ' the early dajs ' and ' the old times ' with the air of one who displa\s his- book-lore rather than of one who is himself a part of his story. At the Bishop's residence we mot and conversed with a French Oblate missionary who was, we believe, the first white man to settle in those mountain wilds. He came there to bring the Tidings of the Great Joy of Salvation to the scattered Indian tribes He lived to see the bronzed children of the forest Christianised and civilised and gathered together in the- quaint and pretty villages that you see around about the waters of the Sound and away in the distant mountains and up the valleys of the arrowy Fraser. And now, after fifty years of heavy toil among the red men, ho passes the twilight of a long life of self-sacrifice among his brethren. He is the patriarch of the Oblate missionaries, an octogenarian and more, thin, spare, ascetical, with hair and beard of snow. When, in his nati\o tongue, he speaks of ' the early times,' it is with the air of one who steps out of another epoch and, like a disembodied spirit, tells of the taming of the wild led man and the fevered era of gold as of things that belong to the dim day 9of eld. He was there in the 'remote"' times of 1865, when New Westminster was created a Vicariate^Apostolic. Since 1890 it has been an episcopal see. At the time of our visit, its prelate (Dr. Donteville) was absent on his arduous episcopal fourneys through his vast diocese, which stretches over the mountains and far away to the borders of Alaska. Those vast British Columbian misKioas are entrusted to the care of the Oblato Fathers. Their genial and affectionate hospitality is the pleasantest memoiy of our visit to New Westminster. Through the kindly oilices of one of their number (a young Irish priest, Father O'Neill) we were enabled to see the sights of the place, including the boarding and day schools, the college, the seminary, the orphanage, the hospital, the pro-cathedral, and the other religious edifices in

which the Catholic body takes an easy lead among the fourteen or fifteen rival creeds that vie with each other for the guidance of souls in New Westminster. There is no mistaking the fact, in any season of the year, that New Westminster is the headquarters of the Salmon-canning industry of British Columbia. Look down at the banks of the Fraser : they are lined deep and far with vast timber and iron sheds that open to the river. These are the canneries. Five of them are within the «. i L^ 't. limits, and there nre (we were informed) twelve all told. Piled among them you see the crowded roofs oi an automatic factory which turns out over nine million cans every year. It is worked on a principle which we saw in full activity and greater detail later on in Swift's slaughter-yards in Chicago — the sheets of block tin are fed in at one end, cut into shape, passed along on travelling links to other machines along the line of operations where the cans are rapidly shaped, fitted, the ends tilted over, dipped, and rolled in baths of solder, sorted out according to size, and .sent, like Jack and Jill, tumbling down inclined planes in a constant stream to the spot just where they are wanted. John Bright loved to thrash the waters of a Scottish salmon-river. So did Millais. And to the average Britisher salmon-fishing is a royal sport, but still and ever a sport or passing relaxation. But salmon-fishing on the Fraser is a business, and a serious one at that. There is no rising to the fly, none of that exciting play of line and reel against the swift fins and lashing tail of a ' game ' fifteen pounder that makes rod-fishing a thing of beauty and a joy for ever by the brown and curling waters of a Highland river. The salmon that rush up the British Columbian, Washington, and Alaskan rivers come there to spawn. That is their business, and It takes them all their time to attend to it. Some Thousands of Millions of others are bent upon the same affair at the same time. They all want to get up first, and so the competition is keen and the life of a salmon at spawning time a strenuous one. They do not seem to want feed as they crowd and jostle each other, fin to fin, upon the up-stream track. They will not rise to a fly, however cunningly made or cast. A story current in British Columbia tells how a British peer — member of a boundary commission — signe-d away the Washington territory to Uncle Sam out of contempt for the unsportsmanlike character of the salmon in the Columbia river which iefusod to rise to cast of fly or glint of spinniivg spoon But it is ever thus with nearly all the tube : with the massive and dainty-fleshed • spring-salmon ' (or tyhce) that sometimes turn the scale at over se\enly pounds avoirdupois ; with the ten to fifteen pound pink ' sockeyes ' that furnish the chief supplies of the < .u.nci ies , and with the late-coming and less \aluable ' humpbacks ' that follow them The ' cohoe ' ho\ve\er, takes Lindiy to the ' spinner ' and leads the angler a suflicientlv merry dance. But his flesh is pale, though edible, and even the local Indians, Chinese, and Japanese legaid him with a sniff of supercilious contempt. The information furnished to me on the spot, and confirmed then and subsequently by photogi aphs niid interviews, docked all suspicion of romance lrom the descriptions 1 had read of the salmon-fi.shing industry on the Fraser. In The ' Running ' Season the salmon form a dense, almost solid mass ' The closeness with which salmon pack themselves,' sa\s Douglas Sladen, describing what he saw high up the Fraser, 'is marvellous ; I have seen se\eial hundreds of them in a pool that would not hold a billnud table ' In the same place, at a -vast distance fi om the mm, he saw a column of them ' many miles long" and, as far as one could judge, about ten feet wide and several feet deep '-thousands of them wounded or slain by being buffeted against the rocks of the nan ow gorges by the swift and tossing rush of the masterful river. Along its banks we saw, later on, scores of the rickety stages on which the Indians stand and scoop up the packed salmon from the crowded pools with long pole-nets line and there in the hi-gher reaches of the Fraser and the Thompson we were shown shallow back-waters wheie the white .settlers simply pitch-fork the crowded fish ashoic, to dry them Indian fashion, for their wmtor lood In the back country salmon is the order of the day w inter and spring, summer and autumn . salmon boiled and salmon broiled, salmon grilled and salmon fried, saln-on fresh and salmon dried, salmon steaks and salmon cutlets, week in and week out through all the rolling j eai To the ' Canuck ' or native it comes as natural as bread Is to us. To the ' tenderfoot ' from afar it grows at last into a hideous monotony. One of the \ictims of

British Columbian mountain hospitality (so the story runneth) was sitting disconsolate one morning in front of a generous supply of salmon—a whole fish— garnished with a pot of fiery mustard. ' Is there nothing else for breakfast ? ' he groaned. The host was dumbfounded. ' Nothing else !' he tfried. ' Why, there's enough salmon there for six, ain't there ? ' ' Yes,' responded the guest, mildly, ' but I don't care for salmon.' ' Well, then, fire into the mustard,' said the host. There is no gentle and artistic ' playing ' of individual salmon on the Fraser. They are simply Shovelled out of the river on as wholesale a scale as the fisher can command. On the lower and more placid reaches of the river the numbers of the salmon are more prodigious and the facilities for catching them greater than elsewhere. During six weeks or thereabouts many thousands of persons of various nationalities— English-speaking races Japanese, Chinese, Greeks, French, Portuguese, etc —are feverishly busy with the salmon-harvest. Steveston, another canning town on the Fraser, has about five thousand persons of many races and creeds at work while the ' run ' lasts. The wages are high, salmon are paid lor at the profitable rate of ten to twelve cents (5d to 6d each), and artisans leave their benches, Japs and Chinese the sawmills and shingle-factories, and farmers their cultivated lands and turn furiously to fishing for a brief season in the turbid waters of the Iraser. The salmon get a brief respite of four-and-twenty hours a week— from 6 p.m. on Saturday to 6 p in. on Sunday. Then the river is free for them to ascend to the spawning-grounds. But at 6 p.m. on Sunday the fleets of some two thousand fishing boats move out, each with 300 yards of gill-netting, 15 feet deep They drop their meshy burdens into the water and thus form a series of Long Floating Fences against which the unlucky late-coming sockeyes strike their heads and get entangled by the gills. ' Traps ' are another feature of the fisheries on the Fraser. They consist of long V-shapod wings down the hollow side of which the eager salmon hopefully 'nose' their way till they reach the apex of the V. This lies temptingly open and they rush in— they are lured into the ' trap ' (or enclosure of great nets hung on tall piles). From these they aie .scooped out in dip-nets in a splashing silvery mass and tossed in'o the waiting boats. At the canneries the captured fish ai c piled and piled in great masses of tens ol thousands until the limit is reached that can be packed for the day Fuither purchasing- is then deilaied ' ofT,' and the announcement often consigns end-lei-s boatloads— tons and tons— of captured fish to the nanure-heap or to the waters from which they vveie just taken Battalions oi Indian squaws clean the salmon as by ]on,g--established i ight. Active Japs and phlegmatic Chinese chip on the heads, tails, and fms, and the cleaned and decapitated fish are sent in a constant .stream into Ingenious Machines fitted with thin circular saws- that cut them into lengths and begins that fit neatly into the standard salmonfins lumbers of the -ellovv men from the Far East cleitly i oil the pink flesh into the tins. These are weighed, earned m a metallic procession to another machine which fits the lids neatly on Then up and away tl.ev go tumbling down an incline to a bath of molten had (kept hot by gas-burners), in which their tojs a i(> Lilted, dipped, rolled at an angle of 45 degrees, and sole'eied on air-tight Then oft for a plunge in a scalding bath, where tliev are boiled for 70 minutes. r lhev «ue i.ext fished out , a small hole is pierced in the lid to let the nnpi isoned hot air and steam escape; a drop of solder then closes up the orifice ; the packing is complete ; and whtn the cans ha\e radiated their heat away they are neatly lapannecl, dressed in showy labels, and packed away m wooden cases that are turned out by tens of thou.s.mi's in the adjoining sawmills. And this is, in .short, the true story of the tin of British Columbian salmon that many of my readers will sample on next Friday (To be continued )