Fishing here on the Columbia River is not just a sport. It is a business which brings in millions of dollars a year. There are single factories where a half a million cans of salmon are put up in one day, and over a hundred million dollars worth of salmon have been taken from the Columbia river since the white man first came here.
The large salmon are called chinook, and one of these fish weighing eighty pounds is not an unknown thing, though their average weight is about twenty pounds. There are many small kinds of salmon, so the chinook is called "the King of Salmon."
The baby fish are hatched way up in the mountain streams and as they grow friskier and larger, they swim down the stream into the Columbia river and on to the ocean where they stay about four years till they are quite grown up. Then they get homesick for the scenes of their childhood, and, choosing their mates, they start back to a sort of "home-coming." It takes a long time, for the current is strong, but if they are lucky enough to miss getting caught and canned, they arrive at the "spawning place" after several months, and lay their eggs, and soon their little fish children are starting out to see the world as their parents did before them.
The salmon are caught with traps, nets, and water wheels, and ninety thousand fish have been caught at once in one of the large netted traps while one wheel has caught fifteen thousand fish in a day. These wheels are covered with netting and are turned by the swift current of the river, which raises the fish into the air and tosses them into the boat.
When the boat is full, it is unloaded at the canning factory at the edge of the river. The Chinese men who kill the fish are very swift, and the machines which clean the salmon can handle about forty-five a minute. They are then cut into pieces by machinery before being packed into cans, and in these cans the salmon is steamed till thoroughly cooked.
We went through the warehouse of a great canning factory, and it seemed as though there could not be enough people to eat all that fish, but Columbia river salmon always finds a market. It is famous everywhere.
There is no country in the world which has kept for its people such playgrounds as we have in the United States. Probably that is because we are the only people who have an Uncle Sam. A king or an emperor would never dream of putting great tracts of land aside for his subjects to enjoy without paying a cent of toll or a penny of taxes, but our Uncle Sam has given his nephews and nieces hundreds of miles of the most wonderful land in the world and these huge parks belong to you and to us just as much as they do to the Astors and Vanderbilts.
The Yosemite Park is one of the finest of our National Parks. It is nearly in the center of the state of California. Here you would almost forget whether it is summer or winter for up on the mountains you are in the land of perpetual snow, while down in the valley it is like the finest summer day and birds and flowers are as plentiful as on a June morning. There are all sorts of trees, too. Some of them are giant redwood trees, cousins of the big sequoias. As you go higher and higher in a mountainous country, the trees grow smaller and smaller until they become dwarfs. Our guide showed us trees fully sixty years old whose trunks were no larger than a pencil.
The largest mass of solid rock in the world is in Yosemite Park. The Indians used to worship it as the great chief of the valley and the early Spaniards named it El Capitan which means "The Captain." On a clear day the people in the San Joaquin valley sixty miles away can see this giant rock.