Bristol Bay has always been a dangerous locality to navigate. It is only by the greatest vigilance and the most careful use of the lead, upon approaching the shore, that disaster can be averted.
Nearly all the canneries in this region are operated by the Alaska Packers Association, which also operates the greater number of canneries in Alaska.
In 1907 the value of food fishes taken from Alaskan waters was nearly ten millions of dollars; in the forty years since the purchase of that country, one hundred millions, although up to 1885 the pack was insignificant. At the present time it exceeds by more than half a million cases the entire pack of British Columbia, Puget Sound, Columbia River, and the Oregon and Washington coasts.
In 1907 forty-four canneries packed salmon in Alaska, and those on Bristol Bay were of the most importance.
The Nushagak River rivals the Karluk as a salmon stream, but not in picturesque beauty. The Nushagak and Wood rivers were both closed during the past season by order of the President, to protect the salmon industry of the future.
Cod is abundant in Behring Sea, Bristol Bay, and south of the Aleutian, Shumagin, and Kadiak islands, covering an area of thirty thousand miles. Halibut is plentiful in all the waters of southeastern Alaska. This stupid-looking fish is wiser than it appears, and declines to swim into the parlor of a net. It is still caught by hook and line, is packed in ice, and sent, by regular steamer, to Seattle—whence it goes in refrigerator cars to the markets of the east.
Herring, black cod, candle-fish, smelt, tom-cod, whitefish, black bass, flounders, clams, crabs, mussels, shrimp, and five species of trout—steelhead, Dolly Varden, cutthroat, rainbow, and lake—are all found in abundance in Alaska.
Cook, entering Bristol Bay in 1778, named it for the Earl of Bristol, with difficulty avoiding its shoals. He saw the shoaled entrance to a river which he called Bristol River, but which must have been the Nushagak. He saw many salmon leaping, and found them in the maws of cod.
The following day, seeing a high promontory, he sent Lieutenant Williamson ashore. Possession of the country in his Majesty's name was taken, and a bottle was left containing the names of Cook's ships and the date of discovery. To the promontory was given the name which it retains of Cape Newenham.
Proceeding up the coast Cook met natives who were of a friendly disposition, but who seemed unfamiliar with the sight of white men and vessels; they were dressed somewhat like Aleutians, wearing, also, skin hoods and wooden bonnets.