Educating by Story-Telling / Showing the Value of Story-Telling as an Educational Tool for the Use of All Workers with Children

by Mrs. Katherine Dunlap Cather

By and by, when all the salmon were too large to be swallowed, they began to grow restless. They saw that the water rushing by seemed to be in a great hurry to get somewhere, and it was somehow suggested that its hurry was caused by something good to eat at the other end of its course. Then they all started down the stream, salmon fashion,—which fashion is to get into the current, head upstream, and thus to drift backward as the river sweeps along.

At last they came to where the Cowlitz and the Columbia join, and they were almost lost for a time; for they could find no shores, and the bottom and the top of the water were so far apart. Here they saw other and far larger salmon in the deepest part of the current, turning neither to the right nor to the left, but swimming right on upstream just as rapidly as they could. And these great salmon would not stop for them, and would not lie and float with the current. They had no time to talk, even in the simple sign language by which fishes express their ideas, and no time to eat. They had important work before them, and the time was short. So they went on up the river, keeping their great purposes to themselves; and our little salmon and his friends from the Cowlitz drifted down the stream.

By and by the water began to change. It grew denser, and no longer flowed rapidly along; and twice a day it used to turn about and flow the other way. Then the shores disappeared, and the water began to have a different and peculiar flavor,—a flavor which seemed to the salmon much richer and more inspiring than the glacier water of their native Cowlitz. There were many curious things to see—crabs with hard shells and savage faces, but so good when crushed and swallowed! Then there were luscious squid swimming about; and, to a salmon, squid are like ripe peaches and cream. There were great companies of delicate sardines and herring, green and silvery, and it was such fun to chase and capture them! Those who eat sardines packed in oil by greasy fingers, and herrings dried in the smoke, can have little idea how satisfying it is to have a meal of them, plump and sleek and silvery, fresh from the sea.

Thus the salmon chased the herrings about, and had a merry time. Then they were chased in turn by great sea lions,—swimming monsters with huge half-human faces, long thin whiskers, and blundering ways. The sea lions like to bite out the throat of a salmon, with its precious stomach full of luscious sardines, and then to leave the rest of the fish to shift for itself. And the seals and the herrings scattered the salmon about, till at last the hero of our story found himself quite alone, with none of his own kind near him. But that did not trouble him much, and he went on his own way, getting his dinner when he was hungry, which was all the time, and then eating a little between meals for his stomach’s sake.

So it went on for three long years; and at the end of this time our little fish had grown to be a great, fine salmon of twenty-two pounds’ weight, shining like a new tin pan, and with rows of the loveliest round black spots on his head and back and tail. One day, as he was swimming about, idly chasing a big sculpin with a head so thorny that he never was swallowed by anybody, all of a sudden the salmon noticed a change in the water around him.

Spring had come again, and the south-lying snowdrifts on the Cascade Mountains once more felt that the “earth was wheeling sunwards.” The cold snow waters ran down from the mountains and into the Columbia River, and made a freshet on the river. The high water went far out into the sea, and out in the sea our salmon felt it on his gills. He remembered how the cold water used to feel in the Cowlitz when he was a little fish. In a blundering, fishy fashion he thought about it; he wondered whether the little eddy looked as it used to look and whether caddis worms and young mosquitoes were really as sweet and tender as he used to think they were. Then he thought some other things; but as the salmon’s mind is located in the optic lobes of his brain, and ours is in a different place, we cannot be quite certain what his thoughts really were.

What our salmon did, we know. He did what every grown salmon in the ocean does when he feels the glacier water once more upon his gills. He became a changed being. He spurned the blandishment of soft-shelled crabs. The pleasures of the table and of the chase, heretofore his only delights, lost their charms for him. He turned his course straight toward the direction whence the cold water came, and for the rest of his life never tasted a mouthful of food. He moved on toward the river mouth, at first playfully, as though he were not really certain whether he meant anything after all. Afterward, when he struck the full current of the Columbia, he plunged straight forward with an unflinching determination that had in it something of the heroic. When he had passed the rough water at the bar, he was not alone. His old neighbors of the Cowlitz, and many more from the Clackamas and the Spokane and Des Chutes and Kootanie,—a great army of salmon,—were with him. In front were thousands pressing on, and behind them were thousands more, all moved by a common impulse which urged them up the Columbia.

They were all swimming bravely along where the current was deepest, when suddenly the foremost felt something tickling like a cobweb about their noses and under their chins. They changed their course a little to brush it off and it touched their fins as well. Then they tried to slip down with the current, and thus leave it behind. But, no! the thing, whatever it was, although its touch was soft, refused to let go, and held them like a fetter. The more they struggled, the tighter became its grasp, and the whole foremost rank of the salmon felt it together; for it was a great gill net, a quarter of a mile long, stretched squarely across the mouth of the river.

By and by men came in boats, and hauled up the gill net and the helpless salmon that had become entangled in it. They threw the fishes into a pile in the bottom of the boat, and the others saw them no more. We that live outside the water know better what befalls them, and we can tell the story which the salmon could not.

All along the banks of the Columbia River, from its mouth to nearly thirty miles away, there is a succession of large buildings, looking like great barns or warehouses, built on piles in the river, high enough to be out of the reach of floods. There are thirty of these buildings, and they are called “canneries.” Each cannery has about forty boats, and with each boat are two men and a long gill net. These nets fill the whole river as with a nest of cobwebs from April to July, and to each cannery nearly a thousand great salmon are brought every day. These salmon are thrown in a pile on the floor; and Wing Hop, the big Chinaman, takes them one after another on the table, and with a great knife dexterously cuts off the head, the tail, and the fins; then with a sudden thrust he removes the intestines and the eggs. The body goes into a tank of water; and the head is dropped into a box on a flatboat, and goes down the river to be made into salmon oil. Next the body is brought to another table; and Quong Sang, with a machine like a feed cutter, cuts it into pieces each just as long as a one-pound can. Then Ah Sam, with a butcher knife, cuts these pieces into strips just as wide as the can. Next Wan Lee, the “China boy,” brings down a hundred cans from the loft where the tinners are making them, and into each can puts a spoonful of salt. It takes just six salmon to fill a hundred cans. Then twenty Chinamen put the pieces of meat into the cans, fitting in little strips to make them exactly full. Ten more solder up the cans, and ten more put the cans into boiling water till the meat is thoroughly cooked, and five more punch a little hole in the head of each can to let out the air. Then they solder them up again, and little girls paste on them bright-colored labels showing merry little cupids riding the happy salmon up to the cannery door, with Mount Tacoma and Cape Disappointment in the background; and a legend underneath says that this is “Booth’s” or “Badollet’s Best,” or “Hume’s,” or “Clark’s,” or “Kinney’s Superfine Salt Water Salmon.” Then the cans are placed in cases, forty-eight in a case, and five hundred thousand cases are put up every year. Great ships come to Astoria, and are loaded with them; and they carry them away to London and San Francisco and Liverpool and New York and Sydney and Valparaiso; and the man at the corner grocery sells them at twenty cents a can.