It was not, however, till my return from Vancouver that I came across the volume on Salmon and Trout of the American Sportsman's Library, edited by Caspar Whitman, and there found recorded all that is known about the salmon and trout of the Pacific Coast.
To begin with, the Pacific salmon does not belong to the genus "Salmo," but to the genus "Oncorhynchus," which, according to Messrs. C. H. Townsend and H. W. Smith, the authors of the most interesting chapters on the Pacific salmon in the above-mentioned book, is peculiar to the Pacific Coast.
One peculiarity of the Pacific salmon seems to be that they invariably die after spawning, and never return to the sea.
In the case of the humpback, I saw this for myself later on in the season, when every stream was literally a mass of moving fish all pushing up to the head-waters, and there dying in vast numbers.
The tyee salmon, "Oncorhynchus tschawytscha," has many names. It is known to the Indians as "Chinook," "tyee" and "quinnat," to others as the Columbia salmon, the Sacramento and King salmon.
It appears to range from Monterey Bay, California, as far north as Alaska.
Messrs. Townsend and Smith state that in the Yukon and Norton Sounds it attains a weight of 110 lb., and in the Columbia 80 lb.
The largest I saw caught at Campbell River weighed close on 70 lb. The largest fish brought to the hotel by any of us was about 60 lb.
The blue back salmon, "Oncorhynchus Nerka," is stated by the same authorities to run up to 15 lb., and the average to be under 5 lb.
This would appear from its description to correspond with the fish pointed out to me by the Cannery manager as blue back—though I cannot quite reconcile its other names: red fish, red salmon, Fraser River salmon and Sockeye—for the fishermen at Campbell River spoke of the Sockeye as quite a different fish, running at a different season of the year.