The finest salmon known to man, savage or civilized, both in flavor and size combined, is that giant fish which runs in especial good form and number into Cook’s Inlet, and which the Russians called the “chowichah;”[45] they are most abundant during the summer neap-tides, but they are not as numerous as are the several other varieties of smaller and far less palatable salmonidæ, which also run up here with them. The average length of these superb chowichah fish is four feet, and a weight of fifty pounds is a low medium. They appear regularly on the 20th and 22d of every May, running in pairs, refusing the hook, though hugging the shore lines. Our people catch them in floating gill-nets, and in weirs of brush and saplings of wicker-work woven with spruce-roots and bark, which are erected on the mud-flats at the river mouth, during low tide. [Illustration: SALMON WEIRS OF THE KENAITZE Method employed by Indians of Cook’s Inlet to catch Salmon] The king salmon, however, is erratic in running to any one spawning spot, and in this respect differs from all the rest of its family, which is remarkably constant in annually returning to the same spawning ground. But the abundance of salmon which we see in their reproductive periods of each year, ascending every river and possible rivulet that communicates with the sea in Alaska south of Bering’s Straits, is a never-failing source of wonder and delight to the white visitor and a measure of infinite creature-comfort to his physical being while sojourning here. Also, the pleasant thought constantly arises that when we shall have a populous empire on the Pacific slope, as we have now in the Mississippi Valley and east of the Alleghanies, what a handsome use we will make of this waste of fish-food wealth[46] which we now observe in the vast realm of its indulgence throughout Alaska. Also in another, but wholly correct sense, the natives themselves shamefully waste the flesh of those fine salmon. To illustrate the extraordinary nature of this suggestion, let the following statements of fact be recalled: The native population of Cook’s Inlet is not large—it is embraced in about one hundred and sixty-eight families, averaging four souls to each household; everyone of these families prepares at least seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred pounds of dried salmon for its own specific consumption during the winter months. That amount of cured fish, therefore, is about one hundred and twenty-six thousand pounds, and as every pound weight of dried meat is equal to an original weight of at least eight or nine pounds of fresh, or undried, then this cured total gives us an immense aggregate of 1,000,000 pounds of fresh salmon; this, figured down, shows that a single Indian uses, during the winter solstice—five months—the enormous amount of 1,430 pounds of this rich-meated article of diet, or about ten pounds every day, in addition to the bear-meat, deer, and sheep-meat, seal