As might be expected the chief industries as yet developed are lumbering and fishing. There are magnificent forests of fir, spruce, cedar, and hemlock, in all directions, while in and around Astoria there are six immense establishments for transforming the timber into merchantable lumber. This lumber aggregates something like a hundred and twenty million feet annually, and it goes to all the ports of the world. There is occasionally floated to the bar and thence to San Francisco, a log-boom chained in substantial fashion and containing several million feet of logs. Such a great boom is one of the most curious sights of the River-mouth. But transcending all else in importance at Astoria is the business of canning and drying salmon. What silver is to the Coeur d'Alene, what wheat is to Walla Walla, what apples are to Hood River, that salmon are to Astoria. The people think, act, and reason in terms of salmon. And well they may. He who has not seen Chinook salmon from the Columbia River has not seen fish. Nay, he cannot even be said to have really lived in the larger sense of the term. Take a genuine Chinook salmon of fifty or sixty pounds, caught in June, fat, rich, glistening,--but words are a mockery. Nothing but the actual experience will convey the impression. The salmon output on the River has for some years run from two hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand cases per year, twenty-four cans to the case. The amount dried and smoked represents something like an equal amount. This is for the River from Astoria to The Dalles. The great bulk of this, however, is put up at Astoria or in its immediate vicinity. It is estimated that from thirty million to forty million salmon are caught yearly on the Oregon side of the lower River. This represents a value of four or five million dollars, about half of this going to the fishermen and half to the cannerymen. Some ten thousand men are engaged in fishing about the mouth of the River. These men are largely Finns, Russians, Norsemen, Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks. They have various co-operative associations and are independent of the cannerymen, to whom they furnish the fish at some stipulated price, usually five cents a pound. [Illustration: Multnomah Falls, 840 Feet High, on South Side of Columbia River about Sixty Miles above Portland. Photo. by E. H. Moorehouse, Portland.]