Salmon is of the most vital importance to the Indians; deprived or by any means cut off from obtaining it, starve to death they must; and were we at war with the Redskins, we need only cut them off from their salmon-fisheries to have them completely at our mercy. If salmon-fisheries—well managed, and conducted by persons who thoroughly understood salting, barreling, and curing salmon—were established on some of the tributaries to the Fraser and Columbia rivers, I am quite convinced they would pay handsomely. Some few attempts have been made by speculators, but always failed for want of capital and proper management. The Hudson’s Bay Company, in some of their inland and northern posts, feed their _employés_ on dried salmon during the winter. At Fort Langley, on the Fraser river, the Company generally _salt in_ several hundred casks of salmon, and these principally go to the Sandwich Islands or to China. There was one large salmon-curing establishment at the mouth of the Puyallup river, but I have been told it did not pay; the fish, being badly put up and carelessly packed, often spoiled before reaching the markets for which they were destined. In Victoria, salmon is now a very important article both of food and commerce. CHAPTER III. FISH HARVESTING. The systems adopted by the Indians for capturing salmon vary in accordance with the localities chosen for fishing. Besides the stages or baskets in use on the Columbia river, they construct weirs reaching from one side of a stream to the other, with skilfully-contrived openings, allowing fish to pass easily through them into large lateral stores made of closely-woven wicker, where they are kept prisoners until required. They have rather a clever contrivance for catching salmon in the bays and harbours, using a sort of gill-net (a net about forty feet long and eight feet wide), with large meshes; the upper edge is buoyed by bits of dry cedar-wood, that act as floats, and the net kept tight by small pebbles slung at four-foot distances along the lower margin. This kind of net the Indians stretch across the mouth of a small bay or inlet, and sit in their canoes a short distance off, quietly watching it. These small bays, or saltwater aquariums, are the lurking-places and strongholds for shoals of anchovies and herrings. Often tempted to wander and make excursions beyond the gateway of their rocky home, they are at once spied by predatory piratical salmon; seeking safety in flight, they dash headlong for their hiding-place, hotly pursued by their dreaded foe, and shooting easily through the cordy snare, laugh to see Master Salmon ‘run his head into the net;’ bob-bob go the floats beneath the surface, up paddles redskin, hauls up his net, clutches the silvery pirate, and with a short heavy club gives him a blow on the head, drops him into the canoe, lets go his net, and waits for the next.