(and, for the time, as they figuratively express
it, "burying the hatchet, and blunting the
arrow"), they jointly labour to construct
numerous stages, which look very like unsafe
clumsy scaffoldings, placed over hollows,
intentionally cleared amongst the boulders; water-
traps, of ingenious contrivance, the purpose of
which is to allow a free sweep to the net, and to
cause an eddy. A tempting resting-place is so
made, luring the tired fish to tarry awhile and
recruit its wasted energies; then the red-skin
turns the occasion to his own profitable account.

The platform consists simply of four strong
poles, firmly built in, with heavy stones to
resist the rapid rush of the water and support
the stage, which is made of lighter poles, lashed
to the uprights with a rude rope of twisted
cedar bark; three or four very long poles,
placed slantwise, make a kind of tramroad to
the shore. This work is completed during low
water. As many as a hundred of these curious-
looking contrivances are usually placed along
the edge of the "long narrows."

Three or four days after the river begins
to rise, the salmon are expected, and one or two
Indians take up their position on each stage,
being equipped with a net, circular in form, and
about three feet in diameter, and from seven to
eight feet in depth of purse; the handle, made
from some tough wood, is usually fifty feet in
length, and springy like a fly-rod. When fishing,
the Indian lies on his stomach, gazing from
the platform intently into the eddying current.
The net is then plunged into the water, as far
up stream as it is possible for the fisher to
fling it, and is allowed to sweep past as far as
the handle will reach; thus, a fish idling in
the eddy is pretty sure to get into the hoop of
the net, the force of the water driving the hoop
along, encloses it within the meshes, and, once
there, escape is impossible. Rapidly the silvery
captive is dragged upon the stage, a heavy
blow with a club stops its flapping, and again
the lucky savage plies his net. Boys and
squaws are waiting to clutch the prize and
lug it to the shore, where the process of curing
is performed by the women. This can be better
explained when describing the grand fishery
higher up the river. By this system of netting,
two hundred salmon are often landed in a single
day on one stage. The men relieve each other
at the work, and the nets are not relinquished
from dawn to dark.

A short passage from Washington Irving's
delightful book, Astoria, may be worth
transcribing, as showing how important this fishery
was to the Indians when first visited by the
"whites," and how rapidly the customs of
aborigines change. No record of the trading village
remains, or of the trade with other far-off tribes:
neither is the described system of pounding
the salmon carried on now—at least, I have
never seen it in action.

"Here the salmon caught in the neighbouring
rapids were 'warehoused,' to wait customers.
Hither the tribes from the mouth of the
Columbia repaired with the fish of the sea-coast,
the roots, berries, and especially the wappatoo,
gathered in the lower parts of the river, together
with goods and trinkets obtained from the ships
which casually visited the coast. Hither also
the tribes from the Rocky Mountains brought
down horses, bear grass, quamash, and other
commodities of the interior. The merchant
fishermen at the falls acted as middlemen or
factors, and passed the object of traffic, as it
were, cross-handed; trading away part of the
wares received from the mountain tribes to
those of the river and the plains, and vice
versa; their packages of pounded salmon
entered largely into the system of barter, and
being carried off in opposite directions, found
their way to the savage hunting-camps far in
the interior, and to the casual white traders who
touched upon the coast."

The next station is forty miles above the
Cascade rapids, at the Dalls. There the river passes
in numberless channels through a solid mass of
slaty rocks—an effectual stop to navigation,
necessitating a portage of ten miles. This has
given origin to a brisk little trading town. The
mode of fishing being pretty nearly like to that
practised at the rapids, I must ask my reader to
accompany me eight hundred miles further up
the river to the Kettle Falls.

These falls are situated very near one of the
oldest trading stations of the Hudson's Bay
Company, the site for which was selected with
especial reference to the immense concourse of
Indians that annually assemble at this spot
during "the salmon run." The trading post,
a solitary quaint old log-house, is built near the
river-bank, on a wide gravelly flat, completely
shut in by tree-clad hills. There can be little,
if any, doubt that this dry patch of land was
once the bottom of a lake, the imprisoned waters
of which broke their way out at the falls;
indeed, the water level of the lake is still clearly
traceable round the bases of the encircling hills.
About a mile above the falls, the Columbia
receives a large tributary, the Na-hoi-la-pit-ka
river: an Indian name meaning boiling or
bubbling up, and still in use among the natives
to designate the falls; by the white traders it
is corrupted to the less poetical appellation of
Kettle, the similitude of the foaming surge
(where the stream tumbles over the rocks) to a
boiling caldron, being apt and truthful.

The head-quarters of the North-American
Boundary Commission, to which the writer was
naturalist, were situated about a mile and a half
up stream from this spot, on the bank of the
Columbia, where its width is four hundred yards,
and the distance from the sea, in round numbers,
about one thousand miles.

For twenty miles above our barracks, down
to its confluence with the river before spoken
of, the Columbia flows on smooth and glassy as
a pond; then, with rapidly increasing velocity
rushing on, is split by an island, just prior to
its dashing over a mass of volcanic rocks,
occupying the full breadth of the chasm through
which it passes, and above five hundred yards
wide. At low-water this is an impassable