Read an Excerpt
No. XXVII SHOWS HOW I CAUGHT SALMON IN THE CLACKAMAS The race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the strong ; but time and chance cometh to all. I Have lived ! The American Continent may now sink under the sea, for I have taken the best that it yields, and the best was neither dollars, love, nor real estate. Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing Club, who whip the reaches of the Tavi, and you who painfully import trout to Ootacamund, and I will tell you how ' old man California' and I went fishing, and you shall envy. We returned from The Dalles to Portland by the way we had come, the steamer stopping en route to pick up a night's catch of one of the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver it at a cannery downstream. When the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was two thousand two hundred and thirty pounds' weight of fish, ' and not a heavy catch, neither,' I thought he lied. But he sent the boxes aboard, and I counted the salmon by the hundred— huge fifty-pounders, hardly dead, scores of twenty- and thirty-pounders, and a host of smaller fish. The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a lonely reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them up a scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery. The crazy building was quivering with the machinery on its floors, and a glittering bank of tin-scraps twenty feet high showed where the waste was thrown after the cans had been punched. Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like blood- besmeared yellow devils, as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived, the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as theywere dumped down under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Ch...
