Pure diversion: R. Kipling on Chinook salmon & the old days

[Dave Robertson]

Klahowya,

>From a favorite book, found in the "free" box at Auntie's bookstore a few years ago:  Rudyard Kipling's travel memoir, "From Sea to Sea", volume 2, which was published in New York by Doubleday & McClure in 1899.

Kipling visited our neck of the woods on this trip around the world, circa 1887.  Before proceeding across the continent to visit Mark Twain, he went up the Columbia by steamer for pleasure, and though it's little contribution to our discussion of early contact-period terms for salmon in English (he was mainly in the company of "terse", as a lot of us NW people say "tourists", and picked up apparently no Chinook Jargon nor fishing jargon), he does write:

     "Then we hit a floating log with a jar that ran through our system,      and then, white-bellied, open-gilled, spun by a dead salmon -- a      lordly twenty-pound Chinook salmon who had perished in his pride.       'You'll see the salmon-wheels 'fore long,' said a man who lived 'way      back on the Washoogle,' and whose hat was spangled with trout-flies.       'Those Chinook salmon never rise to the fly.  The canneries take them      by the wheel.'"  (page 28)

There follows a vivid description of a hellish salmon-wheel and canning factory staffed by Chinese immigrants in extremis.  Some dismissive humor about staying the night at the "Spittoon-wood Hotel" also intervenes, and then a trek up the Clackamas River for five pages of heroic hand-to-hand combat with enormous salmon.  Kipling is full of reactions to the young country he's immersing himself in, quoting an old farmer who "recollected days and nights of fierce warfare with the Indians -- 'way back in the Fifties'", and describing that man's family as speaking "good English in a strange tongue".

Pure diversion.

Dave
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