h 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. They
were all Chenook salmon, as distinguished from the "steel head" and the
"silver side." That is to say, they were royal salmon, and California
and I dropped a tear over them, as monarchs who deserved a better fate;
but the lust of slaughter entered into our souls, and we talked fish and
forgot the mountain scenery that had so moved us a day before.

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 they were dumped down under a jet of water, and
the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up
a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a
knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it
into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as
though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat
and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending,
hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can.

More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, jammed the stuff into the
cans, which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith, soldering their
own tops as they passed. Each can was hastily tested for flaws, and then
sunk with a hundred companions into a vat of boiling water, there to
be half cooked for a few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after the
operation, and were therefore slidden along by the trolleyful to men
with needles and soldering-irons who vented them and soldered the
aperture. Except for the label, the "Finest Columbia Salmon" was ready
for the market. I was impressed not so much with the speed of the
manufacture as the character of the factory. Inside, on a floor ninety
by forty, the most civilized and murderous of machinery. Outside, th