canoe gliding out with a crew of Chinook
Indians from the shadow of a giant promontory, propelled by a square
sail learned of the whites. Knowing the natural, ingrained laziness of
Indians, one can imagine the delight with which they comprehended that
substitute for the paddle. After all, this may perhaps be an ill-natured
thing to say. Who does like to drudge when he can help it? Is not this
very Wilson G. Hunt a triumph of human laziness, vindicating its claim
to be the lord of matter by an ingenuity doing labor's utmost without
sweat? After all, nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that
he may presently stop drudging.

At short intervals along the narrow strip of shore under the more
gradual steeps, on the lower ledges of the basaltic precipices, and on
little rock-islands in the river, appeared rude-looking stacks and
scaffoldings where the Indians had packed their salmon. They left it in
the open air without guard, as fearless of robbers as if the fish did
not constitute their almost entire subsistence for the winter. And
within their own tribes they have justification for this fearlessness.
Their standard of honor is in most respects curiously adjustable,--but
here virtue is defended by the necessities of life.

In the immediate vicinity of the cured article (I say "cured," though
the process is a mere drying without smoke or salt) maybe seen the
apparatus contrived for getting it in the fresh state. This is the
scaffolding from which the salmon are caught. It is a horizontal
platform shaped like a capital A, erected upon a similarly framed, but
perpendicular set of braces, with a projection of several feet over the
river-brink at a place where the water runs rapidly close in-shore. If
practicable, the constructor modifies his current artificially, banking
it inward with large stones, so as to form a sort of sluice in which
passing fish will be more completely at his mercy. At the season of
their periodic ascent, salmon swarm in all the rivers of our Pacific
coast; the Columbia and Willamette are alive with them for a long
distance above the cascades of the one and the Oregon-City fall of the
other. The fisherman stands, nearly or quite naked, at the edge of his
scaffolding, armed with a net extended at the end of a long pole, and so
ingeniously contrived that the weight of the salmon and a little
dexterous management draw its mouth shut on the captive like a purse as
soon as he has entered. A helper