F all the creatures man has hunted not one has had a harder run for life than the Salmon. The rivers of our great Northwest, where he has made his home from the beginning, have become practically one great system of traps for his catching. Miles of nets, scores and hundreds of miles, spread their entanglements in every stream where. the beautiful fish, the finest, the gamest, the most valuable, makes his haunts at the mating season. Men of the region are wont to say that salmon-fishing is a

gamble, but if it is for the man who takes part in it, it can hardly be said to be the same for the fish. It is a game in which the chances are all against the latter.

Ten thousand people are in the salmon-catching and canning business. The season is short and the harvest is said to be uncertain. The salmon run, as it is called the plunge of the mating pairs. to the nesting grounds far up stream from the sea, lasts from one to three weeks only. Yet four to five million cases, each containing forty-eight onepound cans, are packed annually, with forty-two millions of fish, and the mar

ket value of the product is twenty-eight millions of dollars. There are two hundred canning plants along the Pacific coast from California to Alaska and so many thousands of snares for the finny victims that new comers in the trade actually have difficulty to find places in which to spread their own decoys.

It is a short time they have and the work is fast and furious, and has in it all the ruthlessness of other such killings. The fish must be dressed and canned while they are fresh and firm, and the speed to handle at the canneries the huge takes of the multitude of fishermen must be great. The hands of men are too slow for the work. Even specialists-and there were multitudes of them a very few years since-in the art of cleaning fish, are useless. A short time ago, thousands of Chinese employed in the canneries, who did nothing else and knew almost nothing else but to wield the knife over the salmon, worked with almost incredible skill to keep pace with the supply. Now a machine, called the Iron Chink, because it does the human Chink's work, or rather the work of many Chinks-is established in each fac

tory and turns the shining river beauties into eatables at the rate of one a second instead of the hand-rate of one a minute that used to be a boast. A two horsepower engine thus does the work of sixty Chinese workers, for each machine contents itself with so little power.

The canneries are not picturesque, but the machine which prepares the fish for canning is worth watching for its ingenuity's sake. Each requires two operators only to turn out its enormous bulk of 3,600 cleaned fish an hour, every hour in the day. Into its hungry maw one man feeds the salmon, big and little, regardless of size, for the machine adjusts itself automatically to the proportions of its fish of the moment. It cleans a onepounder or a twenty-pounder with equal ease. Hoisted in elevators to the fishhouse floor, the fish are washed thoroughly before they are fed to the Iron Chink. Soaking with water they come. to the feeding table, where the operator feeds them in one by one. A long, wedge-shaped gouge starts with its cutting-point in the fish's gills and swiftly cuts off the head. The cut is not made straight across, as the wasteful knife of

frame that moves in and out according to the size of the fish. These trim off the bony fins clean, and without the chunk of meat the human workers were prone to leave attached to each, as is also shown in the picture. A splitting saw then does its swift task without injury to the delicate tissues of the fish, and an instant later, under revolving grapple and washing-brush everything except the clean, sound flesh is swept away. Hand cleansing in a great vat, where examination of the machine's work is possible, follows. Then rotary cutters slice the

chine each with its proper portion of salt inside, ready for the fish, and there is no time lost in inserting a section of fish in each tin. Through another cleansing vat, under the solderer and to the cooker, the cans are whirled at a pace that keeps the eye busy to follow them. Twenty minutes of cooking in the can in a great vat of boiling water, makes the delicacy ready for table, and the rest is only a matter of venting, resoldering and labeling before the cans are rushed out upon the waiting market. A saving of some ten thousand fish to