The salmon are flung up on a stage, where they lie in heaps of a thousand
at a time, a surprising sight to an Eastern person, for in such a pile
you may see many fish weighing from thirty to sixty pounds. The work
of preparing them for the cans is conducted with exact method and great
cleanliness, water being abundant. One Chinaman seizes a fish and cuts off
his head; the next slashes off the fins and disembowels the fish; it then
falls into a large vat, where the blood soaks out--a salmon bleeds like a
bull--and after soaking and repeated washing in different vats, it falls
at last into the hands of one of a gang of Chinese whose business it is,
with heavy knives, to chop the fish into chunks of suitable size for the
tins. These pieces are plunged into brine, and presently stuffed into the
cans, it being the object to fill each can as full as possible with fish,
the bone being excluded.

The top of the can, which has a small hole pierced in it, is then soldered
on, and five hundred tins set on a form are lowered into a huge kettle of
boiling water, where they remain until the heat has expelled all the air.
Then a Chinaman neatly drops a little solder over each pin-hole, and after
another boiling, the object of which is, I believe, to make sure that the
cans are hermetically sealed, the process is complete, and the salmon are
ready to take a journey longer and more remarkable even than that which
their progenitors took when, seized with the curious rage of spawning,
they ascended the Columbia, to deposit their eggs in its head waters, near
the centre of the continent.

I was assured by the fishermen that the salmon do not decrease in numbers
or in size, yet in this year, 1873, more than two millions of pounds were
put up in tin cans on the Lower Columbia alone, besides fifteen or twenty
thousand barrels of salted salmon.