Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/247

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FROM THE COLUMBIA TO THE SOUND.
241

exporting establishments using steam. Of these large establishments, there are sixteen in Western Washington, fourteen of them being on the Sound.

Although fishing, as a business, has not yet received that attention on the Sound which it has on the Columbia River, it should, in the near future, become a large and profitable trade. Nor would the curing of fish be confined to salmon alone, as on the Columbia it now is. Cod are taken in the Sound, and all along the coast to the north. Vessels are already running from the Sound to the fishing-grounds in the Russian seas, and off the coast of Alaska; and others are yearly being built for this trade. They are brought to the more favorable climate of the Sound to be cured; and the finest cod ever put up on the Pacific Coast have been cured in Washington Territory.

A fish for which the Sound is somewhat celebrated, is the Eulachon—a small, but good-flavored fish, of so oily a nature that the Indians dry it to burn for torches: hence it has also been called the candle-fish. The experiment of expressing oil from the dog-fish, for commerce, has lately been tried, we hear, with favorable results. The oil sells readily for fifty cents a gallon to the millmen, as machine-oil. Halibut is common in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and all along up the Gulf of Georgia, and beyond, through the whole extent of those continuous sounds by which the Northwest Coast is slashed in every direction. Other kinds of fish, good for the table at stated seasons, abound in the waters of the Sound and its tributaries—such as smelt, sardine, oysters, and clams. The speckled trout is taken in every mountain stream, above the reach of tide-water.

We notice in Olympia how abundant are berries,