The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, February 4, 1918, Page 10

1 ¥ Ve |Salmon — the Fish of Greed and Plunder “Fat Fish—Save Meat ” Says Uncle Sam —The Pacific Coast Fish Trust Takes Advantage of This Slogan to Reap Unheard-of Profits on Salmon _ BY LEADER STAFF CORRESPONDENT FEW months ago, after Herbert Hoover had been appointed food adminstrator, he coined the slogan, “Save food and win the war.” Meat, Hoover said, was one of the . most important: things to be saved. “Save meat— use fish instead,” he urged. Out in North Dakota Mrs. Ole Steenerson, being . a loyal American housewife, willing to do her best to help win the war, read this injunction of Hoover's. So instead of ordering some boiling beef for dinner, as she had intended, she ordered some fresh salmon. She remembered, too, that salmon i was cheaper. It had been around 15 cents, she thought, when she bought it last. Imagine her sur- prise when the meat dealer charged her 30 cents i 'a pound, Over in Wisconsin lived Mrs. Hans Schwartz, a good American, too, although both she and her husband had been born subjects of the Kaiser. Mrs. Schwartz read Hoover's slogan and ordered canned salmon. She was charged twice the old price for it. Several million other American housewives had ° . the same experience about the same time. They wanted to know why it was that fish had gone up. \They could understand why beef and pork should ‘be higher, with corn and mill feeds at the prices they were. But they don’t have to feed corn to the ' !salmon, do they? f ‘all their meat products, anyhow, on - laccount of the immense European de- Y mand, and the increased demand for | ‘never dreamed of before. i It first sees light high on the head- { i i f { i T'hen comes a mysterious, over- ;4 bowering desire to seek again ‘he same stream and the same e R A A (é fo'man, but the rest keep on. H . ocean. Then for four years no one i their feeding grounds and swim to and zhe salmon has reached full maturity. ! 3pot at which they were spawn- ERRE MAKING MONEY OUT OF “WIN THE WAR” SLOGAN The women, most of them, got no answers to their questions. To get the answer—to find out why ‘salmon has gone up, they should have gone out to the state of Washington, where the salmon are ‘caught, where some are shipped East ‘as fresh fish, and where the rest is packed in cans. They would have found what the writer has found, that the Meat Trust, composed of the great |Chicago and Kansas City packers, is getting a strangle-hold on the Pacific Coast fishing industry. ‘Able to fix any prices they please, they have. profit- ied to the utmost from the desire of the {American people to save meat and win ithe war. They have been able to sell fish has simply played into their hands and has enabled them to charge prices The salmon is an interesting fish. iwaters of some mountain stream, but it” does mot take the young salmon long to work its way to the open knows where it is. Somewhere in the 3even seas the growing salmon have fro, but where these grounds are, no .one knows. At the end of four years 2d, four years before. How does the almon, only an inch long when it was .i‘hatched,” remember the path that it raversed down the brook to the creek, flown the creek to the river, down the river to Puget Sound and out through aundreds of miles of Sound to the open sea? No ‘me knows, but the fish remember. They trace their vay back with unerring accuracy, all together, in ‘normous schools. . They fight their way up stream in shoals. Some- ‘imes they batter their lives away against dams ‘hat have been built in the intervening four years. hey fight their way, some of them, among fish aps and purse seines spread out by fishermen in e Sound, through and past gill nets spread out entangle them in the rivers. Millions fall prey Finally, when they dave found the same stretch of still water that they @efore the female deposits her eggs, the male $o2 i iartilizes them and then the parent fish, their life- {rork _done, die, Their bodies: glritt,downstregm. to §new when they were freshly spawned, four years . No matter where you live, you eat more or less fish. You will therefore be inter- ested in this true ‘‘fish story.’”’ Salmon is one of the best fish on the market— " either canned or fresh. Salmon is one of nature’s gifts to mankind. The great ‘Western sea is full of salmon—or was. There are not so many now. Read why. — There is a fish trust. The Western fish packers at the present time are taking advantage of Mr. Hoover’s slogan, ‘‘Eat fish—save meat.’”’ Patriotic Americans, as they should, are heeding the Hoover slogan. But should the fish trust use this patriotic impulse of the people for greater profits? You will be interested in this fact story of why fish is high in price now—and you will be interested in some of the facts about how the salmon lives and grows and is caught. the open ocean again, or are devoured by other fish or animals on the way. HOW THE LEGISLATURE HELPED THE INDUSTRY There- are many varieties of salmon, but the pride of Puget Sound is the sockeye. It is a com- paratively small fish, averaging about six and one- half pounds, but its meat is the much prized dark red. It has visited Puget Sound in the past, by the many millions. As the life of the salmon is four years, it follows that “big runs” of salmon come by four-year periods. The years of sockeye runs in Puget Sound in the last decade have been 1909, 1913 and 1917. Gradually in recent years devices for catching salmon have been improved and more fish have been taken year by ‘year. So great did the catch A catch of sockeye salmon in Puget Sound; being taken out of a fish trap and loaded in a scow, which wili take the fish to one of the big canneries. become that a dozen years ago the men engaged in the fishing industry in the state of Washington realized that it would not be long until all the fish were taken out of the ocean, unless means were devised to keep up the supply. Fewer salmon were reaching the spawning grounds every year, and while every salmon female deposits thousands of eggs, only a small percentage ever become grown-up fish.. Salmon eggs. are dainties much prized by other fish, especially trout. So the fish- ermen went to the Washington legislature and asked the state of Washington to save their indus- try for them. They succeeded in securing the crea- tion of a fisheries department, which catches fish on the ‘way upstream, spawns them, hatches the young fry, holds them long enough to glve them a mart in llte, and does not tum them looae Auntil they are big enough to swim away from most of their enemies. Then they are freed and start on their trip to the open sea. At the time the fisheries department was created i a “fish trust” was growing up, with the meat trust taking more than a passing interest in it. The big fishing concerns found it necessary to have the state rear their fish for them, but they weren’t willing to pay the price. FISH TRUST LEGISLATORS FRAME UP A BILL The laws creating the fisheries department pro- vided a small tax upon the fishermen, but not near- Iy enough to pay the costs of maintaining the de- partment. The state was maintaining the hatch- eries, furnishing the fish trust with the fish, and selling them at less than cost. The people of Washington—farmers; laborers and other consumers—were taxed to pay the difference between the cost of the fisheries department and what the fishermen and packers paid. They grew restless under this system, and tried to get some relief through the legislature. But E. A. Sims, him- self a canning factory operator on a big scale, was in the legislature and had become boss of the Re- publicans—the majority party. He succeeded in protecting his own interests by beating every bill that was brought forward to increase the fisheries taxes. Finally the people initiated a measure that would have compelled the fishermen and packers, not only to pay the cost of operation, but also to pay into the state treasury some money for the fish they were taking—fish which by the enabling act creating the state of Washington were declared to be the property of the people of the state. The fishing interests took this initiative measure into the supreme court and prevented it from going onto the ballot. The interests saw by this time, however, that something had to be done. They couldn’t get the people of the state of ‘Washington to give them their fish at less than the cost of pro- duction much longer. So they framed up a bill of their own. It was a highly technical measure. With two exceptions, none of the legis- lators knew anything about it. The two exceptions were E. A. Sims, Re- publican, and W. A. Lowman, Demo- crat, both engaged in the fisheries business. They assured the legisla- ture that the bill was all right, that it would provide enough money to run the fisheries department, so that it would not be necessary to tax the con- sumers of the state for raising fish to be given to the fish trust and then sold back to the people. So the legislature passed the bill, But the people have found out since that they are still raising fish at a loss for the fish trust. - Since the new law was" passed it has been necessary for the state fish commissioner, L. H. .Darwin, to borrow $10,000 from Sims, Lowman and a group of other fishers, to run the department, because there were not revenues enough, and this sockeye run,” the fisheries depart- ment would have gone broke if it had not sold, for $20,000, “spawned” fish, that is, fish from which eggs had been taken, a course never before followed. This is merely in passing, to show that excessive taxation by the state of . .Washington is not responsible for the high price of salmon. As‘a matter of fact the state of Wash- ington charges for its sockeye, which average Six and one-half pounds, at the rate of $1.50 per 1000 fish. For the big chinook salmon, which average : > 25 pounds and better, the charge ranges- from $3 to $5 for each 1000 fish. These are the best grades of salmon and those which carry the highest taxes, amounting to about one cent for each 43 pounds of fish, NEW DEVICES INVENTED ; TO CATCH FISH CHEAPLY Then what has caused the hlgher prices? A small- . er. supply, say the packers.” This is one of ‘those - dangerous half. truths. Let us examine’it. 2 In the last dozen years the efficiency of fish kill- year, the year of the supposedly “big - et =y