times were tough back then

[B~C]

M. bought me a book about the old days of commercial fishing on the Columbia.....I think she is trying to scare me away from fishing on the river. The book is mainly full of old newspaper bits covering fishing tragedies on the Columbia in the 1870-90 era. .. What a HARD life, those folks rented their boats and nets from the cannery and tried to scratch out a living. At night, they would set their nets upstream and drift with the current and then catch the flood tide to drift back up. A squal or miscalculation of the tide would end them up in the bar....and....drowned. One season they placed the estimate of lives lost at 250 to over 300....damn. One guy got dumped in the river on his first night of his new career, survived, and took up logging the next day

Even though the back cover tempts me with an old time picture of a couple of salmon over 100 lbs, I'm going to think twice before I go fishing in Tyboo's part of the river.

Gas may be $5 a gallon, politics are a mess and health insurance is so durn expensive but we still have it pretty dammmmn good


http://www.amazon.com/Salmon-Fever-Rivers-Tragedies-Columbia/dp/1571883908/ref=pd_sim_b_1/182-3048183-8547749

[Wandering Sagebrush]