In the immediate vicinity of the cured article (I say "cured," though the process is a mere drying without smoke or salt) maybe seen the apparatus contrived for getting it in the fresh state. This is the scaffolding from which the salmon are caught. It is a horizontal platform shaped like a capital A, erected upon a similarly framed, but perpendicular set of braces, with a projection of several feet over the river-brink at a place where the water runs rapidly close in-shore. If practicable, the constructor modifies his current artificially, banking it inward with large stones, so as to form a sort of sluice in which passing fish will be more completely at his mercy. At the season of their periodic ascent, salmon swarm in all the rivers of our Pacific coast; the Columbia and Willamette are alive with them for a long distance above the cascades of the one and the Oregon-City fall of the other. The fisherman stands, nearly or quite naked, at the edge of his scaffolding, armed with a net extended at the end of a long pole, and so ingeniously contrived that the weight of the salmon and a little dexterous management draw its mouth shut on the captive like a purse as soon as he has entered. A helper stands behind the fisherman to assist in raising the haul,--to give the fish a tap on the nose, which kills him instantly,--and finally to carry him ashore to be split and dried, without any danger of his throwing himself back into the water from the hands of his captors, as might easily happen by omitting the _coup-de-grace_. Another method of catching salmon, much in vogue among the Sacramento and Pitt-River tribes, but apparently less employed by the Indians of the Columbia, is harpooning with a very clever instrument constructed after this wise. A hard-wood shaft is neatly, but not tightly, fitted into the socket of a sharp-barbed spear-head carved from bone. Through a hole drilled in the spear-head a stout cord of deer-sinew is fastened by one end, its other being secured to the shaft near its insertion. The salmon is struck by this weapon in the manner of the ordinary fish-spear; the head slips off the shaft as soon as the barbs lodge, and the harpoon virtually becomes a fishing-rod, with the sinew for a line. This arrangement is much more manageable than the common spear, as it greatly diminishes the chances of losing fish and breaking shafts.