Summary: | This article is an overview of the variety of trout and salmon that are found in Oregon and Washington states. CUT- THROAT TROUT: Salmo clarkii ( Richardson). TAHOE TROUT: Salmo henshawi ( Gill and Jordan). CRESCENT TROUT: Salmo crescentis ( Jordan and Seale). THE TROUT AND SALMON OF THE PACIFIC COAST With Drawings from Nature by Sekko Shimada By David Starr Jordan TROUT It is now just a hundred years ago that Meri-wether Lewis and Wil-liam Clark, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, the Roosevelt of those days, crossed the great divide and explored the waters which we now call Columbia. It was in the headwaters of the Co-lumbia that these explorers first met with the true trout in America. William Clark, who was a judge of fine fishes, found it good, and thirty years later, when Sir John Richardson published his noble work on the animals of the North, " Fauna- Boreali- Americana," he named this Co-lumbia River trout Salmo clarkii. His specimens came from Astoria, where they were collected by the enthusias-tic surgeon- naturalist, Dr. Gairdner, then an employee of the great fur company, a man worthy of remembrance in the an-nals of the good men who knew fish. The word trout is of French origin, truite in modern French, and still earlier from the late Latin word Trutta, which becomes Trucha in Spanish- speaking countries. In Europe, the name trout in all its forms is used for black- spotted fishes only, those with red spots, as we shall see later, being called by other names. All the true trout have come to Ameri-ca from Asia, and none have naturally crossed the great plains. For in the Great Lake region, the Alleghanies and the val-ley proper of the Mississippi the true trout are unknown. But in Northern Europe, Siberia, Southern Alaska and throughout the Rocky Mountain region and the waters to the westward, trout are everywhere. Their original parentage, no doubt, was fron some sort of a land- locked salmon; their original birthplace perhaps not a thousand miles from the Baltic Sea. Since that time of their ...
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