Native Fishing Equipment, Cont.

This basket, during the fishing season, is raised three times a day, and at each haul, not infrequently contains three hundred fine fish.
Charles Wilkes at Kettle Falls, 1841.

They are now taking about 1000 salmon daily. They have a kind of basket 10 ft long, 3 wide and 4 deep of a square form suspended at a cascade in the fall where water rushes over a rock. The salmon in attempting to ascend the fall leap and fall into the basket. When the basket is full the fish are taken out. A few fish are also taken with scoop net and speared.

About one hundred lodges of Shonshones busily engaged in killing and drying fish . . . the Indians swim to the center of the falls, where some station themselves on rocks, and others stand to their waists in the water, all armed with spears, with which they assail the salmon as they leap, or fall back exhausted.
Robert Stuart at Spokane Falls on the Snake River.

We used to spear chinook at Selway Falls. We would wade out into the water and spear the fish when they jumped into the air trying to climb over the falls.
Vaughan Bybee, Nez Perce, as quoted in "Salmon and his People," 1999.

Fishing with hook and spear on the Little Falls of the Spokane River, 1908. Courtesy of Eastern Washington State Historical Society.

Because salmon stop eating when they enter the Columbia to return to their natal streams, they will not rise to bait. However, Indians in the basin used hook and line to harvest steelhead.

The fisherman cut off a bit of his leathern shirt, about the size of a small bean; then pulling out two or three hairs from his horse's tail for a line, tied the bit of leather to one end of it, in place of a hook or fly. Thus prepared, he entered the river a little way, sat down on a stone, and began throwing the small fish, three or four inches long, on shore, just as fast as he pleased.
Alexander Ross describing Nez Perce practices at the confluence of the Snake and Columbia, 1813.