It is a burning shame, a foul blot on the character of Americans, and tarnish on their reputation for far-sighted economy, that their only idea of the treatment of the wild game of the woods and waters seems to be total annihilation. “After me a desert,” is their motto; and they never rest till, by planting snares and liming streams, they have caught the last partridge and poisoned the last fish. Thus have they already destroyed one of the most valuable resources of the country; the Hudson, the Connecticut, the Penobscot, and even the Kennebec, yield no more salmon, and we yearly pay to Canada enormous sums for what we once had, and might still have, in plenty on our own shores. Not many years ago a person buying shad on the Connecticut River was required to take such a proportion of salmon. Now that the head-waters are covered with tanneries and saw-mills, and are crossed by dams without the simple expedient of a flume that the fish could ascend, and now that early salmon are worth a dollar a pound in New York market, where are the former denizens of the Connecticut?
All the timber cut on the streams would not pay for the damage done to the fisheries. In Canada the people have discovered, fortunately for them not too late, the importance of stringent protective laws. The nets can only be set within a certain distance, and cannot extend across the entire stream. In Lower Canada the net fishing terminates on the first day of August, and the rod fishing on the fifteenth of September, and spearing, the most cruel, unprofitable and injurious mode of destruction, is forbidden altogether.
About one hundred and twenty miles below Quebec the wondrous Saguenay pours its dark waters and fierce current into the placid bosom of the St. Lawrence. It is one of the natural wonders of our still new and scarcely explored country. Hills rise a thousand feet sheer up, and its waters descend a thousand feet deep at their base. The St. Lawrence, at its mouth, is only some thirty feet deep, but the bottom suddenly descends at the entrance to the Saguenay, and becomes from five hundred to a thousand feet in depth. The breadth of the Saguenay is so great that the grandeur of the mountains is lost to the eye, and the scenery is remarkable more for ruggedness than beauty. At the mouth of this river was the first station of the Hudson Bay Company, a little village called Tadousac, which is pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable, and in that village stands the mission church of the Jesuits, the oldest in the country.