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"From the Middle
Nemah we'd go down and into the lower part of the
bay, and then we'd go west and go clear around to the
little old village that we called Sunshine. We watched
the tides you see as we traveled, because we could make
short cuts from one part of the bay to the other, according
to the tides. And then on the tide, then we'd go back
around and then when we start up the river again we'd
hit the incoming tide, and that helped us. We had two
paddles, he had one and I had the other one, and we'd
paddle that little canoe everywhere.
"Well I grew up way back in the woods on the
river bank of the river. We were a mile away from any
road, and there was only one highway that went down
through here, and that was the 101 highway. And when
I was a young boy, that highway was a little narrow,
crooked gravel road. And we lived mostly in the woods
fishing and hunting, and I grew up on a small cattle
ranch. We had deer and we had ducks, and we had a lot
of wild meat that we lived on also, that was part of
our survival. We'd head back through the woods and we
could travel, and on our way we always had a, a sack,
and on our way we would stop along the beach and dig
clams, and pick up some native oysters.
"Back in those days, the native oysters were pretty
common..." "Most of my uncles were
trappers in those early days, you know, they trapped
all over, you know. But most, they had a, they had their
little canoe too. You know, that they would go trap
up the North Nemah and then they'd go just a short little
trip over the top of the ridge and they'd hit the headwaters
of the Palix. And then they'd trap down the Palix, and
then when they come down to the head of the river, they'd
walk around and go back right up into the river again,
up to the North Nemah part again. They made those circles.
"They trapped mink and muskrat and otter, and
they trapped all the fur-bearing animals, but mostly
beaver. And then, later on, the season was all closed
on beaver. That season on beaver was closed for many
years, and so the whole area here, just got overrun
with beavers. The beavers dammed every little canyon
up. So then they opened the season back up on beaver
again to cut back on their population.
"My
uncles trapped, and they were fishermen, and they worked
part time in the woods, logging. But there was not too
much logging going on in those depression days so they
went more to the trapping and then to fishing, gillnet
fishing. And that's what I started out with, when I
was a young boy. I started gillnetting, and I would
take a week or two off from school, when I got up at
the high school. I'd take a couple, two, three weeks
off during the fishing season, and I'd make enough money
to buy my clothes and what I needed for my own. But
you know, if you had ten, eleven dollars, you had a
quite a bit of money in those days because we could
buy a hamburger for five cents, in, back in those days
you know. And so that's the way we survived. And we
lived mostly on common foods like fish, smoked fish,
we always had a smoke house going because there was
fish running in all of these streams just about year
round.
"In the fall of the year, the gillnet season
would come, and then would go on through almost into
December.
"We fished Silver Side Salmon and Chinook Salmon
and, and the what we'd call it, a Dog Salmon, or Chum
Salmon, and that was the main, that was the main runs
of fish that came into all of these streams here. My
mother, she had several ways she cooked it. We never
had electricity until I left home, we never had electricity,
we had wood stove, you know, and she cooked in a wood
stove oven. And she baked bread, all of our bread was
homemade bread. And once in a while I would look at
those kids in school, they'd have bought bread, and
I always thought how good that looked. And I would try
always to trade sandwiches, but they didn't feel like
trading for mine either.
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