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Updated: May 25, 2025
"No fisherman can get the prices you have had lately. No cannery can pack salmon at those prices. Sockeye, the finest canning salmon that swims in the sea, is bringing eighty cents on the Fraser. Bluebacks are sixty-five cents at Nanaimo, sixty at Cape Mudge, sixty at the Euclataws. "I can do a little better than that," MacRae hesitated a second.
But he kept it up. He had a sense of some approaching crisis. By the third week in July MacRae was taking three fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas and Folly Bay. He would lie sometimes within a stone's throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon. He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco.
When he stepped into his dinghy he glanced up at the wharf towering twenty feet above his head. Betty Gower was sitting on a pile head. She was looking down at him. But she was not smiling. And she did not speak. MacRae rowed back to the Blanco in an ugly mood. In the next forty-eight hours Folly Bay jumped the price of bluebacks to ninety cents, to ninety-five, to a dollar.
"How many bluebacks are you going to get for us?" "Just about all that are caught around Squitty Island," MacRae said quietly. "That's why I want another carrier." "Huh!" Stubby grunted. His tone was slightly incredulous. "You'll have to go some. Wish you luck though. More you get the better for me." "I expect to deliver sixty thousand bluebacks to Crow Harbor in July," MacRae said.
He was paying forty cents a fish, more than any troller in the Gulf of Georgia had ever got for June bluebacks, more than any buyer had ever paid before the opening of the canneries heightened the demand. He was clearing nearly a thousand dollars a week for himself, and he was putting unheard-of sums in the pockets of the fishermen.
"Bluebacks are thirty-five cents," he said to the first man who ranged alongside to deliver. "And I want to tell you something that you can talk over with the rest of the crowd. I have a market for every fish this bunch can catch. If I can't handle them with the Blackbird, I'll put on another boat. I'm not here to buy fish just till the Folly Bay cannery opens.
He wondered if that was why Robbin-Steele was so keen on getting a contract for those Squitty bluebacks, why Hurley of the Northwest wanted to make a deal for salmon; if they reckoned that Gower had ceased to be a factor and that Jack MacRae held the Squitty Island business in the hollow of his hand. MacRae smiled to himself.
It was still light light enough to read. But the bluebacks had stopped biting. The rowboat men quit last of all. They sidled up to the Blanco, one after the other, unloaded, got their money, and tied their rowboats on behind for a tow around to the Cove. Gower had rowed back and forth for three hours.
In the second week of his venture he struck a market almost bare of fresh salmon with thirty-seven hundred shining bluebacks in his hold. He made seven hundred dollars on that single cargo. A Greek buyer followed the Blackbird out through the Narrows that trip. MacRae beat him two hours to the trolling fleet at Squitty, a fleet that was growing in numbers.
The dog salmon, great-toothed, slimy fish which are canned for European export for cheap trade, which nevertheless returned much profit to the canneries were still running. MacRae had taken ninety per cent. of the Folly Bay bluebacks. He had made tremendous inroads on Folly Bay's take of coho and humpback. He did not care greatly if Gower filled his cans with "dogs."
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