where the salmon run - Washington Secretary of State

spirit of the father 19
up just by the thousands, white man call them humpback salmon;
well, the Indian call them hadu, and they just fill the river to spawn.
Then they seem to die, after they spawn they die, yeh. The only
salmon that went back out was the steelhead; he never die, he went
back out to the ocean, I guess, wherever he came from.”
Qu-lash-qud was raised by his father; his mother, Sarah Martin,
died when he was young. Qu-lash-qud and his remaining family
shared a longhouse with four other families. It had a dirt floor and an
open fire. Ferns in his sleeping bunk kept him warm. The young lad
lived off the river and the land, getting his fill of fish, huckleberries,
and other fruit.
Qu-lash-qud watched the women bake bread over an open fire.
They maneuvered sticks to hang salmon from the roof. The fish
dangled there, above a smoldering fire, for days at a time. In a week
or so, heat from the stoked fire dried the salmon to the bone. The
women sent Qu-lash-qud off to the river. He tied the fish to a bale of
hay and left them to soak overnight. By dawn, the salmon were so
soft you could eat them without teeth.
When he wasn’t soaking salmon, Qu-lash-qud often stood behind
his father, Kluck-et-sah, on a galloping horse. They’d ride together
up and down the winding trails around Puget Sound, disappearing
into clusters of dense trees. His father also taught him to fish. They’d
climb into a shovel-nose canoe and drift for miles, scooping up the
salmon.
At Thanksgiving, they shared feasts. “All the creeks were just full
of fish,” Qu-lash-qud told a filmmaker, Carol Burns, years later.
“Every year they come up to spawn, and on Thanksgiving we all lived
up on the prairies and we’d come down and camp on a creek and
build a fire and catch the biggest dog salmon and bake them Indian
style with the stick and we’d have our Thanksgiving dinner.”
With his mother gone, Qu-lash-qud looked to his Aunt Sally as a
female mentor. He called her Grandmother. One day, Qu-lash-qud
and his friend drummed and played where the elders gathered to pray.
The boys started to feel sick. “We don’t feel good,” they complained