Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/216

 more pliant and easier to work. It would be, however, very easy to improve the quality of these woods by making them absorb salty or alkaline liquids, according to the skillful process of Dr. Boucherie, a discovery which, once spread abroad, must bring about a lower price of lumber, and thus give a wide extension to civil and naval building.

Every year the Company exports to the Sandwich Islands and to London about 600 barrels of salmon. So abundant is this fish in the Columbia River, and consequently so moderate in the price, that the salted fish can easily meet the competition of the fresh salmon from Scotland which is consumed in Great Britain. Whale^ bone and whale oil, smoked buffalo and goat tongue, buffalo hump, castoreum, swansdown and feathers, sealion tusks, and fish glue are important articles of export.

The value of peltries and furs exported by the Hudson's Bay Company it not less than seventy-five or eighty thousand pounds sterling, about two million francs; but this is diminishing every year. On the other hand the original cost of European merchandise given in exchange to the Indians does not exceed eight or ten thousand pounds (two hundred and fifty thousand francs). Beaver skins, which in the interior of the country serve as a kind of money, are estimated on an average at three dollars a piece; they are sold at London at from twenty to twenty-five shillings. Bear skins are worth from one to two pounds sterling; those of the deer and elk, three shillings; lynx from seven to ten shillings; muskrat half a shilling; blue and silver fox from ten to twelve shillings; hair seal, four shillings; fur seal, twenty-five to thirty shillings; fresh water otters, thirty shillings, and sea otters, eight and ten pounds sterling.

Furs exported from America to Europe and coming from the Hudson's Bay Company territories are esti-