For years Pacific Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to the profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot get fish save out of tin cans.  The salmon swarmed in millions on their way to spawn in fresh-water streams.  They were plentiful and cheap.  But even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond most fishermen’s pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be taken commercially by trolling lines.  The lordly spring, which attains to seventy pounds, the small, swift blueback, and the fighting coho could all be lured to a hook on a wobbling bit of silver or brass at the end of a long line weighted with lead to keep it at a certain depth behind a moving boat.  From a single line over the stern it was but a logical step to two, four, even six lines spaced on slender poles boomed out on each side of a power launch,—­once the fisherman learned that with this gear he could take salmon in open water.  So trolling was launched.  Odd trollers grew to trolling fleets.  A new method became established in the salmon industry.

But there are places where the salmon run and a gasboat trolling her battery of lines cannot go without loss of gear.  The power boats cannot troll in shallows.  They cannot operate in kelp without fouling.  So they hold to deep open water and leave the kelp and shoals to the rowboats.

And that is how Poor Man’s Rock got its name.  In the kelp that surrounded it and the greater beds that fringed Point Old, the small feed sought refuge from the salmon and the salmon pursued them there among the weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows where their back fins cleft the surface as they dashed after the little herring.  The foul ground and the tidal currents that swept by the Rock held no danger to the gear of a rowboat troller.  He fished a single short line with a pound or so of lead.  He could stop dead in a boat length if his line fouled.  So he pursued the salmon as the salmon pursued the little fish among the kelp and boulders.

Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at the oars hour after hour without cabin shelter from wind and sun and rain, unable to face even such weather as a thirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fish in, unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from one point to another on the Gulf.  The rowboat trollers must pick a camp ashore by a likely ground and stay there.  If the salmon left they could only wait till another run began.  Whereas the power boat could hear of schooling salmon forty miles away and be on the spot in seven hours’ steaming.

Poor Man’s Rock had given many a man his chance.  Nearly always salmon could be taken there by a rowboat.  And because for many years old men, men with lean purses, men with a rowboat, a few dollars, and a hunger for independence, had camped in Squitty Cove and fished the Squitty headlands and seldom failed to take salmon around the Rock, the name had clung to that brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea at half tide.  From April to November, any day a rowboat could live outside the Cove, there would be half a dozen, eight, ten, more or less, of these solitary rowers bending to their oars, circling the Rock.