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.