by Timothy Egan
On a morning bundled in mist, I count eight chinooks scouting the overworked passage here at Oregon City. Their stomachs empty since they crossed the Columbia River Bar into fresh water, they seek a square foot of gravel in the natal stream. Once the female finds a home, she will drop a load of perhaps five thousand eggs. If not already attached, the males may compete for paternal rights. Usually the bigger fish win, but occasionally a small salmon darts out from hiding and quickly fertilizes the eggs before the slower-moving studs have finished their mano-a-mano routine. From there, the upstream struggle is over, the salmon’s skin loses color and protective oil; death is a few days away. The carcass is eaten by eagles or is washed downstream to somebody’s farm—the salmon’s death is one of nature’s principal ways of bringing nutrients from the sea to the land of the Northwest.
This trickle of spawners in the Willamette is nothing, of course, compared to what used to be. “At the time of our visit to the falls of the Willamette the salmon fishery was at its height, and was to us a novel as well as amusing scene,” wrote Captain Charles Wilkes during his exploration of the area in 1841. “The salmon leap the falls; and it would be inconceivable, if not actually witnessed, how they can force themselves up, and after a leap of ten to twelve feet retain strength enough to stem the force of the water above.… I never saw so many fish collected together before.”
Most of the salmon that come up this way today are hatchery-bred, with a Northwest background no more extensive than that of the newcomers who fill the three-level homes in the orchard country east of Portland. But a few native kings, descendants of Ice Age pioneers who brought new life back to the glacier-ripped landscape, still make it through. With the reappearance this fall of these last few wild chinook, the chain remains unbroken.
A hundred and fifty years ago the expectations of a nation directed themselves into this hamlet at the confluence of the Clackamas and Willamette rivers, site of the first American city west of the Rockies to incorporate. Leaving debt and dubious backgrounds behind, the wagon travelers crossed the Plains, struggled over the notch in the Rockies, floated down the white water of the lower Columbia and ended up in the Willamette Valley. Usually, it was raining. The land was green and fertile, shadowed by the hulk of Mount Hood. The great cataract in the Willamette provided more than enough power to cut logs. The first paper mill and the first hydroelectric power plant in the Northwest were built around Willamette Falls. Down went the trees that shaded the riverbank, and up went a forest of smokestacks. In no time, Oregon City looked more like Pittsburgh than a new metropolis built under the sublime influence of nature. By the middle of the twentieth century, after enduring a diet of sludge and pulp effluents and logging debris, the Willamette River was nearly dead. A muscled mannequin, it looked like a river and snaked like a river, but beneath the surface the pulse of life was faint.
In the Northwest, a river without salmon is a body without a soul. From the Sacramento to the Yukon, every waterway pulled by gravity to the Pacific has, at one time, been full of the silver flash of life. During certain times of the year, you could walk under any rain-country waterfall and get hit over the head by a leaping forty-pound fish. Lakes ran red with sockeye, streams were crowded with coho, and the Columbia was the main highway for the biggest chinook run the world had ever known. It was a bounty that tested the limits of greed. By midcentury, the handful of fish which made it through the wall of nets, hooks, seines and wheels at the Columbia’s mouth returned to the Willamette only to choke to death in water starved of oxygen. They died with eggs and sperm still inside them, belly-up in a rust-colored river.
Had he not died in the Civil War, Winthrop would have been forced to rewrite his Northwest descriptions if he’d seen what his New England brothers were doing to the Willamette. While Winthrop feasted on Pacific salmon throughout his journey in 1853—he talked of “feeling the exquisiteness of his coloring, grilling him delicately and eating him daintily”—the wild Atlantic salmon runs of his homeland were being wiped out by the excesses of the expanding industrial age. The new inhabitants of the Oregon Country would treat their natural bounty much better, Winthrop prophesied. How could they do otherwise? He had called the area from Portland down to the center of the state, “the sweet arcadian valley,” a place “charming with meadow, park and grove.” And it was upon reflection on what could be in the region of the Willamette that Winthrop repeated his central prophecy for this last frontier corner of mainland America:
In no older world where men have in all their happiest moods recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly beauty have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature’s simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and possible education of a refined and finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage and majestic.
The lesson from the land nearly came too late. In the midst of the Depression, when less than a hundred wild chinook were returning to the Willamette, a cry went up to save the river. At the time, another wave of Americans was spilling into the Northwest, Dust Bowl refugees from Arkansas and Texas and Oklahoma. Hollow-eyed, with strange accents, they knew little about the area except that it was supposed to have in great abundance something they had lost—water. Yes, they had water in Oregon, enough to wash all the tears from the drought out to sea. But they were poisoning it. So, as one generation was happy merely to have a raw element, another generation said it was not enough. To be a Northwesterner was to be a salmon-eater. In 1938, Oregonians, who were among the first people in the nation to give themselves the power of legislation by popular initiative at the ballot box, voted to clean up the Willamette River and save the salmon run. The buffalo had disappeared from the Plains, the caribou had long vanished from the Upper Mississippi Valley, the wild Atlantic salmon runs in New England were mostly memory. The Pacific king, also known as chinook or tyee, a fish which can grow to five feet in length and 125 pounds in weight, was one of the last of the true marvel creatures left in the New World.
Cleanup came slowly. The forest-products industry is king of the political heap in Oregon, and no politician who stands up to foul logging practices will last long in office. It wasn’t until the late 1960s and the election of Governor Tom McCall that Oregon got serious about backing up what the voters had approved in 1938. Under McCall, a zealot with a droll sense of humor and an unshakable sense of destiny, the Willamette was treated like the main artery of the Pope. Without a flow of clean water down the center of the state, Oregon might well kill itself. The state took over the riverbank and started regulating how much poison from Portland’s sprawl could be dumped into the stream. McCall made Oregonians ashamed of what they had done with their Promised Land. His entire government philosophy was built on the simple axiom that people should leave the earth—especially their patch of earth—a better place than they found it. He backed it up with jail sentences for offenders. Over time, the chinooks came back to the river. A trickle, at first, but gradually the runs increased. And by the 1970s, a city sophisticate in Portland, with a few hours to spare in the early morning before business, could fish for the same silver prize as the natives who used to congregate at Willamette Falls. After a bitter separation, nature and man were back together in the arcadian valley.
Oregon City still looks like Pittsburgh, and that is not all bad. I walk along the sturdy row of century-old brick buildings next to the river, smokestacks puffing across the way. Grim-faced men in soiled hats change shifts at the James River Company paper mill. Army Corps of Engineers bureaucrats, with all the efficiency of high school hall monitors, check visitors who come to the locks in search of salmon.
“You mean you just wanna see the fish ladders?”
“Yeah.”
“The hell for?”
John McLoughlin, the Hudson’s Bay Company factor who founded this city and solidified the English trading empire on the Columbia, is buried here on a bluff. I leave the falls, content with the eight chinook who’ve brightene
d the gray morning, and walk up the hill to McLoughlin’s grave. The father of the modern Northwest is buried next to his wife in a simple mound. I stand under maple and oak trees that weep the colors of New England, wet wind on my face. Kicking at the leaves reminds me of a day, some time ago, when a silk-skinned girl of sixteen in a Catholic uniform kissed me in the park, and I drove home so full of glow that I ran a red light and totaled out my family car. Another scent carries me back to a cross-country foot race and the last hill with one guy to pass, and failure. Inhaling the mist, I remember the time we drove the night into the ground in drunken anger after Richard Nixon carried every state in the union except one. We kicked in the faces of all the sodden Halloween pumpkins that looked back at us. My past is imprinted on me, a tattoo of sensory dimensions, released by a breath of fog-dampened air or the sight of a leaf of faded color. So it is with the Pacific salmon, who are guided home by the smells from their juvenile days. The Willamette is alive today because of them.
After fishing for chinook in the Columbia River, Rudyard Kipling wrote, “I have lived! The American continent may now sink under the sea, for I have taken the best it yields and the best was neither dollars nor love nor real estate.”
When you pull a fish like a king salmon out of water, it overwhelms you: the size, the fight, the color, the connection between a landbound two-legger and sea-touring giant. An outsider has trouble understanding this infatuation with salmon. They’re just fish, or lox on a bagel. But then you go to a waterfall deep in British Columbia’s high country and see leaping sockeyes, worn and battered, with long green snouts, struggling the final miles to their alpine lake. Now you think of them as athletes. You check the elevation, nearly 3,500 feet above sea level in the Chilko River, and they become alpinists. What kind of fish climbs a mountain? A Pacific salmon, of course. And then you slow-cook one in foil over a fire, the meat rich with oil that provides sustenance for the long spawning journey, and they are delicacies. The flesh, rosy orange, pulls away from filament-thin bones and needs nothing to enhance the taste.
“You throw a hook into some ordinary-looking creek and pull out a twelve-pound salmon,” said Thomas Wolfe, the writer, upon his visit to the Pacific Northwest in 1938. A picture of the author shows him in the kind of pose that has made Westerners howl for decades. Dressed in a three-piece suit, he’s out in the woods somewhere along the riverbank, holding his catch—a salmon twice as long as his tie. “This is a country fit for Gods,” Wolfe wrote home.
Talk to any native elder from Northern California to Alaska, and you hear the story of a god that lives deep in the middle of the ocean. It’s the same story, this mythic explanation of salmon, that’s been told in a thousand different tongues around campfires along the Northwest Coast. The Great God Salmon exists in spiritual form deep at sea. Once a year, the spirit puts on salmon skin to return to the land—the god’s sacrifice to man. If offended, the salmon will not return. Thus, the fish are never molested; the eyes are never poked out. When the first salmon show up in the spring, a single fish is taken to an altar, where the spirit inside him is given thanks for returning.
It took only one generation of Oregon Country whites to offend the salmon, to the point of near-extinction in the case of some species. When Winthrop came up the Columbia, the river had an annual run of about sixteen million fish. Perhaps two million will return this year. The sins of our fathers were no mere venial lapses; they wiped out whole runs, and in some places, killed the rivers with them. A trail of lawsuits, international treaties, expensive gear and multimillion-dollar hatchery programs precedes the fish I can catch in the Columbia this month, if I can catch one.
Not so long ago, hooking a chinook in midrun was an elemental thrill. Winthrop described a typical scene in 1853:
Over the shoots between boulders and rifts of rock, the Indians rig a scaffolding, and sweep down stream with a scoop-net. Salmon, working their way up in high exhilaration, are taken twenty an hour, by every scooper. He lifts them out, brilliantly sheeny, and giving them with a blow from a billet of wood a hint to be peaceable, hands over each thirty-pounder to fusty attaches who in turn lug them away to the squaws to be cleaned and dried.
Like Lewis and Clark before him, Winthrop could not get over the size of the Indian fishery. Dried and flavored for the winter, the fish were packed into hundred-pound baskets and then traded as currency or used as food supply for the rest of the year. The newcomers, those Scots and Brits and French-Canadians in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, were astonished. They came with a farmer’s view of the world. Here were these people who knew nothing about growing vegetables or raising cattle, and yet they had all the food they needed. The first group of white traders had arrived at the fort at Astoria with their own salted Atlantic salmon. They threw it away when they saw what could be taken from the Columbia. For $60, the Hudson’s Bay Company purchased 7,500 pounds of dried salmon from the natives during their first year on the Columbia. In no time, they jumped into the industry themselves, salting barrels of Pacific salmon for discriminating diners in London and Boston. When Seattle was just a whorehouse and a sawmill huddled on Elliott Bay, Doc Maynard asked Chief Sealth to show him how to catch fish coming up the Duwamish River. The chief gladly shared his skill, after which Maynard started a small export business of salted salmon. By the time of Winthrop’s visit, the first gillnet was introduced on the Columbia, brought over from Maine’s Kennebec River. Rectangular like a long volleyball net, it was used to catch fish as they swam into openings in the net just large enough to snare their gills.
The first salmon cannery on the Columbia went into operation in 1867, after the process had been pioneering on the Sacramento River. One year after it opened, the Columbia cannery was packing eighteen thousand cases of salmon a year, each case containing 48 one-pound cans. The world took a big bite of Columbia River chinook and clamored for more. Soon, every river outlet had a cannery; every pilgrim who’d gone belly-up in a goldrush had a boat of some sort, and horses and mules were hooked to seines which were dragged across the shallows. Chinese immigrants, fresh from the slave-labor of building railroad tracks, were put to work inside the foul-smelling slaughterhouses, earning about a dollar a day. They were prohibited from fishing, that being the work of Scandinavians, who quickly monopolized the industry. By 1883, Columbia River canneries were packing 43 million pounds of salmon a year. But from that point on, the fishery was in decline. Nearly a hundred years later, only 1.2 million pounds of salmon would be taken from the Columbia.
What could have been a productive industry with plenty for everybody turned into a feeding frenzy, Klondike on the Columbia. Riverfront towns were born and died within a few years’ time. Cause of death: salmon greed. The chinook used to be taken at man’s doorstep, at the waterfalls. As salmon became a valued commodity, they were caught farther and farther away from their spawning grounds. Whoever got to the fish first took home the biggest prize, a race that has reached the extreme edge of avarice with today’s Asian driftnet fleets. These ships from Taiwan and Korea and Japan—countries that do not have a single wild salmon returning to their shores—drag the middle of the North Pacific every night with up to thirty thousand miles of nearly invisible plastic net. This wall of death—strip mining the sea, as it’s called—takes everything in its path, including dolphins and whales and shorebirds, but also millions of young Pacific salmon who are in the middle of their migratory journey from river to far side of the ocean and back again. It is an immoral fishery, bound to kill one of the great renewable sources of food in the ocean if not stopped within the next decade. But it has its roots in American salmon-mining schemes.
The first fishwheel was introduced in the Northwest in 1879, a scooper that churned with the current, grabbing salmon at every turn. Most returning Columbia River chinook are headed for journeys of up to a thousand miles—through the Snake to the desert of southern Idaho, up to the Okanogan River in Canada, and all points in between. By grabbing the salmon downriver with
mechanical efficiency, the fishwheels wiped out entire upriver runs. Twenty years after they were introduced, seventy-nine fishwheels were operating day and night on the Columbia. When the contraptions were outlawed in the 1930s, unique gene pools of fish that only spawned in distant streams were gone, never to be replaced. Coastal trolling began in 1912, a way of getting the fish before they even entered fresh water. At the time, Columbia River canneries packed enough salmon to feed every person on earth four pounds a year. Oldtimers like to point out that canned salmon, loaded into the knapsacks of American soldiers who fought in the trenches of World War I, fed the war machine of the Allies. By war’s end, there was precious little salmon left to can.
But, not to worry, said the biologists whose ideas were paid for by the cannery owners. A new word was floating down the Columbia near the turn of the century—hatcheries. We’ll do the spawning for them. Create our own fish. The concept was not local in origin; long after the River Thames had become too sick with industrial sludge to support a natural salmon run, the British were experimenting with artificial procreation, with limited success. In the Pacific Northwest, the idea caught fire: to people who saw resources as unlimited, hatchery production was an intoxicating concept. Salmon need cold (about fifty degrees or less), clean water running over a gravel bed to reproduce. Loggers were fast clogging and suffocating those channels with silt and debris. With hatcheries, only a few fish needed to return to keep the species alive; since they were pulled from the water before spawning, there was less reason to keep the rivers clean. The first Northwest hatchery was built in 1877, just downriver from Willamette Falls on the Clackamas River. By 1888, the United States Fish Commission was fully committed to an artificial spawning program. It was so modern. So efficient. So much more like farming. Plant a seed and harvest a crop. If enough seeds were planted, the fishwheels could churn forever.
