by Timothy Egan
Factory conception at hatcheries was simple: a ripe female was cut open and her eggs dumped into a bucket. Then the milt of the male was squeezed over the eggs. Quick sex, but it worked. In the spring, millions of newly hatched fry were dumped into a pond near the hatchery, where they were imprinted with the smells of the twentieth century. Downriver and out to sea they went, freshly minted, and in a few years’ time they returned. Dealt to the counties as government patronage, hatcheries sprouted up and down the Columbia. But the runs never returned to the old glory days. Not even close. These hatchery fish—they were different. Strange, the Indians said. A little smaller. A little dumber. A little slower on the draw when predators came near. When millions of hatchery fry were put into the river, they overwhelmed the wild fish and spread disease on a mass scale. Interbreeding diluted the gene pool of the native fish. The nets at the mouth of the Columbia and the fishwheels upriver made no distinction between artificially spawned fish and natural runs. Thus, the introductions of hatcheries only accelerated the annihilation of wild fish.
Then came the dams, the biggest harvesters of salmon. In 1933, the federal government inaugurated the greatest public-works plan in history—a scheme to tame the Columbia and bring electricity to farms in the three-state basin of the river. The Dust Bowl refugees would be tilling green land, with an unlimited supply of water, and dinner tables in crowded homestead shacks would be lit by dirt-cheap hydropower. Within a half-century, 14 major dams were built on the Columbia and 13 on the Snake. All told, the River of the West and all its tributaries are now pinched by 136 dams, most used for irrigation to water 25 million acres of farmland in the inland Northwest. The price was the loss of more than half the natural salmon spawning grounds.
The big dams raised concrete curtains, twenty to fifty stories high, through which salmon could not penetrate. Fish ladders were built, but only on certain dams. Many of those did not work. Scaling a three-hundred-foot dam is not easy; the fish need little pools to rest in before continuing to leap up the stairs of the ladder. Some dams were too high for any kind of ladder. More than a thousand miles of upriver spawning grounds were lost forever with the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam, for example. On the Snake, the Hells Canyon Dam ended a desert chinook run on such tributaries as the Owyhee, Malheur, Boise and Payette rivers. The Bureau of Reclamation’s dams on the Yakima River, built without fish ladders, wiped out a sockeye run that used to number 600,000 fish a year of the rich, lake-spawning salmon. For every loss of a run, a new hatchery was built downstream. They called these swap products “mitigation hatcheries,” because they were supposed to mitigate the loss—kill a salmon run and gain a hatchery. Dams became the new symbols of the Northwest—cheap power for the people—but they nearly killed the old symbol.
By the 1960s, everybody in the Northwest could warm their ovens for pennies, but few could afford to cook salmon inside them. The big, beautiful Pacific chinook has always been considered an indigenous right. Like sea otters and timber, this resource was thought to be inexhaustible, a part of the landscape. It was only when the wild runs were nearly gone, when the museum staffers and university archaeologists came sniffing around the the few remaining fish camps like undertakers with measuring tapes, that emergency steps were initiated. In 1980, Congress gave the salmon equal footing with the network of dams, a historic move. After a half-century of dam-building and channel-dredging, the government did something for Nature: the act directed four states of the Northwest to try and restore the Columbia River salmon runs by whatever means possible. Fish ladders that could actually be ascended by salmon were built. Spawning areas were protected from further dredging. And some attention was finally given to the fish going the other way, the young. What these fingerlings need more than anything is a little help getting downstream and back to the ocean. Most of them die because there isn’t enough flow in the river to move them on toward the ocean in time. It’s a simple matter of meeting a biological deadline: their bodies are fast changing from creatures of fresh water to creatures of the sea; if they don’t make it to the salt water within a few months, they die—a young Pacific salmon stuck in a river full of dams.
To help the fry on their way, the Army Corps of Engineers was told to release bursts of water during the spring runoff, essentially creating a fake river flow. But for several years running they have refused to release much water at all. Water is fuel for hydropower, say the Corps managers, who are slow to respond to the new law of the land and forever at war with the river. They came up with an alternative idea to transport the small fish downstream in Corps of Engineer highway caravans; for the last decade, trucking young fish has been the Army’s solution to the loss of the world’s greatest wild king salmon run.
From the towers of academia to the councils of Indian fishermen, screams of outrage have been directed at the Corps plan. Young chinook rely on a long swim downstream to gain smarts and maturity. Trucking them through this crucial period in their lives leaves them naïve and more vulnerable to predators. Their clocks are thrown off; they don’t know precisely when to move on. More important, as University of Washington fisheries professor Norman Quinn points out, when young salmon swim downstream they pick up the biological map which will later guide them home. Each bend in the river, each outlet, triggers a hormonal reaction which will later lead the returning fish to their spawning grounds. If you send them toward the Pacific over an interstate highway, the only smell they pick up is from the inside of a Corp of Engineers truck.
Crossing the Columbia from Oregon into Washington, I’m surrounded by boats packed with anglers. For a few days this September, several thousand people will get to feel the way Rudyard Kipling felt. The fish are running hard this fall, hordes of chinook and coho heading for the interior, for mountain tarns and desert creeks and valley irrigation ditches. The lawsuits, the official acts of idiocy, the Rube Goldberg schemes of the Corps, the racist insults between Indians and whites—all are forgotten for a few days of fishing.
For Billy Frank, Jr., the fall fish run makes his heart race. That guy, the salmon, he’s coming back. Goddamn! He’s made it through a period of near-extermination. What’s more, so have the Indians. Billy Frank’s father used to say, “When the salmon are gone, there will be no more Indians.” A Nisqually tribal member, approaching his sixtieth birthday, with long gray-black hair tied in a ponytail, Billy Frank, Jr., says, “Hey, I’m here. I’m alive. So are the salmon.”
He’s still jumpy around white fishermen. Because of salmon, he’s been beaten and shot at and arrested more than ninety times. His boat has been sunk, his nets ripped, his car tires slashed, his children insulted, his home sprayed with graffiti. But as the twentieth century draws to a close, this American native feels as if he can finally walk into a room full of blond gillnetters without the fear that somebody’s going to take a punch at him, or spit on him, or call him a drunk.
“I have this measuring stick I keep at home,” he says. “If I can go into a sportsman’s club and come out alive, I put a notch on it.”
He lives near the mouth of the Nisqually River, just off the wildlife refuge and not far from the tree where his tribal ancestors signed a treaty with the American government that was supposed to give them access to their salmon run for eternity. Once, all six species of Pacific salmon returned to the Nisqually. Now, only the coho—also known as silver—and the chum return.
Citing the treaty of 1854, Billy and his father would paddle out into the Nisqually in cedar dugouts in front of their home at Frank’s Landing, where they would hang nets during the fall coho runs. No sooner would they pull their first fish from the water than Washington State game wardens would arrest them as poachers. Billy Frank, Jr., said he was not just another angler, but a member of a sovereign nation with specific property rights to one river’s fish runs. The first time Billy Frank, Jr., was hauled into jail for fishing, he was thirteen years old. Back and forth it went for nearly forty years. In time, most of the Nisquallies moved away from th
e river’s mouth, forgot about the conservation culture of the salmon, went on welfare, died young, or killed themselves with alcohol. The salmon born in the Nisqually in south Puget Sound were caught by fleets of American fishermen off the Washington coast, by Canadians off Vancouver Island, by Russians off Siberia, and by Japanese dragging forty-mile-long driftnets. Fish that used to be taken at the Nisquallies’ doorstep were snatched from the middle of the ocean. The few salmon that would make it all the way across the Pacific, down along the North American coast, into Puget Sound and up the Nisqually River were supposed to belong to Billy Frank, Jr., and his father and a handful of other Nisquallies who were trying to make a living as they’d always made a living. The Puget Sound runs dwindled, from ten million fish a year, to two million, to less than one million, to a few hundred thousand.
“The golden egg of the Northwest was this guy, the salmon, and they were destroying the golden egg,” says Frank, a small man with a perpetually furrowed brow, wrinkled from woe. “They talk about cheap electricity. Hydropower. It’s not cheap. It’s all been paid for by the salmon. When these lights come on, a salmon comes flying out.”
Frank fingers a gold salmon medallion around his neck. “That guy, the salmon, he just wants a little breather.”
In 1970, Frank and other Indians whose ancestors had signed the original treaty with Governor Isaac Stevens sued the state of Washington in federal court. The judge was an appointee of President Nixon’s, George Boldt, who had gained a reputation as a hardball conservative after he presided over the trial of student antiwar activists known as the Seattle Seven. For three years, Boldt heard testimony about the salmon as god, the salmon as food, the salmon as cultural icon, the salmon as the source of all things good in the Northwest. Ostensibly, it was a trial about numbers—who gets what. But it turned into a trial about broken treaties and a way of life ten thousand years old. What Billy Frank, Jr., remembers from the case was the hatred he saw in the eyes of state prosecutors. One assistant state attorney general broke his fist when he slammed it down while thundering against the Indian fishermen. When it was all over, Judge Boldt ruled that the Indians were entitled, by treaty, to take half the fish that returned to Washington waters—a stunning victory for the tribes. It was this court decision, which is to Northwest Coastal Indians what Brown v. Board of Education was to blacks in the American school system, that ended the fish wars for the Puyallups. A similar ruling extended the principle to Oregon treaty tribes.
At the time of the decision, Indians were taking only about five percent of the returning salmon. They now take half. The court decision caused widespread violence, battles between whites and natives not seen since the Indian wars of the 1850s. Boats were bombed. Nets were cut. Indians were shot at. About half the white fishermen went into bankruptcy. The state of Washington refused to enforce the court decision, a position which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco called “the most concerted official effort to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.” Despite the continued struggle to overturn the decision led by Attorney General Slade Gorton—who came from a fish-processing family in Massachusetts but never understood the salmon culture of the Northwest—the United States Supreme Court upheld the Boldt decision. In their ruling, the justices referred to an earlier High Court decision in which Judge Joseph McKenna said salmon were as necessary to natives of the Northwest as the air they breathed.
The tribes had always felt they had a traditional right to a clean environment; with the Boldt decision, they gained a legal right. They hailed the ruling as a belated but honorable tribute to American justice. Beyond its political implications, what the court ruling did was bring Indians into the management game, which forced all parties to look hard at how to conserve the great original resource of the Northwest. A treaty was signed with Canada to protect fish bound for American waters. Fish managers started looking at the whole picture—logging, dams, pollution—and not just hatchery patronage numbers. Using the Boldt decision to protect the entire salmon habitat, the tribes had a legal tool to keep the rivers clean and Puget Sound from choking on its own excess. As passions died down and salmon runs started to improve, the decision was starting to look like a gift from the salmon god—the divine hand of the land.
And Billy Frank, Jr., the habitué of jail cells, hunted and harassed at night by game wardens, has become a close adviser of Washington Governor Booth Gardner. As chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, he now tells game wardens what to do. But he seems a man unsuited to vengeance. He looks at the coho hurrying up the Nisqually River and sees the spirit wearing the salmon skin—the silver flash of life. The Coastal Salish Indians, Winthrop said, had eyes for the sustenance of their lives which the whites had yet to develop. “In muddy streams, where Boston eyes would detect nothing, Indian sees a ripple and divines a fish,” he wrote.
Frank says more whites have learned to see. And the natives who’d gone blind? Many are looking at the river again, looking without tears. “We just about got this thing turned around now,” he says of the Puget Sound salmon runs. “It’s taken more than a hundred years. But I tell my people to get ready. Get your smokehouses back in shape. Don’t forget the ceremonies. That guy, the salmon, he’s coming back.”
East of the city of Seattle, nearly 100,000 people crowd the banks of tiny Issaquah Creek on a Sunday afternoon to look at battered chinook making their way to a spawning pond behind the shopping malls of suburbia. The creek is shallow, perhaps two feet deep at most, and no more than twenty feet wide. In places, it looks like nothing more than runoff from a lawn sprinkler. These foothills of the Cascades belong to the New Northwesterners now, young families who live in planned communities with Indian names like Klahanie Ridge. About twenty thousand people a year move into this part of the state, pushing the limits of Seattle’s sprawl to the vertical edge of the Cascades. They profess wonderment at these big chinooks in their new neighborhood. It’s certainly something to show the folks from Chicago. The Issaquah Salmon Festival brings everybody out of the new developments to look at the magic in their stream. Most of them don’t connect the fish to their new homes, except as part of the scenery of this green corner of America. When the rains come in a few weeks, the Snoqualmie River, which flows through this part of King County, will swell up overnight and flood its banks, washing away thousands of salmon eggs. The river never used to flood with such force and regularity; the soggy lowland would soak it all up. Now, the wetlands are paved over for Hyundai dealers and Toys ‘R’ Us stores. The rain, instead of sitting in the natural reservoirs, runs off the pavement of the new suburbs with Indian names and floods the river, killing much of the next generation of fish.
Lining the banks of Issaquah Creek today are young women in leather mini-skirts and old men in Budweiser hats. The sun is out, the creek is thick with salmon. Children tell their parents the story of the life cycle of the fish.
All over the Northwest, the scene is repeated in the early days of autumn. At the University of Washington, the only college campus in the nation with its own salmon run, about four thousand chinook and coho are coming back again this year to a pond off Lake Union. A dentist across the lake from Seattle has imprinted enough fish to return to his backyard. If you wanted to, you could get Pacific salmon to return to your living room, says Jack de Yonge, a newspaperman who writes about salmon the way the French write about food. In Lake Washington, surrounded by a million people, 600,000 sockeye salmon have passed through on their way to the Cedar River, providing a big city fishery for the tastiest of all salmon. Like the chinook anglers in Portland, the sockeye fishermen present a picture of an urban oxymoron: while thousands of cars are stuck in commuter traffic on their way across the bridge into Seattle, boats bob along the lake angling for the big sockeyes. City stress on one side, country relief on the other. Most of the small boats are outfitted with $1,200 digital fish-finders—sonar—to help them track the schools of sockeye. There are so many salmon comin
g back through the locks that connect Puget Sound to Lake Washington this year that the daily limit has been upped from two to six fish a person. In retail markets, that fish sells for twelve dollars a pound.
Farther north, in the city of Everett, a group of children from the Jackson Elementary School patrol the little drainage ditch that runs from behind their playground to Puget Sound. For five years they’ve been trying to keep Pigeon Creek free of lawn fertilizer, industrial runoff, old tires and other enemies of salmon. Their teacher, Brandon King, came to Everett as a child from western Pennsylvania. His father used to take him to Pigeon Creek in the fall to show him the secret of life in the Pacific Northwest. Big wild cohos filled the creek then; it has not had a run for more than a decade. Under King’s direction, the children have been planting salmon fry in the creek, hoping something might happen. This year, it did. While scouting around the creek, a fifth-grader spotted several silvers returning up the ditch. A miracle, they all said.