Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis

5. Taking Salmon

5/ Taking Salmon Fish culturists prophesied an endless supply ofsalmon, but when hatcheries failed to deliver immediately on that promise, the dream ofa fishery without restrictions seemed to falter. With that dream also went all hope for harmony among fishers. Starting in the early 1880s, fishers began to compensate for declining harvests by attacking their competitors. They divided into factions, and each group tried to influence state regulations and federal policies. Their underlying intent was to gain an advantage at the expense ofrivals. Salmon management was devolving into a Spencerian struggle more concerned with identifying and excluding the politicallyweakest members ofthe fishery than with addressing the fundamental problems of overfishing. But public rhetoric could leave a listener with a different impression. Fishers often claimed that these contests were a struggle by The People for conservation, but such arguments were usually self-serving rationalizations constructed to achieve economic gain. Battles between fishing interests were really about social legitimacy, and contestants did their best to portray opponents as liminal members of society. These early "fish fights" were ugly, violent affairs, and government officials did little to mediate disputes. Still unwilling to restrict economic competition, they kept their distance and clung to the forlorn hope that hatcheries would eventually solve all problems. The Pacific Northwest's history of fish fights is well documented, but the environmental and social consequences of these battles have received less attention. Such episodes need to be understood not only as allocation struggles-for that they were-but also as contests to produce and control the social spaces offishing. Contestants understood, at least implicitly, that before they could claim fish they first had to transform natural space into a social space that they could control. Fishers used many tactics to accomplish 133 TAKING SALMON this end. They sorted themselves by race, ethnicity, class, gear, and place in order to exclude outsiders. They also made exclusive claims to sections of streams through physical alterations, social contracts, and legal fiat. The political contests to control fishing spaces did protect some salmon and salmon fishers, but by 1908 the struggles had also devastated communities and fractured the biological coherence of salmon management.! Race was the first fault line. Contests for access to land and fish produced both official and unofficial policies that segregated Indians and Asians from the salmon fisheries. Both groups resisted efforts to exclude them, but few Indians and fewer Asians maintained access into the twentieth century. During the 1850S and 1860s settlers bent the federal government to their desire to wipe Indians off the map. In the early 1850S treaty agents negotiated and renegotiated agreements until whites had effectively banned Indians from the Willamette Valley. Meanwhile in the Rogue Valley, miners and settlers precipitated a war ofextermination. The bloody fighting forced the U.S. Army and Office of Indian Affairs to orchestrate the removal of Indians from southwestern Oregon. In 1855 President Franklin Pierce signed two emergency executive orders creating the Coast Reservation and the Grand Ronde Agency for these refugees. The treaties negotiated by Isaac Stevens and Joel Palmer in 1855 played a similar role in rearranging social space east of the Cascades. When Plateau Indians resisted invasions by settlers and miners in 1859, the army seized fishing sites and starved Indians into surrender. Impelled by the pressures of resettlement, the federal government became choreographer to a mass exodus of Indians away from the Willamette, Rogue, and Columbia Rivers? Relocation to reservations was only the beginning of a concerted effort to dismantle the aboriginal fisheries. Even after they were forced to move to the Grand Ronde Agency, Molallas, Clackamases, and Clowellas continued to visit Willamette Falls to catch salmon. Whites attacked these Indians so relentlessly that the reservation agent bribed Indians with an offer of free nets to persuade them to fish the Yamhill River instead. But the Yamhill turned out to have few salmon, so the agent asked the Indian Office to grant Grand Ronde residents access to the Salmon River on the Coast Reservation. Each change in policy diverted Indians farther from their former fisheries and from whites) Indians living on the Coast Reservation experienced an even more serious assault. President Pierce created the reservation by executive order rather than treaty. This accelerated the process of relocation, but it also left Indians vulnerable to later spatial adjustments. In 1865 Congress bisected 134 TAKING SALMON the 200-mile reserve to satisfY demands that Yaquina Bay...