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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [First Page] [299], (1) Lines: 0 to 2 ——— 6.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [299], (1) 17. Fishing the Line Political Boundaries and Border Fluidity in the Pacific Northwest Borderlands, 1880–1930s Lissa Wadewitz In the waning summer months of 1895, George Webber, a U.S. customs inspector in Puget Sound, expressed his exasperation in trying to police the water border between Washington and British Columbia. In particular, he was frustrated with Canadian fishing boats illegally crossing the border to help themselves to what Webber deemed an American possession—salmon taken in the numerous fish traps at that peninsula. “If you try to get to them,” Webber complained of the Canadian vessels, “they will steam away for a hundred yards across the line and then lay and laugh at you.” The only way to catch them, he advised, was “to wait your chance, and the first time you can get aboard them in American waters to make the seizure.”1 Webber’s laments echoed repeatedly from his perch in the salmoninfested waters of Puget Sound as he struggled to uphold U.S. customs laws and protect U.S. fisheries from the depredations of what he perceived as fish-hungry northern neighbors. Indeed, Webber’s experiences with the Canadian fishing vessels at the turn of the century highlight several crucial issues regarding the connections between political borders and environmental policies and practices that beg further study. Borders are not merely abstract political and economic entities; they divide, restrict, and mitigate the lives of the people living along their edges. Although American historians acknowledge this phenomenon with respect to the southern border of the United States, we have not looked at our northern border with the same level of diligence and inspiration. His- 300 | Wadewitz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [300], Lines: ——— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [300], torians interested in the intersections of social and environmental history should be particularly concerned with how working-class or poor peoples (designations often directly tied to issues of ethnicity) interacted with their natural surroundings and how conservation legislation came to affect them and the quality of their lives. As some scholars have shown, the creation of national parks and forests and other conservation legislation in the United States interfered with poor peoples’ subsistence lifeways in some areas by pushing them out of designated spaces and restricting their methods of resource procurement. Peoples living in border regions underwent similar processes, but they were able to take advantage of political realities to achieve their subsistence needs by crossing the borders between the United States, Canada, and the international seas of the Pacific; these resources included both subsistence goods and wages.2 The designation of the U.S.–Canadian political border and the ready access to international waters in the western Puget Sound region contributed to economic and social changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that, in turn, exacerbated rates of environmental exploitation . The evolution of the Pacific salmon fishing industry in western Washington and in southwestern British Columbia from approximately 1880 through the 1930s provides an excellent lens through which to examine these claims. Although the creation of the international boundary had some positive economic impacts on the lives of the region’s inhabitants , with the onset of conservation laws governing the fisheries, the existence of the border ensured higher catches of salmon than might otherwise have been possible. In short, the border contributed to the decline of the Pacific salmon runs while simultaneously offering the region’s fishermen greater financial opportunities. The Puget Sound Salmon Fisheries: A Brief Overview The life cycle of the Pacific salmon precipitated many of the border tensions that have touched the western U.S.–Canadian boundary. The main species of Pacific salmon begin their lives in rivers or lakes, migrate to the oceans where they spend their formative years, and then return to ascend their natal rivers and spawn in the same place as their ancestors. The Fraser River run of salmon has been of particular interest to policymakers since the late nineteenth century...

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