The fisherman's problem: ecology and law in the California fisheries, 1850-1980 9780521385862, 9780511097157, 9780521324274

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Figures (page viii)
Tables (page ix)
Preface (page xi)
Acknowledgments (page xiii)
Abbreviations (page xvi)
Introduction (page 1)
1 The problem of environment (page 3)
I. The miner's canary (page 17)
2 Aboriginal fishery management (page 19)
3 The Indian fisheries commercialized (page 41)
II. Sun, wind, and sail, 1850-1910 (page 64)
4 Immigrant fisheries (page 65)
5 State power and the right to fish (page 93)
III. The industrial frontier, 1910-1950 (page 121)
6 Mechanized fishing (page 123)
7 The bureaucrat's problem (page 156)
IV. Enclosure of the ocean, 1950-1980 (page 185)
8 Gridlock (page 187)
9 Something of a vacuum (page 207)
10 Leaving fish in the ocean (page 227)
Conclusion (page 249)
11 An ecological community (page 251)
Appendixes (page 259)
APPENDIX A Record of climate, Sacramento and San Diego, 1853-1980 (page 260)
APPENDIX B Standing crops of coastal schooling fishes, 1800-1970 (page 264)
Notes (page 265)
Selected bibliography (page 337)
Index (page 363)

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3. The Indian fisheries commercialized 53 Table 3.1. Population of northwestern California Indians.

Ethnic group Precontact 1880—1910 % Residual

State total 310,000 16,350 5 Shasta 9,955 100 2

Tolowa 2,400 150 6 Yurok 3,100 700 22 Hupa 2,000 300 29 Karok 2,700 800 30 Wiyot 3,300 100 3

Athapaskan® 15,450 400 3 “Includes Chilula, Whilkut, Mattole, Kato, Wailaki, Nongatl, Lassik, and Sinkyone. Source: Cook, “Aboriginal Population of the North Coast,” passim; Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California, p. 833.

1960s and 1970s, the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, which follows traditional Yurok and Hupa territory from the lower Trinity to the ocean, was

the largest and most populous reservation, in the state. Although unemployment remained very high on the reservation, per-capita income among Humboldt County Indians, enhanced by their timber resources, was a remarkable 90 percent of that of the county as a whole.* The striking difference between the demographic responses of these people to the catastrophe of the late nineteenth century was attributable to the ecology of the lower Klamath basin and to the singular adaptation that these

three groups had made to it in the centuries before 1850. Although the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok were the wealthiest of all aboriginal Californians, Anglo-Americans were for many years unable to tap the resources they had

learned to exploit so profitably. Conversely, the success with which the native economy had limited its use of the river fishery in normal times, both in order to share with upstream groups and to lower its risk of harvest failure, left it a natural reserve on which to draw during hard times. Nature banking,

so-called, had been a fundamental aspect of the native economy; it now enabled the three core groups to remain self-sufficient during the invasion and thus weather it better than could communities that had pressed their habitats to capacity.** The peculiar culture of these people, finally, enabled

them to deal with the invaders on their own terms far more successfully than was the case elsewhere in California. When the storm passed, the Indians of the lower Klamath-Trinity watershed remained in possession of their traditional lands and economies, while all around them their neighbors had ceased to exist in functioning communities.

For the same reason that the elaborate specialization developed by the

54 I. The miner's canary Yurok, Hupa, and Karok was increasingly dilute with distance from the Klamath-—Trinity confluence, peripheral areas were more accessible to com-

merce. Shasta territory, at the headwaters of the Klamath and to the east of the densely timbered coastal strip, was auriferous and possessed good agricultural land. It was promptly and thoroughly overrun with miners: Thousands were at work within months of the gold discovery there in the spring of 1851, and in October of that year the McKee treaty-making expedition found the Shasta starving because sickness had left them too weak to hunt or fish.” Wintu people on the upper Trinity near Weaverville relinquished their lands to miners and soldiers during the “Wintoon War” of 1858-9. The Chimariko, a small group living in the richly auriferous Trinity River canyon, fought the miners through the early sixties but ultimately

learned, as Powers put it, “that they must not presume to discuss with American miners the question of the proper color for the water in the Trinity

River.” By 1871, the Chimariko were utterly scattered; by the turn of the century, they were extinct.*° Elsewhere in northwestern California, Indian people either lived along the coast, where they were exposed to infection and attack, or in areas suitable for agriculture, where settlers soon sought them out. Newcomers first invaded Tolowa country when a group of them founded Crescent City in 1852 and others began farming the Smith River valley a year later. Although remnants of the Tolowa economy still functioned in 1880, the Indians lost great numbers to measles and cholera. Chilula and Whilkut people, just west of the Hupa, possessed rich pastures and lay in the path of pack trains to the Trinity mines. In 1856 these people rose, only to lose a destructive conflict with the intruders; those who survived scattered.“ The Wiyot tribe about Humboldt Bay, the largest natural harbor on the coast north of San Francisco, was by far the hardest hit of any northwestern native group. Several towns sprouted next to the bay to service the freight

business to the mines before 1850 was out. The McKee party found the Wiyot already suffering serious losses to disease in 1851. Nine lumber mills ringed the bay in 1854. Sporadic violence took a mounting toll of Indian

lives until the Gunther Island massacre in 1860, after which the Army moved many of the Wiyot to Fort Humboldt on the bay and thence to a reservation at Smith River for their protection. Within the next decade, most of the Wiyot villages along the coast were deserted, as were most of those formerly inhabited by Coast Yurok people north to the mouth of the Klamath River.*° Relatively unknown to settlers before 1854, the Eel and Mattole Rivers marked the southernmost boundary of the Lower Klamath culture area. Wiyot and southern Athapaskan communities there collapsed as their fertile valley became an important agricultural producer between 1854 and 1857. The Eel supported a substantial fall run of salmon, and H. H. Dungan of

3. The Indian fisheries commercialized 50 Eureka began fishing it in 1853. By the close of the decade there were seven packing plants on the river supplying cured fish to the miners and townspeople of northwestern California as well as for export. The Eel became the second most important salmon producer in California, but the canning industry crippled it along with the Sacramento during the 1880s. Some forty of the local natives who had managed to hang on bought a parcel of land on

a small island in the mouth of the river in 1869 and did day work for the packers. They were not hired to fish, however, but rather as divers for the dangerous work of clearing the riverbed for the new people’s nets. They did some subsistence fishing out of season, as well, at least until 1888.*° By that time, Anglo-Americans had largely erased Indian society from the coast and

put the land to other use, except in the rugged canyons of the Klamath River.

“Nature seems to have done her best to fashion a perfect paradise for these Indians,” wrote Special Agent Paris H. Folsom to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1885, “and to repel the approach of the white men.”” In the early days the only access to the region's interior from the west was by pack train. Mines in the Weaverville area were more naturally tributary to the Sacramento Valley than to Humboldt Bay. As late as 1890 the only access to Hoopa Valley was on foot or muleback over forty miles of rough country from Arcata. Yurok country on the lower Klamath was the most isolated spot in a remote region. Steep canyon walls held out roads and rails, while a sand bar at the mouth of the river denied entry to all but the lightest boats. The first road pushed through to Requa, at the rivers mouth, in 1894. Not until the 1960s was there a good two-lane road from there up the river to Weitchpec.” With the exception of Karok territory above Orleans Bar, the area was practically useless for placer mining; in all but a few places the gold particles were too fine and too widely scattered to repay digging. Later, the high cost of freighting equipment and supplies into the area held back more capitalintensive mining and logging as well. Although some of the upriver Karok were sick in the fall of 1851, the McKee expedition found the Yurok and Hupa in good shape. Downriver Yurok were difficult to gather for McKee’s parleys: The expedition’s secretary noted in his journal that these “peremptorily refused to have anything to do with the whites, as a party of whites had prevented their building a fish-dam last summer.” A few Hupa came down to Weitchpec to talk but were “very impatient to be gone, saying that many of their people at home were sick; that this is the fishing time, and fish must be caught for food in the winter.”” George Gibbs predicted in 1851 that should the supply of placer gold give out, the Karok’s land “would soon be abandoned to its former possessors.”” He was right. After a brief exile, the Karok gradually drifted back to their homes. The California Geological Survey visited the northern edge of Karok

56 I. The miner's canary country in 1863 and found it practically deserted, save for the Indians. Powers

found the Karok getting on well in 1871-2; he found the Hupa prospering at the same time. Powers attributed their well-being to the fact that the miners had bypassed the lower Trinity, leaving the waters unmuddied and the Indians in peace.” The farmers who usually succeeded miners in building western communities found no arable land of any extent in the entire basin below Shasta country. Under the reservation system, Indians in Hoopa Valley grew some crops, and the Yurok below Weitchpec had small patches of potatoes wherever there was any level ground, but in general the river was, as one gov-

ernment agent put it, “utterly useless for white settlement.”” Most continued subsisting largely on fish from the river as they always had. Under

the laws of the 1850s the government had established a reservation on the lowermost twenty miles of the Klamath, and some government-sponsored farming had taken place there. During the winter of 1861-2, however, a severe flood washed away topsoil and equipment, and the government abandoned the site as worthless. The Yurok knew otherwise: As the federal agents

moved to a new reservation on Smith River, most of their charges simply took to the hills to wait out the flood, returning to the river and its salmon in the spring.”° The environment to which they were so well adapted thus served as a bulwark behind which the core tribes of the Klamath Basin gained time to adapt to the new order of things. Not to be discounted, however, was the natives own active and skillful military defense, itself aided by the unexploited surplus of salmon in the river. The Yurok rose in 1855. In the peace concluded that year, they won the land one mile on each side of the Klamath from its mouth to a point twenty miles upriver as a reservation. Having defended the lower half of their territory, the Yurok remained peaceful thereafter. During the 1860s they were “the most numerous and powerful band in the northwestern part of the state.””’’ The Hupa, perhaps with some Whilkut and Yurok joining them, fought the usurpers so successfully between 1860 and 1864 that they brought all commercial activity in the middle reaches of the watershed to a standstill, cut off all communications between the coast

and the interior mines, and drove settlers back to the coastal towns. They,

too, won recognition of their right to their lands after the fight, as the government evicted settlers from Hoopa Valley and set the area aside as a reservation in 1864.”° Reported the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at the end of the war,

The great numbers of Indians inhabiting the Klamath and Humboldt countries, the dense redwood forests on the river bottoms, and the high, craggy, precipitous mountains back, would, to my mind, be

3. The Indian fisheries commercialized 57 a serious warning against any effort to remove them by military force... .”° By 1865, the three tribes of the core area had secured their traditional fishing grounds — the Karok by default and perseverance and the Yurok and Hupa through armed resistance. Because the Klamath—Trinity system's spawning areas begin at Blue Creek, just a few miles above the estuary, much of the watershed’s potential for salmon production survived the first two decades of U.S. sovereignty in Indian hands. Given a chance, the Indians found that they could deal with the newcomers in business as well as in battle. Their senses of property and the exchange value of things were, if anything, more highly developed than those of the

settlers. They had only to accept dollars instead of dentalium shell as a measure, which was not difficult to do. Yurok in the Weitchpec area refused

to deal with Redick McKee until he paid them for three of their villages that packers had burned that spring and for two of their people who had been shot, but were peaceful and tractable once McKee compensated them. “They peremptorily refuse to render the slightest service without something

... received beforehand,” wrote McKee’s secretary.” Gibbs relayed the story of Red Cap, an Orleans-area Karok who, to compensate a miner for the theft of his rifle, levied a tax of fifty cents in U.S. silver on every salmon sold by an Indian to a miner until the debt was paid off.” Here, the Indians’ customary method of arbitrating disputes over property meshed well with U.S. legal practice and the affair did not lead to bloodshed as it would have elsewhere. Erikson, however fanciful some of his other observations, could

not miss the key element of intergroup relations on the Klamath: “Yurok and the white man,’ he wrote, “each understand too well what the other wants, namely, possessions.””” Here there was at least some commonality of understanding and behavior; elsewhere in the New World the utter lack of common cultural ground did much to seal the Indians’ fate.™ U.S. currency and political connections in the U.S. government simply became additional resources for Indian use. The Indian Agent at Hoopa Valley noted that the Hupa were disinclined to work on communal projects at the reservation, “but will work industriously if left to do so on their own account.”°* When Powers visited the Yurok and Karok in 1871-2, he found people of both tribes working in nearby towns and buying food and clothing

from local merchants. “These Indians are enterprising,’ he wrote; “they push out from their native valley.”” Austin Wiley, the Indian Agent who negotiated an end to the war with the Hupa in 1864 and for a short while was chief of the California Indian Superintendancy, reported that he had grown up with Indian leaders in the Klamath Basin and had located the Hoopa Valley reservation on the lower Trinity at their request. More than

58 I. The miner’s canary one government official who had leverage over policy for the Klamath Basin

had marriage or other kinship ties with powerful Indian families in the region.” “It is no little to their credit,” concluded Powers, that the Indians “learned all these things by imitation, having never been on a reservation.” Yurok, Hupa, and Karok people appealed to the ethnocentricity of the Office of Indian Affairs in Washington as well as to that of Powers. Apparently, the government was more willing to let a fishing people continue subsisting in the customary way than one which hunted or gathered foods that did not appeal to Anglo-American taste. If the Yurok were “in general sullen and suspicious,’ they at least shifted for themselves and got on relatively well at little or no public expense.” Their preference for living in nuclear families impressed observers also. “They form a very respectable peasantry, wrote Paris H. Folsom. “While these Indians still have a sort of tribal code, they are rapidly becoming individualized and segregated in

individual interests. ...In fact, they have the model idea of an American life.”°’ Indian Affairs agents repeatedly urged their superiors to leave the Yurok alone and to protect them from outsiders.” The fortunes of these tribes seem to have touched bottom during the mid1860s, as did those of the Klamath River salmon. At that time, there were 650 Indians living at Hoopa Valley and about 2,000, presumably Yurok, along the forty miles of the Klamath River below Weitchpec. In 1865, the

resident surgeon at Hoopa Valley reported that the Klamath and Trinity were very muddy from mining upstream and “almost deserted” by salmon.”

Two years later, another agent wrote that Indian fishing was almost at a standstill, so that “only now and then one of their ingenious weirs is seen.” Thereafter, as mining gave way to agriculture in the interior between 1865 and 1875, the fishing improved. Powers found the fishery intact on the lower

forty miles of the river, even if on a scale smaller than it had been in the early days. At the same time, the Hupa were subsisting reasonably well on their traditional economy. “Though not so plentiful as in former times yet ... they manage to have plenty,” reported the agent at Hoopa Valley in 1871.” Klamath River Indians began fishing commercially for salmon in 1876, on

terms to which both they and the government agreed. Two Crescent City

entrepreneurs contracted with the natives in that year to catch and salt salmon at the mouth of the river. The Klamath Commercial Company, of which one of the original partners was a founder, began milling lumber and packing Indian-caught salmon on the river in 1881. Five years later, with the permission of the Indian Agent at Hoopa Valley, John Bomhoff of Crescent City established a cannery at Requa, near the mouth of the river. In marked contrast to what obtained on the Eel River, Bomhoff reserved all of the fishing and most of the cannery jobs for the Indians. The only outsiders were those who tended the packing machinery. The arrangement worked

3. The Indian fisheries commercialized 59 well, apparently, providing a money income as well as traditional subsistence

to the Yurok.” The uncertain legal status of the old Klamath River Reservation brought competition for land to the river in the 1880s. The government had vacated the old reservation on the lower twenty miles of the river after the flood of 1861—2 but had never abolished it formally. Since that time, squatters had trickled onto the old reservation, as well as onto the twenty-mile “connecting strip’ between the reservation and Hoopa Valley. Through the late seventies

and eighties, as bills to put the old reservation up for sale appeared in Congress, the Interior Department at last rallied to the defense of the Indians

and recommended that the entire length of the river below Weitchpec be reserved for the natives. In 1877, the Army evicted settlers from the old reservation and stationed a detail from Hoopa Valley at Requa “to prevent intrusion on the Indian lands, and to protect the Indians in their only industry

... that of fishing salmon.”” Pressure to open the river for settlement intensified during the mid-1880s. An 1880 act of the state legislature had declared the Klamath a navigable stream from its mouth to Orleans Bar, apparently to encourage public access

to the lower river and in plain contradiction to the facts of the river's geology. ’° Squatters moved again into the canyon, claiming that the government had abandoned the reservation in 1862; the Interior Department averred, however, that it still considered the lower river part of the Hoopa Valley reservation and denied their applications for patent to the land.” Informed of conflict brewing between squatters and natives on the connecting strip, Interior dispatched Paris H. Folsom to the area, where in 1885 the latter found what he called his “respectable peasantry’ “supporting themselves without aid from the Government, by fishing, hunting, raising

a little stock, cultivating patches of soil, and by day's labor at the Arcata lumber mills....In short, Sir, I have never been more pleased with any Indian community.” Folsom described the squatters as “bummers” and “leechers” and urged his superiors to evict them, compensate them for their improvements, and establish the river formally as part of the Hoopa Valley Reservation.

The issue came to a head when the salmon entrepreneur R. D. Hume arrived from Oregon in May, 1887, and prepared to pack fish at the mouth

of the Klamath without permission. As with the others, the Interior Department had denied Hume the right to purchase land along the river with a government land warrant and in 1883 had turned down his offer to pay $50,000 for a ten-year lease on the fishery. Undeterred, Hume crossed the sandbar at the river's mouth in a light steam tug, prepared to build a floating

cannery in the estuary, and at gunpoint warned Captain Daugherty, the commander of the army garrison at Requa, not to interfere. Although Hume apparently arrived with his own fishing crews, he also began purchasing fish

60 I. The miner's canary from some of the Yurok with goods he kept in a small store aboard his tug. The Yurok, Daugherty reported, had worked very hard to clear the estuary’s

bottom for their nets and were “much disturbed” by the intrusion. They appealed to Daugherty to intercede, much as an earlier group had appealed to George Crook to prevent others from interfering with the fishery and as they would have appealed to their own arbitrators before U.S. authorities took over during the 1850s. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington agreed with the Indians, noting that by seining so near the river's mouth Hume would obstruct the runs and “cut the Indians off from their accustomed supply.” He appealed to U.S. Attorney General Garland for a judgment on the Indians’ behalf, lest the latter “undertake to defend their

rights by violent means.” In reply, Garland noted that since the State of California had declared the Klamath navigable the Indians enjoyed no exclusive right to its fishery, but only a right to fish in common with the public at large. Whether or not the lower river was “Indian country’ and whether Hume could be excluded on that ground, he wrote, were questions “clearly justiciable in the appro-

priate courts at the suit of the Indians themselves who are interested in them.” Daugherty’s garrison thereafter seized Hume’s tug with its store of trading goods under a law prohibiting unlicensed trading in “Indian

country.” The matter then came before the federal district court in San Francisco in the case of United States v. Forty-Eight Pounds of Rising Star Tea, etc. The government's prosecution was badly handled: The U.S. attorney did not appear in court to present the Interior Department's side of the issue; Daugherty, who was in the city on other business, was the government s only witness. Judge Hoffman agreed with Hume that the Klamath was by law a navigable river and that the land around it had ceased to be an Indian reservation when the army abandoned it during the winter of 1861—2, and on appeal Judge Sawyer of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sustained Hoffman's decision. Hume was free to trade or to pack fish at the mouth of the Klamath as he pleased.” Hume's operations on the Klamath never turned a profit for him; after several years, he sold out at a loss to Bomhoffs Klamath River Packers’ Association. He had made the breach, however, and thereafter the clamor in Del Norte County for free access to the land on the Klamath’s banks grew louder and more shrill by the year. Finally, to circumvent the Rising Star Tea decision and on the basis of Paris Folsom’s report, President Harrison officially extended the boundaries of Hoopa Valley Reservation down to the ocean in 1891. The state legislature repealed the river's navigability the same year, apparently in an effort to encourage mining upstream from the reservation. In 1892, Congress approved a bill allotting plots of land on the lower reservation to the Indians under the Dawes Act and opened the rest for sale

3. The Indian fisheries commercialized 61 to the general public. The river's status as an Indian reservation, however, and consequently the Indians’ preferential right to the salmon fishery, were secure after the conflict of the late 1880s. Commercial packing continued on and off at low levels through the nineties and into the next century.”

Conclusion: new competition for Klamath River salmon Demographic peace returned to California at some point near the turn of the century, when the Indian population of the state began to turn upward again. During the 1880s and 1890s about 500 Indians at Hoopa Valley were subsisting on reservation crops supplemented by hunting and fishing. Along the Klamath, to the west, lived anywhere from 600 to 900 Yurok, still living

“to quite an extent,” according to the Indian agent, off native foods.” Although a good number of outsiders moved onto the river during the first decades of the twentieth century, the area nonetheless remained an Indian reservation. The Interior Department and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this formally in 1904 and 1913, respectively, noting pointedly that the “prevailing motive for setting apart the reservation’ in the first place had been “to secure the Indians the fishing privileges of the Klamath River’ and to

protect them from usurpers like R. D. Hume.” That the Indians of the now-extended Hoopa Valley Reservation possessed

some preferential rights to the Klamath River salmon fishery was clear, although the extent of those rights remained undefined and would prove increasingly controversial as the fishery declined over the course of the twentieth century. Until 1933, when California closed the river to commercial fishing, a good many Yurok made their living from the fishery. From one to three canneries at Requa provided many with cash income, either for fish or for work in the plants themselves. The Yurok, for whom the canneries reserved most of the fishing and cannery jobs, gradually adopted U.S.-style boats and gill nets for their work and became, in essence, commercial fishers. Between 1915 and 1928, an average of eightytwo boats harvested some 52,000 chinooks, or about 725,000 pounds, each

year.” The world-renewal religion that had underwritten the Indians’ former way of life decayed gradually as the older people who could still remember the

ceremonies died and more and more of their children took up jobs on the outside. The Kepel weir and dance lapsed shortly after 1910: Not enough men could get together at one time to build the dam, and there were none left who knew the ceremony in its entirety. Away from the river, the cult was apparently extinct by the 1880s. On the reservation, however, Yurok aristocrats continued to meet to organize ceremonies and perhaps to arbitrate

62 I. The miner's canary conflicts at Requa and in the Kepel area well into the 1930s.*’ A cultural renaissance began at Hoopa Valley during the 1960s, as logging brought a measure of prosperity to the region and as a nationwide resurgence of Indian activism made its way to northwestern California.” Although the Klamath Basin Indians may have adapted well to their new social environment, they nonetheless retained a strong hold on their traditional culture. While salmon had become a source of cash for many, for the tribes it remained key to their sense of themselves as Indians.

The resolution of the desperate conflict of the nineteenth century only prepared the way for a new and different one later. At the root of the new struggle, as later chapters will show, was the steady depletion of the Klamath River salmon by causes over which the Indians had little control. The people of the Lower Klamath culture area had won precious time in which to adapt

to life under the new regime because they were successful in defending their territory and because the commercial economy had not been able to tap the natural wealth of their fertile but forbidding country. After 1900, economic development provided outsiders with the tools to overcome the physical barriers that earlier had shielded the area and confronted both the salmon and their Indian trustees with more dangerous a threat than they had yet faced. For the time being, however, the fight was over. Government had at last

secured the Indians rights to the land and the fish of the Klamath Basin, and for a while what remained of the native population was left in peace. Meanwhile, government biologists had discovered the importance of pristine spawning habitat to the health of the salmon fishery and had begun to press

for the establishment of natural preserves for spawning fish. The federal government set aside Afognak Island in Alaska as such a preserve in 1892.°° The next year, one U.S. Fish Commission scientist went so far as to propose

setting aside an entire watershed, somewhere on the coast, as a “great national nursery” for salmon. The Klamath, he thought, was the most likely candidate: “the land extending some distance from the mouth of the Klamath River is, I believe, a Government reservation, requiring no special legislation

to close the stream to outside commerce.”” Although the nursery never came into being, this scientist, like Livingston Stone before him, had perceived the relationship between the well-being of native society and the productivity of the coast’s most valuable fishery. Into the twentieth century, now in Anglo-American law as before in native religion, the future of the region's Indians and that of its salmon remained entwined.

Il Sun, wind, and sail, 1850-1910

BLANK PAGE

Immigrant fisheries

As a rule, they take very little interest beyond their

immediate environment. ... These men are first fishermen, second fishermen, third fishermen and Italians. — Henry A. Fisk (1905)'

California waters supported a motley assortment of fishing enterprises during

the first fifty years of statehood, just as they had while in the safekeeping of the original inhabitants. David Starr Jordan, later president of Stanford University and one of the leading ichthyologists of his day, noted in 1879 that California fishers invariably worked “within a few miles of shore by means of small vessels or boats too frail to face the dangers of the open sea. These are of diverse patterns, and the predominating types come from the central seats of antipodal civilizations.”* Chinese junks mingled with lateenrigged Italian boats and New England whaleboats. Nowhere else in the United States, and possibly the world, has a fishing industry ever been so ethnically diverse.° This was partly a function of the great variety of the fishery resources that California had to offer. As immigrants struggled to recreate familiar patterns of life in their new home, they began fishing wherever they found resources to which they could adapt available skills and that they could market among people with whom they were accustomed to dealing. This was adaptation between culture and environment of a sort, but one very different from the kind that the Indians had worked out. Where aboriginal fishers had over countless seasons learned to harvest their resources so that fish and fishers alike would endure, Italians, Anglo-Saxons, Chinese, and other immigrant fishers found niches only where the stream of commerce chanced to bring them onto fertile patches along the rivers and coast. Collectively, wrote Jordan, the immigrant fishers refused “nothing for which they [were] sure of finding a market, from the whale to the abalone.”* San Francisco, the economic capital of nineteenth-century California, stood unexcelled among U.S. cities for the year-round variety and abundance of its fishery produce.’ But there was no one fishing “industry” in California, any more than there had been a single Indian culture. Each immigrant group 65

66 II. Sun, wind, and sail, 1850-1910 carried on its business in near isolation from the others, each with its own economic organization, its own methods, and its own markets. Although by the 1880s California was one of the nation’s leading fishery states, the industry never influenced the economic development of the region the way it had in seventeenth-century New England, for example, or in frontier Alaska. “Fish are not much sought after in California,” wrote a visitor to the early Mexican settlement at Monterey, “in consequence of the productions of the land being so very abundant.” No one would have denied the fisheries potential, but the Sacramento basin offered more profitable outlets for investment than fishing, and rough seas and uncertain winds kept offshore resources mostly out of reach until motorized boats became available

after 1900. Throughout the nineteenth century, then, fishing remained primarily the calling of poor immigrants, carried on in the interstices of the economy by people who were not much inclined to change their customary ways of doing things so as to take part in the intensely commercial mainstream

culture of the state. Indeed, by the end of the century, the fisheries were something of an embarrassment to public officials who wished to modernize

them and increase their output. “Except for the salmon fisheries of the Sacramento and the Columbia, and the ocean fisheries in the immediate neighborhood of San Francisco,” as Jordan wrote in 1880, “the fisheries of the Pacific Coast exist only as possibilities. For the most part only shorefishing on the smallest scale is done, and no attempt is made to discover off-shore banks, or to develop them when discovered.”’ Their economic marginality notwithstanding, the fisheries lay at the very heart of the ecological transformation that took place in late nineteenth-

century California. The immigrants, indeed, settled down in no pristine wilderness but in an environment already disrupted by the decimation of fur-bearing mammals and of Indian populations in the region. After statehood, rapacious fishing contributed further to the process, seriously damaging some of the most sensitive resources. Fishers and their prey were not the only ones to make claims on the state’s limited supply of water. Together,

they fared badly in competition with mining, agriculture, and other industries for fishery habitat. Meanwhile, currents changed and seasons grew warmer and cooler, drier and wetter, as they always had, in no identifiable pattern. All these changes had significant effects on the fishing industry as it developed and all had much to do with shaping public policy for conserving the fisheries as it evolved at the same time (see Chapter 5).

The final quarter of the century saw one fishery after another come into hard times, some as they depleted their resources and others as they suffered the harmful environmental effects of other forms of water use. As California's

waterways grew crowded, the insularity of the business and the sharply drawn ethnic boundaries between its different sectors began to dissolve. Public authorities moved gradually to bring the reluctant fishers under their

4. Immigrant fisheries 67 control. Private and public responses to the problems of the 1880s and 1890s reorganized the industry and prepared the way for technological change that would later make fishing an important business in its own right.

Economic development Most economic activity in nineteenth-century California took place in the Sacramento—San Joaquin watershed, which drained the central two-thirds of the state from the crest of the Sierra Nevada, through the lush marshes and grasslands of the Central Valley, and out through San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate (see Figure 4.1). Early visitors to the Sacramento River found a beautiful waterway, teeming with life; in 1852 one took 3,500 pounds of river perch near Sacramento City in a single day.” The Sacramento was, moreover, second only to the Columbia as a habitat for salmon. Gold rushers

who took a few minutes away from their diggings in the late forties could pitchfork fifty-pound salmon out of the Yuba and Bear Rivers in unlimited quantities. E. Gould Buffum and a companion shot thirty-five “splendid” fish out of the American River one afternoon in 1848. “There is every possibility, Buffum wrote in his journal, “that the salmon fishery will yet prove a highly lucrative business in California.”’ Nevertheless, as long as the Gold Rush was on and “the spirit of adventure and speculation remained abroad, ” as Bancroft put it, fish and other goods that took time to prepare and turn over were simply a bad gamble, and the “exorbitant” costs of labor, shipping,

and warehousing kept the distribution of all food products in chaos until about 1852.*°

Fishing was one of many local industries that emerged in the wake of the juggernaut of 49. Disappointed miners drifted out of the Sierra to take up more reliable occupations through the 1850s. Heavy floods in the winter of 1861-2 and the vicious droughts of the following biennium brought a final end to the Gold Rush. With imports momentarily checked by the Civil War the state was, in Bancroft’s words, “thrown more upon its own resources, to the development of much neglected wealth.” Californians began to fish as the developing economy provided access to consumers who would buy the kinds they knew how to catch. Shipping on the lower Sacramento and along the coast improved rapidly after the early fifties. The salmon trade began “assuming large proportions, ” according to the San Francisco Alta, when freight on the river dropped to $10 per ton in the summer of 1851."* Steamship service to Hawaii opened in 1861 and to China and Japan, encouraged by subsidies from the U.S. Post Office, in 1867. Subsidies from the government of Australia brought steamers

laden with California salmon to that locality during the sixties, as well. Shipping to Eureka, on the northwestern coast, increased with lumber pro-

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