OREGON: The Chinook Are Running

Salmon are as much a part of Northwestern life and legend as the Indians. Like the clear, fast, greenwater creeks and rivers that lace the hills together, they belong to the country. Many a Western boy got his first sense of the strangeness and mystery of his own land when he stood on the banks of some stream and watched the great fish swarming inland from the sea.

Those were the days when you could see the salmon fighting their way upstream, up rapids, over falls, around innumerable obstructions, until each found the stream where it was spawned, where now it would spawn and die. If you were lucky you could see a Chinook, the biggest salmon of them all, weighing maybe 50 lb., break through a shallow rapid like a torpedo. If you were still luckier you might catch one. Because the fish come up small streams, perhaps only six feet across, you had the feeling that the salmon were running right into your field, into your playground, even into your back yard. As soon as school was out kids would run whooping and hollering down to the creek, to try for salmon with spears, gigs, pike poles, BB guns, .22s, and even with stones. Sometimes there would be a wounded fish trapped in some shallow pool. Sometimes you could see a salmon leap a falls, or jump the spillway of a lumber company’s dam. There would be a dark flash barely under the water, an explosion of water as the fish broke into the air, perhaps 15 feet, and then, if it fell back, a moment when it lay stunned before the current carried it back downstream.

Everybody knew the salmon’s mysterious life cycle—how it disappears into the Pacific for at least three years and then, forced by irresistible instinct, drives itself back through fresh water, eating nothing on its hundreds of miles journey upstream to the spot where it was spawned. Nothing can stop it but death. But ever since the building of the great dams on the Columbia, the Northwest has been concerned about the effect they would have on the salmon. Bonneville, 170 feet high, has fish ladders that the salmon use in going up. But still nobody knows how many of the young fish, the fingerlings, successfully return to the sea through the whirling, bladed turbines, or by Bonneville’s ice sluice, spillways and bypasses. (Four hundred and fifty miles upriver from Bonneville, Grand Coulee rises to its 550 feet in a barrier that the salmon cannot pass—so the far reaches of the river beyond Grand Coulee can never be salmon spawning ground again).

The Chinook running this year were fingerlings in 1937. At that time Bonneville was already a partial barrier. This fall these fingerlings, now grown to huge Chinook salmon, were moving upstream in numbers that set a modern record. Last week the Oregon State Fish Commission released its figures on September deliveries of Chinook to Oregon salmon canneries. The average September catch has been 2,000,000 lb. Last month’s was 9,600,000 lb. Through the first 20 days of September Government fish counters at Bonne ville counted fish using the ladders at the rate of more than 22,000 a day, compared with about 10,000 a day last year.

The fish experts of Oregon, keeping their fingers crossed, said: “Very encouraging.” If, as the engineers claimed, the adult salmon could get through in 1938 and afterwards, and their young get back to the sea, this year’s record run meant that the Chinook will run, dams or no dams. If, as some fishermen feared, this is the last big run the Columbia will ever see, the Chinook had ended, as he always did, in a blaze of glory.