End of the Line

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"Early on at the Salmon Summit it was evident that if you eliminated the comme rcial and sport fisheries on these stocks from Alaska to the Danes, you still couldn't save those runs," says Eaton. The problem is that the protected fish—Snake River sockeye and spring, summer, and fall chinook—at times mingle with healthy wild stocks and the 2.2 million hatchery fish that return to the Columbia each year. The healthiest run of wild fish, ironically, spawns in the Hanford Reach, a 50-mile-long stretch that courses through the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the site of widespread radioactive contamination. The run is "the guts" of the fishery, according to Eaton, for both Lower Columbia gill-netters and the Indian tribes that fish above Bonneville Dam and are allowed half the in-river catch by law.

Fishermen say they only catch three to five percent of the returning Snake River fish, while nearly half die negotiating the fish ladders on the eight main stem dams. Yet the runs are so depleted that each fish has become vital to the population's survival. What angers Bob Eaton is that eliminating the gill-netters is much easier, cheaper, and far less politically painful than making the dams more friendly to fish. The NMFS draft recovery plan says that "while it may be controversial to compensate fishermen for giving up the privilege of harvesting a public resource, no other measure seems likely to produce mature spawners at so little cost."

"The question is whether there is political will to do more than maintain gene pools," says Eaton. "If your goal is to support a commercial and sport fishery, then you've got a resource, not a museum piece. But if the goal is to get them back to cameo size, then there is no fixture for sport or commercial fisheries in the Northwest."

Not far from the port of Astoria, the Columbia River Maritime Museum displays a rich repository of artifacts from the heyday of the fishery. Within its collection, two black-and-white photos stand out. The first shows a grizzled man in a wet fedora lifting an 82 1/2-pound chinook salmon. The fish stretches from his sagging shoulders to the tangle of net at his feet.

These were the "June Hogs," the giant royal Chinook that formed the basis of the early fishery. In late spring and early summer, these enormous fish began their run, climbing the falls at Cascades and Celilo, and continuing undaunted to the very headwaters of the river in the Arrow Lakes of British Columbia. Yet when the final gate of the Grand Coulee Dam closed in 1941, it sealed the June Hogs' fate. With a height of 343 feet, the dam was considered too tall for fish ladders. It closed off 1,000 river miles of salmon habitat, a third of the upper Columbia. Still the indomitable June Hogs held on, spawning in the tailwaters below the dam until the mid-1950s, when they followed the passenger pigeon to extinction.

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