Crossing the Next Meridian by Wilkinson Charles F.;

Author:Wilkinson, Charles F.; [Wilkinson, Charles F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6530997
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

The destruction was appalling to some sensibilities, even in that age of conspicuous bounty. In 1894, the Oregon Fish and Game Protector reported, “[I]t is only a matter of a few years under present conditions when the chinook of the Columbia will be as scarce as the beaver that once was so plentiful in our streams.” Guardians of the public interest recognized the problem fairly early and tried two approaches. The first led to some early and tentative attempts at state regulation. The Washington Territory, for example, introduced gear restrictions in 1871, and Oregon followed suit in 1878. In 1877, Washington began regulating the duration of the fishing season, and Oregon acted accordingly the next year. Catch limits were first imposed on the British Columbia Fraser River salmon fishery in 1882, and in 1889 the federal government of Canada began to require licenses of all non-Indian salmon fishers. The Alaska Territory adopted catch and season regulations in its White Law. The second approach was to augment the supply. In 1877, at the request of and with partial financing by the canners, an agent of the United States Fish Commission opened a salmon hatchery on the Clackamas River in Oregon. There were no apparent effects on the size of the runs, however, and the hatchery was soon abandoned.24

These early gestures at bringing law to the harvest and propagation of salmon runs, however well intentioned, had almost no lasting effect. The catch, gear, and season restrictions of the nineteenth century, universally disregarded and sporadically enforced, were seen as a joke by fishers and enforcement officers alike. Willful violators were prosecuted only when a particularly objectionable violation was accompanied by publicity sufficient to make it hard to ignore. Hatcheries never became a factor during this era. The situation drove thoughtful people to despair. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, in the same spirit as when warning about the western rangelands in the 1880s, lamented the ineffectiveness of state regulation of this common-pool resource:

The salmon fisheries of the Columbia River are now but a fraction of what they were twenty-five years ago, and what they would be now if the United States Government had taken complete charge of them by intervening between Oregon and Washington. During these twenty-five years the fishermen of each state have naturally tried to take all they could get, and the two legislatures have never been able to agree on joint action of any kind adequate in degree for the protection of the fishers. . . .

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