My dad had a berth on the Hood Canal for his small boat. He and mom set crab pots after work in the evening, then picked them up and reset them. They fished for salmon EVERY DAY, there was not even a season the fish were so plentiful. Soon after the Boldt decision you would often see dead salmon floating as fish were rejected as being too small to keep. They would catch every one, and throw back the shakers. Truck beds filled with salmon sat in tavern parking lots, rotting in the sun because they made so much money sometimes they forgot what was in the back of their pickup. River mouths blocked, and the fish population plummeted. In the early 70’s my mom caught a 62lb salmon not far from the Dosewallips-Hoodsport area on Hood Canal to win a derby. You cannot catch a fish that big even in the Ocean now, but back then it was part of a bounty that seemed endless. With the Boldt decision, the runs were destroyed. Instead of natural spawning, they began farming fish, and the fish became smaller and less hardy. It isn’t that the rivers are incapable of serving as breeding grounds, it is that the schools of fish are raped into near extinction by netting. They simply should have bought the so called rights of the Natives for a price, and kept the sports fishery solid for as long as the “sun shines and the wind blows”.
One good turn deserves another.
White hunters in the mid 1800’s decimated the buffalo population on the plains which impacted plains Indians who were married to the animal. Until the plains Indians had horses and were able to hunt the buffalo they were generally farmers, but horses and tribal wars for territory changed things around. I think the horse came in around mid seventeen hundreds for the plains Indians.
In Oregon it appears to be the other way around. Difficult to understand why the Indians there would willingly kill off what sustained them. They are supposed to be the original environmental activists. It sounds like the State of Oregon was a big loser as well. Sport fishing and associated tourism income for the State was killed off as well as the salmon, by folks who should know better.
Would love to hear more on the subject. How do you restore historic salmon runs that you have killed off? When you catch all the salmon with a memory where they came from up river. What then?