Crabin Fev,

That photo is also in Lichatowich's fine book, Salmon Without Rivers.

This is a photo of a Puget Sound cannery at its finest....sadly, most of these fish were either canned rotten or chucked...you can only can so much fish in a day before they all start to rot.

Where was this photo taken? Could be any river in CA, OR, WA, or BC. By 1890 ANY western coastal stream large enough to support a cannery had one in operation, mining natures wealth.

Spark, you wanna know why Columbia Chinook are an Endangered Species?...it's not from catch & release mortality I can assure you. The number of canneries peaked on the Columbia at a whoppin' 39 in 1887, and then they began a slow, steady decline because they had wiped them out.....there were no more fish to harvest. This happened on nearly every majory river system in the NW, not just the Columbia.

The really sad thing is that these canneries migrated from the East Coast, where they had already brought the Atlantic Salmon to near extinction. They knew damn well that salmon were NOT an inexhaustible resource and were more than aware of the consequences of overharvest and habitat destruction.....and nobody stopped them.

When you look at the run sizes of salmon before and after the canneries were done raping, pillaging, and plundering it's a miracle they survived at all....

Ike