For about the past 10,000 years, Indian tribe members have taken big nets to the Columbia River where the water runs fast and used the nets to scoop out salmon.

When the industrialized Europeans came in the mid-1800s, they knew a good idea when they saw it. The Indians caught so much salmon, so quickly, that some enterprising Europeans quickly realized they could make a killing scooping out fish, canning them and selling them cheap. But not being inclined to stand around on fishing platforms as the sun beat down on them, they mechanized the method.

Thus the fish wheel came to the Columbia. It’s sort of like a paddlewheel with baskets on the ends, with a wooden flume built downstream to divert a big cross-section of the migrating fish into its path. The current turned the wheel, the baskets scooped out all the fish that are carried through the flume, and the cannery built nearby processed them into little flat tins.

To give you an idea of how many fish these things scooped out of the river: One built in 1887 about five miles from The Dalles pulled 418,000 pounds of fish out of the river in 1906 alone. By that time, there were more than 75 others like it lining the shores of the river where it ran fast.

Not surprisingly, the operators started noticing the catches dwindling as the 1900s wore on. But their response was to blame the gillnetters — the boat operators on the lower Columbia who were also hauling out tons of fish.

The two groups — fish wheel operators and gillnetters — sponsored competing ballot measures ... Continued@URL... http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2008/11/16/news/local/1loc12_finn.txt