It is July, the
peak of summer on Kodiak Island, and salmon are returning in their millions to
the island’s rivers, and to the prince of Kodiak’s rivers, the Karluk, on the
southwest coast of the island. Like many Kodiak rivers, the Karluk River system
supports all five species of salmon native to Alaska- pinks, chums, silvers,
kings and sockeyes, but it is the sockeye, the red salmon, which have made the
Karluk arguably the greatest salmon river in the world.
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| Sockeye, or red, salmon |
The word “Karluk,”
is itself derived from the Alutiiq word for salmon, “Iqaluk,” and these noble
fish have been spawning in the Karluk since the retreat of the last ice age
glaciers about 8,000 years ago. Archeological evidence indicates the first humans
on Kodiak arrived not long after the ice went away, in skin boats from Asia by
way of the Aleutians and the western Alaska coast. As evidenced by their hunting
tools found near the mouth of the Karluk, these immigrants focused their food
gathering efforts on the hunting of marine mammals, but as subsequent cultures
evolved on Kodiak, the focus of their diet changed from seals, sea lions, and
the occasional whale, to salmon.
Sockeye swim into
the Karluk for six months, beginning in May, peaking in late summer, and still
coming in decreasing numbers well into the fall, with stragglers as late as
December. This easily obtained protein source, available fresh for half the
year and handily converted to dried salmon for the fishless winter and spring months,
allowed the Alutiiq people and their ancestors to divert a substantial portion
of their time and energy from food gathering to the pursuit of high culture. All
summer they caught salmon with nets in the lagoon at the mouth of the river and
in v-shaped stone weirs they built in the river itself, which forced the salmon
to pass through narrow apertures where they could be speared or driven into
woven basket weirs. By the time the Russians arrived in the late 18th
century, the Alutiiq at Karluk had developed a society rich in politics, art,
and religion, all made possible by the easy availability of the king of fish.
The Russians of
course were single-mindedly obsessed with the gathering of sea otter skins, not
salmon, and despite their need for cash, viewed the fish almost exclusively as a
food source for themselves and their coerced Alutiiq hunters, not as a source
of capitalist wealth. While there is evidence the Russians sold some dried and
salted salmon from Karluk to markets in California, they never exploited the
incredible resource of the river’s sockeye run to its full potential.
Historians have
long conjectured on what might have been if the technology of the hermetically
sealed tin can had become available to the Russian American Company in those
last years of their Alaskan venture, when the sea otters had run out and the
colony was bleeding money. Instead, in 1867, ten years after the Hume Brothers
began canning salmon on the Sacramento River, the Czar sold Alaska to the
Americans. By the early 1870s, having already fished out the rivers in
California, Yankees began canning salmon in Southeast Alaska, and in 1882 built
the first cannery on Karluk Spit, where the river emptied into Shelikof Strait.
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| Salmon canneries at the Karluk River, 1880s. |
For five years it
was the only cannery at Karluk, but within a few years the spit was covered
with other wooden cannery buildings, net warehouses, workshops and housing for
the seasonal workers. The money to build the canneries came from San Francisco
and New York, the fishermen were mainly working class Americans and recent European
immigrants, and the cannery workers were Chinese. The local Alutiiq found their
livelihoods where they could in this newly arrived industrial scene, as cannery
workers or as fishermen working for the canneries.
In these first years
of the canning industry at Karluk the extravagant wealth which might be taken
from the river became apparent to the American capitalists. In 1882, 58,000 salmon
were canned at Karluk, in 1887 a million, and for several years in the 1890s,
more than three million fish a year were commercially harvested and canned at
Karluk. The largest Karluk harvest ever was in 1901, when 4 million sockeye
were caught and canned, and the largest escapement was in 1926, when 2.5
million fish made it past fishermen’s nets into the lake. (This number must be
qualified by the fact that escapement was not measured at Karluk before 1920) The
run declined from there, unsteadily, with good years and bad, but trending always
downwards, until the nadir of the Karluk fishery in 1955, when fewer than 30,000
sockeye were caught.
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| Beach seining at Karluk, 1960s |
Until the 1940s
the fish were mainly caught with beach seines, some as long as 300 fathoms- 1,800
feet. One end of the net was anchored to the beach on the spit and the other
end was towed out into the water with a steam launch, around the schools of
salmon, and back to the beach, at which point the fish were loaded into carts
and rolled directly into the canneries. It was a very efficient system. After
the Second World War beach seines were gradually replaced with seines deployed
from boats- the same kind of net, except a boat held both ends of it, which
allowed fish further from shore to be captured. Fishing went on six days a
week, and each year’s management of the fishery was decided in a smoky room in
Seattle by cannery owners and Federal fisheries managers. Concern for the
future of the run was trumped by the desire for profit.
And then in 1959
Alaska became a state, and as our local narrative has it, with the end of 80
years of cannery influenced management, the hiring a young cohort of Alaska
Department of Fish and Game fish managers, and decisions based on the best available
science, the salmon runs were saved. The Karluk sockeye run has been rebuilt,
though not to historic levels. After a few bad years around 2010, the run this
year is healthy again, with about 200,000 sockeye having escaped up river past
fishermen’s nets so far this season, and 150,000 sockeye harvested.
Kodiak salmon, and
especially the Karluk sockeye, have been lucky in their choice of spawning habitat.
In recent years it has become apparent to fisheries scientists that rearing
habitat is the single most important factor in the health of a salmon run. This
would explain why hatcheries, fishing reduction, and even the elimination of
fishing altogether, cannot always save a salmon run which has no clean place to
mate and lay its eggs. The placing of
thousands of small streams around Puget Sound into culverts since the 1960s has
been blamed for the decline of a once massive silver salmon resource there, and
the threat of mines in the watershed of Bristol Bay looms as an existential
threat to that fishery. But with neither an encroaching population nor mineral
wealth, managers and fishermen on Kodiak are cautiously hopeful that, barring
unforeseen effects from climate change, salmon will live here forever.
