Nearly 40 years ago, I received a copy of Roderick Haig-Brown’s Return to the River: A Story of the Chinook Run as a Christmas present.  In this book, which is perhaps the best animal biography ever written, Haig-Brown introduces his readers to a fish named Sachem. This fish, an 80-pound male, is one of the monster spring-run Upper Columbia River chinook salmon.  Sachem was heading to somewhere in the 1,600-plus kilometres of spawning water above Grand Coulee dam, but he didn’t make it back to his spawning stream. He was captured in a trap, taken to a barriered-tributary of the Wenatchee River and released to spawn in the hope that some of his protégé would survive and flourish. Haig-Brown wrote this book as Grand Coulee was nearing completion and, with its 550-foot drop, there was no possibility of salmon and steelhead heading for spawning streams above Coulee to get over the dam. Even if fish could pass this concrete monolith, the smolts heading downstream would have been crushed to death on the rocks below the gigantic spillway. The dam’s construction ended the run of mighty chinook salmon and summer-run steelhead into the Upper Columbia as well as some of its tributaries.

Over the ensuing decades, as I learned more about the Columbia River, its early exploration, its salmon and steelhead runs, I was able to fish some of its American tributaries for summer-run steelhead. During my trips, I often thought of what we lost when man in all his arrogance altered the natural environment, paying little heed to the creatures that for millennia relied on that environment for their existence.

When Grand Coulee was finished in the early 1940s, there had been an intense commercial fishery operating on the Columbia since 1866 that mostly targeted the early runs of chinook, which were rich in fat content and prime fish for canning. The chinook commercial catch peaked in 1883 at 42,799,000 lbs of canned salmon. By the time Grand Coulee was nearing completion, the runs into the Upper Columbia had already been reduced to a mere fraction of natural abundance. Commercial fishing played a large role in that reduction.

Written by Art Lingren