By Jude Isabella
(Reprinted from The Journal of the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, No.45, Spring 1999.)

If one image could illustrate the history of fishing in British Columbia, it would be a salmon, curved into a dollar sign, fighting its way upriver. Every time the fish leaps in the air, grasping hands - from a few individuals, but mostly corporations and bureaucracies - almost prevent the salmon from reaching its destination.

Aboriginal Fishers And The Hudson's Bay Company
Salmon meant wealth, and not only to industrial movers and shakers in British Columbia in 1871, when Alexander Ewen began the first continuous cannery. For thousands of years before Europeans arrived and the Hudson's Bay Company set up what would be future department stores, salmon had already meant wealth to First Nations people of British Columbia. If the salmon run failed, an aboriginal community could starve.

It's easy then to imagine the excitement accompanying a salmon run. Yet it was another fish that brought greater joy to aboriginal fishers every year - the eulachon.

Eulachon was synonymous with the coming of spring.

While waiting for the sun to glint off these small silver fish, the native people would make or trade canoes, collect gear and get ready for a run that usually happened during the latter part of March. Journal accounts from the Hudson's Bay's Fort Simpson, describe 700 canoes, from as far away as Tacoma, following the seagulls to the eulachon on the Nass River. Each year, the first eulachon was to be caught by the First Nations. A powerful belief was held that the first fish must be cooked with respect in the traditional manner; otherwise the eulachon could take offence and leave the river.

Salmon Fishing on the Fraser River ca 1905 (BCARS D-00026)

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That was no small fear since the fish were traded far to the north and south and into the Interior over the Grease Trail, an ancient trade route. It was the eulachon's oil that was valued and Hudson's Bay traders quickly adapted to its use. A rich source of Vitamin A, the native people mixed the oil with other food and traders followed suit, lubricating the dried and salted salmon and venison they ate. Eulachon was on the cargo list of the 0aer, the Hudson's Bay Company's supply vessel bound for Forts Victoria, Nanaimo and Rupert in 1866.

But schooners with holds full of cod were sliding into port as well. Halibut was another important fishery and herring, not prized by native people or traders, were salted down and eventually consumed or traded too.

The story, however, always flows back to the salmon.

On Friday, May 2, 1670, King Charles II signed a charter for his cousin Prince Rupert and the Hudson's Bay Company was born. The charter granted the company "the sole Trade and Commerce of those seas... with Fishing of all sorts of Fish, Whales, Sturgeon and all other Royal Fishes in the Seas, Bays, Inlets, and Rivers within the Premises."

Fur may have built much of Canada but in British Columbia, salmon could have been hard currency.

Alexander Mackenzie cruised the Fraser River, stocking up on fish in 1793. And Simon Fraser remarked on the intensity of the salmon harvest for the aboriginals in 1808. While the explorer was on the lower Fraser River (which he thought was the Columbia River) he wrote that the natives gave him "plenty of salmon, which they took in abundance by means of barriers."

Dwellings thousands of years old are mute testimony that the Fraser River salmon runs supported aboriginal communities for generations. Salmon established a relatively wealthy lifestyle for groups of people considered hunters and gatherers. But this ancient tradition stumbled upon by Europeans, would change in less than 100 years.

Of course, change began with the Hudson's Bay Company and a place enjoyed today by thousands of visitors - Fort Langley.

Built 50 kilometres upstream from the mouth of the Fraser River, Fort Langley began a salt salmon market in 1827. Native harvesters provided the tens of thousands of fish exported annually, and native women cleaned, cured and packed the catch - a foreshadowing of the future. The barrels were shipped to Hawaii, a transfer point for trading ships to Asia and South America.

Salmon runs, for the most part, were uninterrupted. Natives fished, traders sold. Then gold was discovered. The aboriginal people knew about the gold, but compared to salmon, the mineral had been superfluous; to the white population it was simple: gold meant riches. By August 1858, 30,000 people followed the gold rush through Victoria on their way to the Fraser River. The prospectors looking to get rich quick would soon clash with native communities.

More than 2,000 native people assembled at Hill's Bar, above Yale, at the height of the fishing season. Native groups within the territory had arrived at the river that season to environmental calamity. Miners had rapidly altered the landscape: cutting trees, diverting streams, digging trenches through gravel spawning beds. It was ironic, considering miners depended on dried salmon from the Company, which was bought from the native fishery.

Even the Victoria Colonist was writing editorials asking whether it would be better to exploit the "imperishable productive resource" rather than the quickly exhausted minerals of the Fraser.

Miners didn't agree and the conflict escalated in Boston Bar, leaving 31 native people dead, including five chiefs, and three fish camps destroyed. With the gathering at Hill's Bar, white vigilante groups moved in and a deal was eventually struck between miners and native fishers. But at what price to the aboriginal fishers? The issue of aboriginal fishing rights was beginning and a way of life was ending.

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Canneries
Thirty thousand one-pound (454-gram) tin cans were hand-soldered and hand-filled with salmon by workers for Scottish immigrant Alexander Ewen's new enterprise. It took less than 2,000 salmon to fill the 300 cases that launched the B.C. canning industry in the summer of 1871.

Nine years later, Fraser River canned salmon was being eaten out of tins by thousands of factory workers in England. Forty two thousand cases left the cannery and the following year that number tripled.

BC Canneries - Receiving Floor 1913 (BCARS E-05032)

Greed may well have been canners' mantra had they had one. Stories surrounding the canneries in the late 19th century can make a reader gasp for air because of the absolute speed at which the environment was comprised and workers abused. As early as the 1880s cries of stock depletion were heard.

At first it was the least numerous of the five species of salmon - chinook - that was harvested for canning. By 1876, sockeye was deemed the tastiest in a can and it was also the most abundant salmon, especially every four years - a cycle year - when this particular species returned to spawn in the rivers where they originally hatched.

Pulling on the "torture sticks" (oars) and pulling in the salmon were natives, Scandinavians, Greeks, Italians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Chileans and Hawaiians. After 1893 the Japanese began emigrating and their early history in British Columbia became entangled with salmon as well.

The pioneering Ewen was described as "avaricious, erratic and stubborn, a diehard liberal and a notorious drinker."

In those heady early days Marshall English, a Virginian, built the largest cannery on the river and it seems he liked a drink as much as Ewen, perhaps more. Marshall was "unable to refrain from a good time while the money lasted. He was an infamous drinker who would excuse himself while walking with friends, throw up in a ditch and then resume the conversation without showing any discomfort."

T.E. Ladner, a Cornwall farmer, formed the Delta Canning Co. in 1878 with a Scot, J.A. Laidlaw, at Ladner's Landing. Ladner made his fortune as a teamster in the Caribou; Laidlaw made money working an abandoned mine.

J.H. Todd, a Canadian who established himself in business by selling notions to miners, began Richmond Cannery in 1882. Todd was cheap. "He once attempted to pay two native people a hardtack biscuit each for the arduous task of paddling him upriver to New Westminster." Keen and hard were two other words used to describe the canner.

An American black and expert tinsmith, John Sullivan Deas, took over a cannery built in 1872 by Capt. Edward Stamp near New Westminster, and moved it to Deas Island.

While salmon lined the canners' pockets with gold, fishers grappled with the backbreaking task of hauling aboard sockeye larger, as pictures and films indicate, than today's specimens.

Nets were set from dugout canoes at first, but a more effective flat-bottomed plank skiff, up to six metres long, was mass-produced locally and quickly caught-on. A crew of two, sometimes husband and wife teams, set and pulled the 550-metre nets. The only shelter was a crude tent slung across the bow and a cut-down oilcan was used as a stove. A 12-hour shift earned $2.25 for a fisher and $1 for a boat puller.

With labour and fish to exploit, opening a cannery was irresistible to anyone with capital. By the 1880s canneries were perched like scavengers on every major sockeye run from the Fraser to the Skeena River. It was also a period of consolidation.

The Victoria Canning Company was formed in 1884 by R.P. Rithet, Andrew Welch, Ladner and other investors, merging several canneries from the Fraser to Prince Rupert. In 1891, British engineer Henry Bell-Irving formed the giant Anglo B.C. (A.B.C.) Packing Company.

Two years later, the two firms controlled more than 60 per cent of the production on the Fraser.

Lucky for them the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1887, and a clear path was established for fresh, frozen and canned fish to markets in eastern Canada and the United States. That same year a dozen canneries were working the river, nine more than when the industry began.

Railways changed cannery history in another way as well.

In August 1913 during a peak cycle for salmon, millions of sockeye could be seen making a futile attempt up the Fraser. The sight stretched on for 16 kilometres. Blasting by the Canadian Northern Railway for a route through the Fraser Canyon caused one of the biggest environmental catastrophes in the province. The ensuing landslide at Hell's Gate destroyed the major sockeye runs on the Fraser, runs that would only recover closer to the 21st century. That disastrous season was also a huge moneymaker for canners. But four years later, another cycle year, the Fraser River's canned pack was 75 per cent below 1913 levels. Undeterred from continuing their virtual license to print money, canners focused on pinks, chum and coho salmon, species that spawned closer to the coast. Canneries were already dotting the coast when it was clear, by 1921, two cycles after Hell's Gate, the sockeye industry was dead.

[Right] Hell's Gate Slide 1913 (BCARS A-03882)

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Asian Workers And Union Strife
During the 1870's, a Chinese butcher crew turned on cannery foremen who were pushing them past the limits of endurance. Marshall English barely saved the lives of his two white foremen from the angry crew flashing the knives used for beheading and gutting 1,000 fish a day. English fired the foremen.

The canner had no choice if he wished to continue raking in huge profits. Even Ewen admitted that "...but for Chinese labour I do not think there would be so many canneries in existence... more than three quarters of the inside work is done by Chinese (but) the cost of their labour is less than the other quarter of whites."

Once butchers headed and gutted the fish - they were paid by the piece - native women cleaned and washed the salmon, then cut it into chunks. Another crew of native women filled the cans and Chinese workers then soldered the tops, boiled the cans in tanks, sealed the vent holes, cooled the cans and lacquered them to prevent rust. Chinese men made the tin cans by hand before the fishing season. They were long days and little pay.

Fishers fared somewhat better, except perhaps for the Japanese who had built both a fleet, and the community of Steveston, while the canneries reigned.

Writer Geoff Meggs in "Salmon: The Decline of the British Columbia Fishery", summed it up best: "If working conditions were primitive for fishermen, they were doubly so for cannery workers, who differed from slaves only in the fact that they were laid off at the end of the season."

Once winter came Chinese workers, after paying off their lodging and food bill to the company, were hustled back to the Chinatowns. Japanese fishers found a cushion in the winter with the herring and chum salmon fishery. They established an industry up and down the coast, harvesting in winter when employment was scarce, especially for Asian people.

Without the Asian population, canneries would never have made the fortunes they did. And they used the endemic racism to their advantage, to divide workers and keep the labour market under control.

In the 1880s when canneries were merging and forming monopolies, new government regulations limiting fishing licences with the bulk going to canners, put fishers on alert. Independent fishers would be forced to quit or submit to a cannery boss.

By 1893, with canneries owning 909 of the 1,174 boats harvesting salmon, Bell-Irving and his mega-company ABC Packing met with competitors. He wanted to control labour rates and prices. Company fishers were paid $2.25 a day since the canneries began and Bell-Irving wanted to keep that rate. Independent fishers were offered six cents a fish if government regulations to remove offal from the rivers were enforced, and seven cents if unenforced. A year earlier the price was 10 cents a fish.

Labour responded by organizing the Fraser River Fishermen's Protective and Benevolent Association (FRFPBA) on May 20, 1893. Japanese fishers wanted to join but were denied. After all, a key plank of the union was to eliminate Japanese fishers. Still, 1,600 fishers and boat pullers were rallying around a demand for $3 a day and to maintain sockeye prices. On July 14 a strike vote led to a 10?day tie-up and the union was joined by 100 native gill-netters.

A carrot of a 10 per cent wage advance was dangled before native fishers, then Indian agents were sent in to try and force them back to the boats. But most held ground, along with hundreds of Japanese fishers and boat pullers. Scabs were eventually lured to the fishery and the strike fizzled.

In a way, the canners lost; the sockeye price held at seven cents, down from ten, and an increase in wages was granted. But more importantly trade unionism was established in the fishing industry and trouble was just beginning.

Fishers were gaining strength in the following years, enough to convince canners to form an opposing organization in 1898: the B.C. Salmon Packers Association, later called the Fraser River Canners Association. As the FRFPBA was defunct after the 1893 strike, fishers countered with a new group a year later, the B.C. Fishermen's Union.

By 1900 racism was rampant and the reasons were obvious.

Licences for native fishers fell to 423 in 1900 from 850 in 1896. In the same time period the Japanese fleet saw their numbers rise to 1,804 from 782. Natives aligned themselves with white fishers and the unions. A strike was called that year, for five cents more than the 20 cent offer. A glance south showed Puget Sound fishers were making 28 cents.

Canners warned their Japanese fishers that any who supported the strike would see their fishing supplies and food cut off. Japanese fishers held out for two weeks before setting sail. Their organization Gyosha Dantai, the Steveston Fishermen's Association, eventually called for a return to work; they were forced to back down to cannery managers who controlled the immigrants' naturalization papers.

Still, several hundred Japanese fishers pulled into port when they realized the strike continued, inspiring those still picketing. Eight canneries were left without fish from Japanese boats.

Another source of strength came from the native community. Chiefs were threatening to head home, with the canning crew, if no agreement was reached.

After three weeks the strikers won with a fixed season rate of 19 cents, meaning no slide of five cents at the height of the run. Finally, the canners were sharing a piece of the pie.

In the following years, the relationship between industry and labour was much the same: a continuous fight for a share in the wealth while canners continued to play racism to their advantage. Lauren Cassaday, an American researcher who toured the entire Pacific salmon industry in the early 1930s, concluded that canners were pursuing "a deliberate policy of racial hiring to maintain tension, division and low prices."

Even though the Japanese fishers provided invaluable labour to canneries, they were helpless as the fisheries department implemented legislation to drive them from the industry. By 1919 a freeze was put on Japanese-Canadian licences. In 1923 Mackenzie King's government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and provincial officials pressed for repatriation of Japanese-Canadians. It took the Supreme Court and the Privy Council of Great Britain to force a change in government policy in 1929.

The Japanese fleet never fully recovered and with the Second World War, boats and gear were impounded and sold for $1.4 million, mostly to canners. When the war ended, negotiations helped rid the industry of race discrimination, and labour contractors were gone, but so were the Japanese.

Interned Japanese Vessels, December 1941 (MMBC P3586)

Unions had other victories. Just before the war ended, shore workers were organized in sixteen plants earning the industry's first sick pay, vacation pay and overtime pay.

But tensions would continue until the present. The United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union (UFAWU) reached a peak with seven thousand members by the early 1960s.

The Union and the Native Brotherhood together represented nearly all crew members on salmon seine, herring seine, and halibut long-line vessels and 70 to 75 per cent of salmon gill-netters. Between 1945 and 1963 the UFAWU were involved in about 25 strikes.

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Early Federal Fisheries Policy
As the tide moved in and out of the mouth of the Fraser River, fish heads, guts and whole carcasses stirred gently with the movement. The river was a putrid mess and the fish offal was blamed for a typhus outbreak. Cannery policy was to throw everything unused in the canning process back into the river, which meant the pink, spring and chum salmon that slid mistakenly into the pack were chucked back dead. Some canners admitted to discarding 3,000 fish a day.

The public was outraged and in response Ottawa extended the Fisheries Act to British Columbia in 1875. A year later Alexander Anderson was appointed the province's first fisheries inspector and regulations came later but canners continued to push fish offal through holes in cannery floors.

Anderson set in motion a policy that dogged federal fisheries in the years to come. He defended aboriginals against over-fishing charges and ended the legal sale to canners of fish caught in the traditional fishery. He was also adamant that Ottawa should not grant exclusive fishing rights to "non-Indians" until aboriginal fishing rights were clarified and he advised the government that "the exercise of aboriginal fishing rights cannot be legally interfered with".

For the commercial fisheries, Anderson introduced a licensing system and ordered a 36-hour weekly closure as a conservation measure. Of course, regulations were made to be broken, especially when a cycle year hit. And when fisheries officials revamped the legislation in 1889 with limited licences, it was the canners who held all but 100 of the 450 issued. It was simple, when overcapacity and production costs were high, canners turned to state controls to keep their wealth flowing. State prohibitions also limited the American competition.

Government policy extended to fishing technology. Trap nets and purse seines were illegal since 1894 but after the 1900 and 1902 strikes, canners agitated for their use arguing that it would allow them to control price demands from fishers and compete with low-cost American producers. The canners won, and under protest from fishers, in 1904 traps and seines were allowed.

On the Skeena River that same year, canners lobbied Ottawa to extend the Fisheries Act to the native people and to forbid their use of weirs and selling of fish. Although fishing for sockeye on the Babine River, which flows into the Skeena, was practised for generations using community-owned weirs, the aboriginals suddenly found themselves accused of destroying the resource.

Canners drafted a letter to fisheries minister Louis Prefontaine. Ignore the request, canners declared, and they would no longer support provincial Liberals.

Relations were strained between the government and Babine native groups and the fisheries inspector for District 2 (the Fraser River fishery was designated District 1, the north District 2) John Williams appealed to Indian Affairs for an approval to use force. It was not granted because the department believed the native claims had a foundation in Canadian law. By 1906 an agreement was reached and the weirs were dismantled and the fisheries department agreed to supply the native people with enough nets for food fish and trade. Indian Affairs agreed to the compromise because the Babine groups were allowed to continue selling fish.

The government also capitulated to lobbying efforts on banning the Japanese from the fisheries, and not just salmon. The unlicensed hand?line cod fishery was licensed in 1923 to enforce a 40 per cent reduction recommendation from the 1922 Fisheries Commission to reduce the number of "Oriental Licences." The number of Japanese working in seining and in the dry salting herring industry was cut in half in 1925.

The Privy Council in 1929, while not giving back the Japanese what they lost, did result in a clear division of powers between provincial and federal governments within the fisheries. Ottawa was given sole management of the harvest, but no authority after fish were caught, unless destined for export markets.

The early commercial fishery, especially salmon, was fashioned through the government's role and vice versa. Other fisheries did have some impact, however.

When the Atlantic halibut stocks began failing on the east coast, schooners from New England began fishing from Tacoma and Seattle in the 1880s. Vancouver soon became the New England Fish Company's headquarters because of the Canadian Pacific Railway and its promise to waive shipping charges if the boxed iced halibut arrived in sub-quality condition. By 1911 Prince Rupert was the undisputed king of halibut and the largest cold storage plant in the world was constructed.

Things continued to improve for the halibut industry. The majority of halibut was landing in Canadian ports from Canadian vessels by 1940, which was the majority of the Pacific Coast catch. Biological resources are inherently limiting and in 1974 the depletion of the stocks on B.C.'s coast felled the fishery.

Pilchard, groundfish and herring fisheries are more inconsistent industries historically. Japanese fishers exploited the resource most effectively for foreign markets and as bait for halibut fishing. The Fisheries Department allowed the oil and nutrients of herring and pilchard to be harvested and sold in 1925 resulting in a 128 per cent increase in the number of boats in the seine fleet. The result? After the Second World War pilchard stocks disappeared leaving fishers to haul in millions of herring. The herring fishery was closed by 1967 and reopened five years later with new regulations and a herring roe industry.

Groundfish had a relatively small local market demand, mostly on the south B.C. coast. The trawl technique used to catch halibut was used on groundfish, with heavy nets reaching deep undersea terrain. In the 1960s lots of fish boats would finish up the salmon season by trawling for groundfish, but it took large vessels with enough power to drag heavy nets and deliver 22,000 to 36,000 kilograms of fish to make any money.

The government traditionally imposed few regulations on the ground fishery in the belief that the difficult terrain prevented over-fishing.

That myth can be traced back to the beginning of the fishing industry and British Columbians are learning the folly of such thoughts. The question is, is it too late?

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References:

Meggs, Geoff and Duncan Stacey; "Cork Lines and Canning Lines: The Glory Years of Fishing on the West Coast", Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992.

Meggs, Geoff; Salmon: "The Decline of the British Columbia Fishery", Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991.

Marachak, Patricia, and Neil Guppy and John McMullan, editors; "Uncommon Property: The Fishing and Fish-Processing Industries in British Columbia", Toronto: Methuen Publications, 1987.

Meilleur, Helen; "A Pour of Rain", Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1980.

Kennedy, Howard Angus. "The Book of the West", Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1925.

Jude Isabella is a freelance writer living in Victoria. She has worked as a journalist for 10 years in British Columbia covering books, environmental issues, and science. Jude has two children and in her spare time studies anthropology at the University of Victoria.