The three documents in this section highlight the complex issues associated with salmon and hydroelectric dams.

The 1937 U. S. Commissioner of Fisheries Report concluded of the Columbia River salmon fishery that "the protection of individual runs menaced by virtual extinction must at the present time be left to chance." At the same time, the report calls for federal government investment in "fish-cultural apparatus and property" to solve the dilemma posed by declining salmon runs. Bonneville Dam on the Lower Columbia included fish ladders and elevators. Grand Coulee Dam, built without fish mitigation features, virtually cut off all salmon spawning habitat for the upper 620 miles of the Columbia River.

The 1937 Mitchell Act authorized funding of measures to preserve and protect Columbia Basin salmon.

Journalist and Oregon State Senator Richard Neuberger wrote extensively about Grand Coulee Dam. The excerpt in this section from The Saturday Evening Post in 1941 discusses the difficulties of reconciling salmon spawning habits with the newly built Grand Coulee Dam.

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U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries Report

The federal commissioner of fisheries, directed by Congress to assess the effect of Bonneville Dam on salmon runs, 1937.

The Conservation of a great fishery resource involves a variety of circumstances, concerning which there is a dearth of information at the present time . . . [T]he recommendations involved [in framing a conservation policy] can only be considered as preliminary until such time as more information has become available through the work of fishery scientists. Indeed, a policy of conservation can never be devised in final or absolute form. Policies announced and adopted today will be modified and extended tomorrow when additional information resulting from continuing studies is available. The resource we seek to conserve is itself a living and dynamic thing, developing and adapting itself to new circumstances and conditions resulting from natural growth and changing economic conditions. . . Wildlife resources can be conserved only by eternal vigilance in balancing the productive forces of natural growth and replacement against the destructive forces of man's exploitation. The following chapters therefore will be a progress report on a frankly unfinished work which must continue for many years. . .

Bonneville Dam has been considered rightly as a key to the continuing prosperity of the fishing industry of the Columbia River system. The dam is located about 146 miles from the mouth of the Columbia in the midst of the mighty thoroughfare of migrating salmon between the sea and their spawning places. It will interpose a barrier which, if not surmounted, will destroy the major portion of the fish supply. While the Willamette and other tributaries of the Columbia below Bonneville afford extensive spawning areas for certain species, the major spawning grounds for the salmon and steelhead lie in the higher tributaries of the Columbia and include the great Snake River drainage. The success of fish protection at Bonneville Dam, therefore, will affect perhaps 75 percent of the total salmon supply of the region. For that reason every means should be employed to minimize the interference with salmon migration. . . .

The commercial fisheries of Washington and Oregon support an industry that ranks about fifth in magnitude among the other great industries of the Pacific Northwest. The fishing industry of the Columbia River district gives employment to approximately 3,250 fishermen whose annual catches of fish and shellfish average more than 30,000,000 pounds, bringing the fishermen themselves an income of 1 3/4 million dollars. . . .

Recommendations for Fishery Conservation On the Columbia River

The foregoing pages provide a view of the present status of the Columbia River salmon fishery, as influenced by natural conditions, individual activities, and the combined effects of an increasingly complex social order. They reveal an imperfect understanding of the natural requirements of the fishes upon which a great industry depends. They suggest something of the fortuitous and heedless development of industry, which has produced changes in the environment that are inimical to continued prosperity of the fisheries. They clearly demonstrate the present inadequacy of governmental machinery to protect a resource that is important, if not indeed essential, to continued social progress. They should impel action to correct a situation which cannot be viewed with complete optimism.

Scientific Investigations

The Federal Government should finance and conduct through its Bureau of Fisheries an increased program of research on the natural history and ecological requirements of the various species of salmon and other commercial fish in the Columbia River Basin as a basis for a continued program of fishery management. During the past 3 years approximately $22,000 per year has been available for studies in this region. In earlier years research had been conducted in a desultory fashion at various times. Already a great deal of valuable data has been secured but, faced with the emergency presented by the construction of Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams, fundamental information has been found to be so incomplete that vast programs of development were of necessity undertaken without assurance of their possible effects on the fish supply. The fish-carrying capacity of the various tributaries of the Columbia River system has nowhere been satisfactorily determined, yet an extensive program of transplantation of millions of fry must be conducted within the next year or two on a trial-and-error basis. Stream surveys that have already been completed reveal extensive spawning areas that can be utilized more completely with a resultant increase in fish stock, but less than one-third of the total basin has been surveyed to date and the work of rehabilitating the runs in the remainder of the basin must either be neglected or undertaken without a knowledge of possible success or failure.

Large investments are soon to be made in fish cultural apparatus and property; millions of fry will be produced by artificial propagation and rearing to compensate for the runs obstructed by Grand Coulee Dam. Many of the technical details of this program have been worked out on a basis of general experience in fish culture rather than on a basis of fact demonstrated by actual experiment. Continual improvements in methods of feeding salmon in hatcheries are being made, but better rations should be provided as our knowledge of fish nutrition increases. When large numbers of fish are gathered together in the hatchery, conditions favorable to the disastrous spread of disease occur, yet the prophylaxis and cure of fish diseases are a relatively unknown field. Finally, the effects of commercial fishing on the supply are shrouded in mystery. Statistics of landing show a well-marked downward trend in total yield, but the racial composition and final destination of hordes of salmon entering the mouth of the Columbia River to be caught by fishermen or to continue to their spawning grounds as fate may direct is unknown. As a result, aside from blind restriction of commercial activity, the protection of individual runs menaced by virtual extinction must at the present time be left to chance. The facts developed by these various lines of investigation all bear directly upon the ultimate objective of fishery conservation; that is, the management of the supply in such a way as to yield maximum and stabilized returns to the fishing industry and to maintain these historic runs of salmon as a food resource for national safety.

The Columbia River is an interstate stream. Canned salmon is a national food commodity. The recreational facilities of the Columbia River Basin attract visitors from all parts of the country. Therefore, the Federal Government could properly expend three or four times the amount now provided in acquiring the necessary technical information to protect and develop the fishery resources.

S.Doc.No.87, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. 1-2, 4, 74-76 (1937)

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 The Mitchell Act

U.S. Congress, 1938

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,That the Secretary of Commerce is authorized and directed to establish one or more salmon-cultural stations in the Columbia River Basin in each of the States of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. . .

SEC. 2. The Secretary of Commerce is further authorized and directed (1) to conduct such investigations, and such engineering and biological surveys and experiments, as may be necessary to direct and facilitate conservation of the fishery resources of the Columbia River and its tributaries; (2) to construct, install, and maintain devices in the Columbia River Basin for the improvement of feeding and spawning conditions for fish, for the protection of migratory fish from irrigation projects, and for facilitating free migration of fish over obstructions; and (3) to perform all other activities necessary for the conservation of fish in the Columbia River Basin in accordance with law.

Mitchell Act, Pul. L. No. 75-502, ch. 193, 52 Stat. 345 (1938)

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The Great Salmon Mystery, by Richard Neuberger, 1941.

ONLY A PART OF the Columbia's salmon population heads for the 620 miles of river back of Grand Coulee, but that part includes the best strain of salmon which must not be allowed to become extinct.

Uncle Sam's academy for fish starts enrolling pupils when these salmon thoroughbreds are trapped below Grand Coulee. Then they are rushed forty-five miles in tank trucks to ponds alongside the immense hatchery which Joe Kemmerich operates in the Washington town of Leavenworth. There the salmon are spawned artificially. After about a year in hatchery troughs and pools the resulting offspring, approximately six inches long now, are put in the trucks and turned loose in streams entering the Columbia River below Grand Coulee Dam. The theory is that if one generation of Chinooks had an irresistible urge to spawn in creeks above Grand Coulee because it was the scene of their early life, why will not the next generation of Chinooks go back to tributaries below Grand Coulee if that was where they were released as baby fish?

"Thus," announces the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reassuringly, "the hatchery-reared fish will return to the water in which they were planted, establishing new and natural runs in those streams."

Will this idea work? government experts things so, but admit there will be no conclusive answer for four years--not until the salmon now being propagated artificially at Leavenworth come back up the Columbia to spawn. Will they continue on to Grand Coulee, over the route their ancestors traveled, and perish buffeting its cement ramparts? Or will they wind off toward their new habitats?

The ultimate outcome of this novel plan is only a single phase--albeit, a vital one--of the Great Salmon Mystery. All sorts of other questions must be settled too. . . .

The Washington Department of Fisheries is pressing for legislation to complete the screening of all irrigation canals and has set up nearly 300 filters already. Oregon's Fish Commission wants trolling in the ocean rigidly controlled, and its chairman, John C. Veatch, believes no commercial fishing should be allowed on the Columbia above Bonneville Dam. Senator McNary, of Oregon, believes that trolling at sea must be closely regulated. He has introduced a bill giving the Fish and Wildlife Service the right to prevent the catching of salmon under certain weights and sizes. "We know," he explains, "that the Chinooks attain most of their growth in the ocean. It is an economic waste to permit the catching of a nine-pound salmon which in three or four months might weigh twenty-five pound. The reduction of spawning grounds in the upper Columbia makes more imperative than ever that we get every possible ounce of food value from the salmon which are netted in the Pacific." McNary says he has assurances that Canada will parallel any such action taken by the United States. A number of wild-life experts hope to forbid Indians from spearing and netting the homeward-bound salmon at Celilo Falls, but others ask if we take away even this from the country's original owners, what are we accusing Hitler of, anyway?

Ever since the first cannery was built on the Columbia seventy-five years ago, salmon have been a red-hot political issue in the Pacific Northwest.

Richard L. Neuberger, "The Great Salmon Mystery," Saturday Evening Post, 13 Sept. 1941, 20-21, 44.

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