Rooster Rock State Park

For thousands of years, American Indians harvested the legendary annual runs of salmon returning to spawn in the Columbia River and its tributaries with spears and dip nets, but Euro-Americans quickly replaced those methods with fishwheels to profit from the fish. The first fishwheel on the Columbia operated in 1879, and by the early 1900s seventy-six fishwheels supplied nearly 50 canneries. The catches were immense: in 1881, Frank Warren's fishwheel a few miles east took 10,000 salmon in a single day, and in 1883 Columbia River canneries processed more than 20,000 tons of Chinook salmon. Oregon banned fishwheels in 1926 for economic and environmental reasons, and they ended on the Washington side of the river in 1934. Today some of the Columbia's salmon species face extinction.

Oregon · United States