The Great Herring Flood: When the Duwamish River Turned White
May 1877: A bizarre natural phenomenon turns Seattle’s waterways into a slippery, smelly carpet of dead fish, while loggers race to beat an early spring flood.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Duwamish River presented a strange sight yesterday. Captain Marshall of the steamer 'Lulu' reported that on his way up the river on Sunday, he passed through continuous shoals of herring with which the river seemed literally alive. Men were out in their canoes hooking them in at a lively rate on boarded sides.
However, when they descended the river yesterday, they found the surface of the water literally covered with dead herring. It appeared that whole shoals of them had been destroyed together. The cause of the wholesale destruction is not known, but it is supposed that they died from the effect of fresh water.
Meanwhile, the loggers are busy taking advantage of the rising waters. A gentleman from Snohomish informs us that during the past few days 1,000,000 feet of logs have been taken away from the Duwamish and Point to the different mills on the Sound. There are still a lot of feet in float there.
As everything appears to be ahead of time this season, we are likely to have our usual June freshet in May. The White and Duwamish rivers commenced rising rapidly on Monday afternoon, and up to yesterday morning they had crept up their banks for the space of a foot or more, and were still rising. It is evident that the snow drifts in the mountains, which usually melt away in June, have already to melt away, and the mountain streams are being swelled in consequence.
The late freshet this season is not likely to be heavy, however, as the Winter has been an open one and the accumulation of snow in the mountains small. Therefore the loggers who wish to take advantage of it to get their logs down, had better take it in the flood and improve it while it lasts.
In 1877, Seattle’s industrial economy was already at the mercy of the region's volatile hydrology, with loggers racing against early melts to float timber down the Duwamish. Today, as climate change alters precipitation patterns and threatens both salmon populations (the modern equivalent of the herring boom) and infrastructure from flooding, the tension between resource extraction and environmental stability remains a defining feature of life in the Pacific Northwest.
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