The Great Columbia Fish Rush
When an electric railway culvert at Columbia flooded the flats, local residents turned the disaster into a spontaneous community harvest of salmon and trout.
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.
Along the Rainier avenue electric line between this city and Columbia, the flats used as vegetable gardens are completely covered with water. At Columbia, the freshet brought sport to the inhabitants. The electric railway track dammed up a rivulet, creating a pond. When the water went down, fish from Lake Washington found themselves imprisoned in the pools. All Columbia turned out; men and boys were wading waist-deep in the water, throwing fish onto the ground with their hands. W. M. Camp, superintendent of the Rainier avenue electric railway, jumped into the water up to his waist and threw out a salmon weighing eight or ten pounds. Others used pitchforks, rakes, and spears made from sticks with nails driven in the end. The fish caught were principally trout, silver salmon, and dog salmon.
“All Columbia turned out. Men and boys could be seen wading about in the water up to their waists, trying to scare up a fish.”
The area once known as Columbia is now the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle. The image of residents wading through flooded gardens to harvest salmon in the streets highlights a time when the urban landscape was still deeply integrated with the wild cycles of Lake Washington.
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