The Salmon Strike That Moved an Industry: How Columbia River Fishermen’s Union Priced Themselves Out of Business
In February 1898, a Chicago buyer predicted that the fishermen's demand for higher wages would force salmon canneries to abandon the Columbia River for Alaska—a prediction that came true within a decade.
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.
Union Creek is being loaded with lumber piled 30 feet high, to be taken north for the Chacal cannery. Fifty-nine Chinese arrived by the Walla Walla yesterday and will go north on the Idaho to engage in cannery work, together with about 106 picked up at Portland and Astoria, and several fishing boats.
About these preparations for canning salmon, I had an interesting and meaty conversation with Mr. Thomas McCausley, superintendent of the Alaska Salmon Packing Co. at Tongass, and Mr. A. W. Berry, an old Columbia river packer, now largely interested in the Tongas Packing Company. As they were detailing the facts concerning the salmon industry in Alaska last year and the outlook for the coming spring and summer, which are given below, I was reminded of a talk I had just one year ago at the Palace hotel, San Francisco, with Mr. J. K. Armsby of Chicago.
Mr. Armsby is the head of the house that buys and sells more canned salmon than any other firm in America. At that time the Columbia River Fishermen's Union had passed a resolution fixing (I think) $10 as the price of salmon for the ensuing season. Mr. Armsby said: "Unless the fishermen recede from this stand few canneries will make money this year; most of them will do well if they come out even and some will suffer a loss. You have done nothing artificially to replace the stock of salmon which with every year since the industry was started, has suffered depletion. It is my judgment that the high price now demanded for fish will precipitate what must inevitably come in the course of events, namely the removal of the industry from the Columbia river to Alaska."
This 1898 prediction captures a pivotal moment in Pacific Northwest labor history: the tension between worker wages and industrial viability. While the specific price-fixing attempt failed to stop the decline of the Columbia salmon industry, it foreshadowed the massive consolidation of power that would follow as capital moved north to Alaska, leaving local workers with less leverage—a dynamic that echoes in modern debates over resource extraction and labor rights in the region.
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