By Lester R. Petersen, Reprinted From: Raincoast Chronicles, Number 5

It was huge, sprawling across a great patch of shore and out over the water of its protective bay. Technologically it was no doubt inefficient. Run as a total process, probably no industrial operation received such high tuning as the Pacific Northwest salmon cannery.

In 1867 the salmon canning industry reached the Fraser River. From there it spread up north until almost one hundred canneries had been built throughout British Columbia's coastal waters. By 1957 almost all canneries beyond the Fraser delta had closed or disappeared.

During the years they operated, these canneries brought a unique way of life to the northwest coast.

These canneries came about through an unusual series of circumstances, typical of this part of the world. First of these was the canning process itself. Fraser River Sockeye salmon had been shipped, salted in barrels, from Fort Langley, established in 1827 by James MacMillan for the Hudson's Bay Company. But salted fish appealed to a limited palate, and sometimes arrived at its destination in no palatable state whatever. Canned sockeye became immediately popular and retained its taste indefinitely in the can.

Establishments such as Fort Langley, Fort McLaughlin, and Fort Rupert, which had been built to receive furs but which had grown into the fish processing business, thereby set a mode of operation for salmon canneries to follow. Some canneries were, in fact, built literally within a stone's throw of trading posts, which were being phased-out at about the time that the canneries began to appear on the scene. The cannery manager would have much the sauce powers as his prototype, the post factor, excepting the enforcement of criminal law. Much as furs had been brought to the trading post, so would fish be brought to the cannery. As the trapper had received tokens or script for his purchases rather than currency, so would the fisherman draw books of coupons with which to buy his needs.

A further circumstance joined with these phenomena to provide an additional ply to the thread; namely, a work force. Twenty years after Confederation, when the placer fields that had drawn a tremendous stream of miners were exhausted, the whole of British Columbia could count hardly fifteen thousand inhabitants. The need for fishermen could be met in part by providing gear to local Native Indian men. And Indian women could provide the important task of filling the can neatly and exactly with sliced salmon.

But a great gap in manpower still existed at both ends of this packing process. The whole fish must be cleaned and its head and tail severed; packed cans must be cooked, cooled, and nailed into wooden cases.

To make up a labour force which the white population could not furnish the Canadian Pacific Railway, during the early 1880's, imported some fifteen thousand Chinese labourers. For a time, as prodigious amounts of rock and earth had to be moved all along this phenomenal route, all of these human machines were needed. Within a very few years though, as the two ends of rail neared each other, camp after camp closed, releasing their work forces to search for other jobs. Just as the Canadian Pacific no longer needed this pool of Human labour -- huge for that time in British Columbia's history -- prospective cannery builders needed it desperately. It could be said without too much danger of contradiction that the majority of the Canadian west coast's canneries which came and disappeared again could not have been put into operation without borrowing from this army of Oriental workers.

The very early salmon cannery existed almost entirely on manpower. The salmon was caught by hand labour, cleaned and sliced by hand labour, and packed by hand labour into cans which were themselves produced by hand labour on the spot -- cut from tin plate and soldered into shape. Even when E. A. Smith's "Iron Chink", just after the turn of the century, eliminated the cleaning and slicing processes, and when the American Can Company introduced ready-made containers, the fish cannery still demanded, throughout its days, a great input of human exertion, both at sea and on shore.

All of British Columbia's inlets possessed tremendous runs of salmon. Only Smith Inlet and Rivers Inlet, though, were home to the spawning Sockeye, the only variety canned during early years of the industry. Located two hundred miles up-coast from the Fraser River, these northern waters seemed very remote and forbidding to an immigrant who might, in any case, find an opportunity to harvest boatloads of the world's prime sockeye from the Great river.

Nevertheless, despite all problems, Robert Draney and Thomas Shotbolt managed to bring Rivers Inlet Cannery into being in 1882.

While the Owikeeno people of Rivers Inlet remained numerous, native fishermen could man a large proportion of gillnet skiffs. These people had fished the inlet -- their hereditary tribal waters -- from time immemorial. In addition to the trap, the hook, and the spear, they were already accustomed, by the time Europeans arrived, to the use of a fibre salmon net. Any further deficiency in white fishermen was made up by transporting north numbers of Japanese boatmen, who quickly adapted to whatever conditions existed in their new surroundings.

During the 1890's, the ethnic composition of up-coast fishing fleets began to alter. Norwegian colonists settled in the Bella Coola Valley, and Danish-speaking immigrants established a colony at Cape Scott. From the beginning, men from both of these settlements sought cash incomes from work "outside". As they were already north, Rivers and Smith Inlets did not seem remote.

When, early in the twentieth century, families of Finlanders, rebelling against what they felt to be enslavement of the working class in their homeland, established the community of Sointula on Malcolm Island, the ethnic balance that was to persist at canneries in these two inlets began to take shape.

Since the cannery required both a large level space and docking for steamers, it invariably involved a structure on pilings. Projecting from some part of this wharf, and attached to it by a ramp, narrow lines of floats projected, like thin fingers from a hand, more or less parallel to the shore. Pilings and floats, it might be said here, have formed an indispensable foundation of almost every enterprise along the northwest coast right up to the present time.

Against the shore side of this wharf the cannery was built, leaving broad planked surfaces out to the sheer drop into deep water. Near the cannery, and usually on firm land, stood the boiler room. This all-important plant was called upon not only to power all canning machinery and to cook the canned fish, but also to keep the entire community ablaze with light.

Nearby also stood the equally important company store, office and cook-house and dining-room for manager and staff. Here a cook -- generally Chinese -- performed miracles between weekly steamer-calls with meats and vegetables already not fresh upon their arrival.

Somewhere, on flat ground or hillside near the cannery, stood the manager's home. From its location, it seemed to dominate the cannery area. Actually, while salmon were being canned, or while fishermen were in from the grounds on week-ends, the manager had little time to view his domain from his front window.

Few industrial operations have been so influenced by one individual as was the up-coast salmon cannery by its manager. The plant belonged to a company, but the success or failure of its operation depended on the acumen, the tact, and the personality of the man in charge. Until the radio-telephone made its advent after World War II, the ten or so canneries operating in Rivers Inlet shared one telegraph set. Except for the most urgent of communications, the manager drew on his own resources when decisions had to be made.

Even at the best of times, keeping his varied racial groups working in harmony to keep his production line running smoothly took a person of rare quality. Somehow, even during the periods of critical international ructions, with more diplomacy and less power than surface appearances would indicate, he held all together. While. for instance, Japan was making war against China during the 1930's, Chinese shore-workers processed without incident salmon caught by Japanese fishermen.

One phenomenon, the price paid the gillnetter for his fish. the manager could not control. The lowering of this price below what fishermen felt to be a subsistence level led to a two-week strike in 1931, and to the Great Strike of 1936, which cost the entire season. Despite pressure put on Chinese, Japanese and native Indian fishermen and workers by canning operators and by federal government agents, all of these groups chose to suffer loss of an entire season's income rather than break faith, even with national enemies. In each of these instances salmon prices were higher for the year following. But many fishermen during these pre-welfare-state times, knowing of the miseries strike action would bring to their families, still chose the ultimate weapon at their command in hopes of making a better way. From a vantage point of today's instant strike and exorbitant fish prices, it is difficult to comprehend the enormity of the action taken by workers of more than a generation ago.

Strangely enough, the strikers' solidarity resuIted in part from the multifoliate personalities of their cannery managers. While paid to represent cannery operators, the qualities that made them less accustomed to ask than to command rendered each, in varying degrees, unsuited to act as followers rather than leaders. As men among men, while they could not speak out, many inherently sympathized with the beleaguered, desperate strikers. In all of the bitter recriminations that invariably accompany an issue so momentous as a strike in times of avant, the cannery manager, in general, suffered little as a result of the role he played during very critical days. Seemingly born rather than made, the ethos and the modus of British Columbia's salmon cannery manager represents a mine for almost unlimited study.

Somewhere, also, at one end of the complex, stood the China House. Here, during off hours, the all-male gang of shoreworkers rnade their own way of life, eating, sleeping and playing Fan-Tan with ivory or pig-bone markers. The fishermen knew nothing of these, to them, nameless individuals. Washing most fastidiously at cold-water taps outside their plain wood building or sitting on a sunny evening, they conversed incessantly in a tongue of which the non-Oriental learned never a tone.

Many stories of so-called "Tong wars" became entangled into northwest coast fishing lore. Investigation into the bases for such bloody episodes reveal but a few actual incidents. There were far fewer cases of knife-play among Orientals than of gun-play among non-Orientals along British Columbia's coast. Rivers Inlet canneries did produce gun-play, during the Great Strike, but they saw precious little wielding of hatchet or knife.

In the area of the store and office, living accommodations were provided for a bookkeeper and whatever clerks the canning operation required. The bookkeeper -- usually, a permanent company employee assigned to a cannery during the fishing season kept records of all fish delivered and of expenses incurred by each fisherman. He also kept account of times worked by canning crews.

The millwright, because he enjoyed the dubious privilege of living at the cannery site year round, was provided with a home much like that of the massager. When the last can was packed away, the millwright began ills winter-long chore of dismantling, repairing, and re-assembling the entire mechanical plant. If two or more millwrights were needed for this job, they enjoyed at least a minimum of human company. Even so, they -- and their families, if they were married -- led their lives during the rain-filled off season almost entirely removed front direct contact with other members of humanity. Separated by waters that could become stormy enough even with summer winds, they could visit but little from one cannery to another during the short, grey days of winter. Somehow these men contrived to complete their appalling tasks in time so that, as the next season rolled around, when the first salrnon presented itself to the great long line of machinery every piece of metal was ready to do its job.

Cottages or apartments housed the net-men during their months at the cannery. These men made their way up-coast sometime in early spring. ln the vast loft above the cannery, with a steady rhythm of rain on the sloping roofs above their heads. they fought against time to make nets ready for the sockeye season. New nets, in pre-World War II days made of Irish linen by Barbour, who held a patent on the only practicable knot, were ready to be "hung" with cork-line and lead-line. A small rope, fed through a mold which stamped the cannery name to bits of lead and affixed them to it, acted as long sinker, holding one edge of the net down. A larger line, to which wooden "corks" were threaded at intervals, kept the other edge at the surface. Nets two years old were retired, to be made into float-ropes. Those front the season before were mended, stripped and re-hung for another season's use.

Native Indian families from up and down the coast migrated to Rivers and Smith Inlets each summer for the winter's "stake" to be made there. Each cannery provided a quarter of cabins for these people.

Socially-minded writers have, over the years, expended a considerable garland of words on the deplorable conditions which Chinese and native Indian peoples were forced to endure during the fishing season. Such criticisms however, neglect some essential considerations.

While cannery housing for these peoples was unquestionably primitive, it was equally primitive for any white fishermen who wished to spend weekends ashore. The cannery provided a plain living space with beds, stove, table and chairs, and storage shelves. But during the days when gillnet skiffs were powered only by oar and sail many fishermen, white as well as Indian, came from homes that lacked running water, oil-fired stoves or electricity, one amenity with which all cannery buildings were supplied. This sort of housing, then, did not seem too inadequate to tenants of years gone by.

Furthermore, the Rivers Inlet sockeye run arrived in the very middle of summer. Today well-to-do outdoor types leave fully automated homes, by choice, to spend much of this same season in summer camps just as primitive as were the cannery cabins of fifty years ago.

Prior to the early 1920's propeller-driven boats were not allowed to carry nets. Regardless of how a fisherman might arrive at the cannery, he must perforce fish from a skiff-equipped with only the power of his own two hands. Some arrived by steamer from Vancouver or Victoria; others, by means of vessels from Bella Coola, Sointula, Alert Bay, Cape Scott, and other localities. Some of these boats would see duty as tow-boats and as fish collectors.

The fisherman, having received word earlier in the year that a net and skiff would be reserved for him, appeared at the cannery about a week before the season's opening in order to assemble his necessities. His skiff, lamed inside end painted outside in the cannery colors, had already been launched, and must be bailed of its rainwater. A cotton tent or a hedged "dog-house" had to be attached to this 25-foot craft, forward from the main bulkhead.

Into this little space -- "home" for the days on the fishing grounds -- he stowed a week's groceries, Primus stove, and bedding, without mattress. To a piece of old line provided him he tied a rock gathered from the sheer beach for a crude anchor. When all else was ready he pulled his net aboard.

During opening day, usually the third Sunday in June, the manager dispatched tows of skiffs to various fishing grounds. Like a general deploying his troops he sought to cover all fronts. No one knew just where the best schools of sockeye would appear. It was the manager's responsibility to ensure that boats from his cannery were stationed at every likely passage.

Photo (left): Tug boat tows salmon gill netters to the fishing grounds ca 1940. Note the small tent shelters on the boats. Photo (right): These "day boats" were only powered by oars and a small sail. (Canfisco Photo Collection)

Fishermen rowed out from the cannery float to where a tow-boat waited. As each skiff arrived, more tow-line was paid-out. In Rivers Inlet, skiffs were not linked one to another, as was done in other places along the coast. Here, each tow-boat was equipped with a heavy line. At skiff-length intervals, smaller lines, about four feet in length, end with hardwood eyes set in the loose ends, branched out alternately from either side of the main line. Each fisherman received one of these branch lines. He fed his painter rope through the eye and tied the end in a bow-knot amidships.

With the latest arrival nearest its stern, the tow-boat set out toward its destination, pulling as many as forty skiffs.

A fisherman had no contact with the row-boat, sometimes far ahead of him. When he wanted to drop-off. he was obliged to follow a very exact and very strenuous procedure, First, seated, well braced, he pulled undone his painter and held it by the end. Then, with the other hand, he grasped the tow-line, which lay, rigid front the pull on it, alongside his skiff. Holding to this, and travelling full speed, he gradually let out his painter, through the eye of his branch line, allowing the bow of his skiff to veer away from the tow-line. Selecting his own "moment of truth", he released, first painter, then tow-line, at the same time beseeching his private gods to keep him clear of the double column of vessels charging at him from astern.

Once clear, he was on his own, far from another human being, on a sea not necessarily calm. In a ceremony dating from days when fishermen carried no timepieces, canneries fired a gun at six o'clock each Sunday, the commencement of legal fishing for the week.

Far beyond the range of this sound, the individual fisherman had to depend on his own reckoning.

When six o'clock -- or its near approximation -- arrived, the fisherman rowed a few strokes, then threw over the stern a buoy attached to his net's cork-line. A flag on this buoy displayed his cannery's particular colors. Letting out a bit of net to catch in the water, he then commenced to tow, at right antes to the channel and, if he was beyond the inlet in Fitzhugh Sound, far froze shore.

With the trailing end of the cork-live tied to the skiff's stern, and the sun stilt high in the northern June heavens, there was nothing to be done now for an hour or two. Now was the time to consider the world's woes. With neither radio nor reading matter, the fisherman, as much as any other follower of a lone pursuit, was forced to turn inward for mental stimulation. Mingled with rational contemplation of his net, totally unrelated minutae linked in strange trains of thought. Accompanying images, equally unrelated to a factual world, flickered in a weird kaleidoscope across some vast abyss of the mind.

Nothing much is recorded as having come from these unnumbered bouts of intertwined reason and fantasy. No monumental story; no cosmic-conscious philosophy; no great work of art seems to have been produced on the gillnet fishing grounds of Rivers Inlet. Perhaps the subconsciously realized comedy-relief aspect of the phenomenon: of a time of peace interspersed between times of uttermost elemental strife, smothered any chance of the fisherman's bringing his imaginative musings to fruition. Very often, when wind and rain prevailed, there was little occasion for anything but practical thought and action.

At night. with wind screaming and sky blackened by clouds, body and mind, during waking hours, became absorbed in a brooding evaluation of the general Scheme of Things. At such times. the bobbing lantern at the net's far end -- set there to replace the flag before dusk -- might assume overwhelming proportions. Sometimes the only light in view, it seemed like a living, friendly being, the only spark with which he maintained any contact whatsoever. If the storm were to overthrow it, the night would become dark indeed.

Soon after dawn, after having dozed in fragments, the fisherman must "pick-up" his net. For this operation he dons hipboots, oilskin apron and, if rain is falling, rubber coat and sou'wester hat. If he has managed to procure one, he pulls in the net over a roller attached to his skiff's stern. To facilitate setting it out again he "splits" the lines, throwing cork-line forward and letting lead-line fall just behind his boots. Salmon caught in the net he forces out from the mesh that holds it behind the gills.

With net and fish aboard, he must pump or bail his craft. Then, as tides have probably swept him miles from his chosen grounds, he must row or sail back. Round-bottomed skiffs are almost impossible to row against wind and tide, but their keels permit a certain amount of tacking. Flat-bottomed skiffs, even though they were provided with centreboards, gain no way in a tack into the wind, but can, with an expenditure of almost superhuman energy, be rowed into it. Finding a "drift" clear of other nets, he now "sets-out" again.

With one eye on the watch for his collector. he can now take time for a rudimentary breakfast. The adept cook could produce, in wind and wave, morsels of rare delight from the tiny Primus; the culinary duffer used the contrivance sparingly, and frequently ate his food cold.

The collector -- tow-boat of the day before, if the fisherman has not travelled too far -- pulls-up alongside his skiff sometime during the morning. He pitches his sockeye aboard, passes his tally book to the skipper for a record of his catch, and asks about fishing elsewhere. Somewhere, far off, there has been a big catch -- but the collector is heading in the opposite direction. He stays put for at least another day.

On Friday he waits, net aboard and covered, to be towed back to the cannery. Here he learns the ritual of precious days spent at a calm moorage. He must pull his net up into one of the "bluestone" tanks lined along a portion of the wharf-edge, leaving damaged portions hanging-out. The copper sulphate solution in the tank dissolves destructive algae from the immersed part of the web; and a net-man, his mending needle flashing faster than the eye can follow, miraculously sews new mesh into the gaping holes.

lf he has a cabin ashore the fisherman carries bedroll and other essentials to it. If not, he remains aboard his skiff, as the majority choose to do. Surprisingly, although he has been bone-tired through most of the week at sea, he whiles away the long evening. He walks along to the cannery to see his fish canned. He moves from one knot of fellow fishermen to another, picking-up bits and pieces of the jumble of lore that he must somehow classify and remember. Without benefit of chart, he learns to piece together such terms as Fish-Egg, Addenbrooke Light, Swan Rock, the "Jap Drift", Rouse Point, the Haystack, Charcoal Bay, Long Point and others into some semblance of their restive locations. He hears of whales, that might sink his boat; of reefs; of seals, that pilfer during the day; and of human fish-thieves, who steal from nets in the dead of night.

All that he hears is real. The human thieves steal silently, with the amount of their theft never known. The seal is also silent, and maddenly elusive. The fisherman can gain respite from this intelligent creature only by pulling in his net, complete with sockeye fish-heads left by the marauder, and removing to some other spot.

Whales are not so silent. The sperm whale -- as much as eighty feet in length -- occasionally visits the fishing grounds. Here, rising above the surface now and again to blow, it cavorts about the net, plucking-out salmon with the delicacy of a human hand. The fisherman whose net this enormous beast of the sea is treating as a smorgasbord sits at the stern of his craft, knife in hand, ready to cut his cork-line should the whale become entangled. At night the sound of a whale blowing enters the very soul. But it never loses its finesse, and finally goes on its way.

Killer whales pass by in pods, two or three at a time always at the surface, blowing and arcing their high black dorsal fins. Although they literally never pause to pluck fish from nets, their grim-looking, seemingly purposeful movements make them appear even more foreboding than their larger relatives.

In his wanderings to the limits of cedar planking, he gathers impressions that will remain with him through years to come. Every glance of a stranger face; every syllable of an unfamiliar tongue merges with the composite mist of memory. A gestalt of buildings and boats set against hemlock and cedar forest imprints on some inner eye. Sounds of machinery record on an inner ear. Half a lifetime later, all might be recalled with amazing clarity.

As the season advances, tow-boats that had headed out toward the open sea now turn their prows up-inlet. Here, the fisherman encounters physically sites which had been only names. Toward the head, the fillet is a pallid green, whitened by milky waters from Mt. Silverthrone and from Klinaklina Glacier. Whereas at Fitzhugh Sound foothills rolled slowly back, at Shotbolt Bay mountains rise abruptly from the inlet's floor to nearly five thousand feet. So sheer are some of the totally bare slopes that a fisherman in bright sunshine may see clouds form around these peaks, and watch rivulets of fresh water stream down the smooth rocky slopes at the prow of his skiff.

As the salmon ready for the last phase of their cycle, their journey up the Wannock River, boats from all canneries gather near the inlet's head. Gone now is the limitless space of the open Pacific. By day the familiar dots of cork-line floats can be seen in all directions as fishermen struggle for room, By night lantern lights twinkle from shore to shore, giving to the waters the appearance of some immense troop encampment of bygone days.

Now, as the season nears its end, ships that can at the cannery with supplies take aboard cases of canned salmon. If the pack is large, a freighter will appear, pitting its sedate progression against the crock to clear the fishing grounds with its valuable cargo before nets are strewn across its way.

Just as suddenly as the sockeye bad increased, they diminish in number. As July turns to August, the talk turns to next year's prospects. Charles Lord, Fisheries Officer, has usually made his predictions known by this time. Based on spawning conditions, hazards of flooding and slides, and on whatever other phenomena might have affected fingerling escapement three years before Lord's calculations, for weal or for woe, ace respected as the word of doom.

There is talk of future plans. Some will continue to fish the fall season on seine-boats. Some will turn to logging. A few will return to "stump-ranches", where they will spin out their stakes with odd jobs and winter trap-lines; perhaps, at the same time, enjoying a hit of pie-in-the-sky prospecting. While together all are boys, and the whole world a series of heroic episodes. There will be time enough later, the solitude, to contemplate the slim roll of bills that must somehow endure through lean Depression days ahead.

The last Friday arrives. The last tow to the cannery. The inlet is as bare as at the dawn of Creation, with never a scar to show where a million salmon have been removed. The net is palled into a bluestone tank for a final time. Personal belongings come out of the skiff; it has done its job, and will soon be stored for the winter in the cannery loft. Accounts are settled with the bookkeeper. The manager shakes hands in farewell. As he leaves the wharf, the fisherman finds his being torn a thousand ways in emotional contemplation. The season has ended.

Gillnet fishermen still make their way, in their high-speed boats, to Rivers Inlet. Their monofilament nylon nets catch the sockeye salmon. There are fish camps here and there where supplies can be bought -- for cash. But of the canneries that gave a unique flavour to the inlet for a lifetime, hardly a sign remains.