"The harbinger of good news..."

"[T]here was great joy with the natives last night in consequence of the arrival of the Salmon; one of those fish was caught; this was the harbinger of good news to them. They informed us that these fish would arrive in great quantities in the course of about 5 days. this fish was dressed and being divided into small peices was given to each child in the village. this custom is founded in a supersticiuos opinion that it will hasten the arrival of the Salmon." -- Meriwether Lewis

Near the Dalles and all along the Columbia River, the Corps of Discovery witnessed a salmon economy in full swing. Salmon were at the end of their seasonal upstream surge and the Native Americans in the area had all the fish they could want and enough to trade. Clark noted wooden houses where half the rooms were devoted to dried salmon and estimated that stacks on nearby rocks contained 10,000 pounds of fish. Even more frequently than they commented on the amount of salmon, though, the explorers mentioned the rough, surging currents that made canoeing a challenge. This was the key to the salmon's abundance; they thrived in the pure water and rapid rivers that characterized the Columbia River basin.

Tracking the changes

Over the past 200 years, the unfettered river waters that impressed and frightened Lewis and Clark have become polluted and divided by dams. The Columbia system once saw 16 million salmon returning each year. Now, only 1 percent of the wild salmon that existed at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition come back to these once-mighty waters.

Irrigation draws water out of the Columbia and its tributaries, and 29 federal dams block rivers in the Columbia basin. Industrial logging muddies streams with sediment, and runoff from agriculture, mines, and cities pollutes the water. The trip of the salmon upstream as adults and downstream as smolts has become an increasingly challenging obstacle course, with fewer making it through each year.

In 1896, even after salmon populations were starting to decline, the total catch of chinook, coho, sockeye, chum, and steelhead was 3.3 million. In 1990, it was 257,000. Some runs of coho, chinook, and sockeye are already extinct, and 21 runs of all species are threatened and 5 are endangered. Additional threats come from overharvest by large commercial fishing operations, farm-raised salmon, and hatchery-raised salmon that decrease genetic diversity and bring disease to wild populations.

The lower Snake River, the area Clark described as full of rapids and teeming with fish, is a particularly vital area for salmon recovery. It contains populations of endangered spring/summer chinook, fall chinook, and steelhead, in addition to four dams, which create a lethal corridor that threatens the survival of salmon in the Snake River basin.