The Story Of The Columbia River Gillnetter
The Columbia River salmon is in trouble, and it’s going to be a long struggle to save any of the remaining runs from extinction. Nowhere is the pinch felt more than in Astoria where many families have fished the river for generations. Visitors here are met by a sign that proudly greets the visitor with the title of “the oldest American city west of the Rockies”. It was founded in 1811 as Fort Astor-the first European settlement in the Pacific Northwest.
Lewis and Clark remarked on the amazing runs of salmon in the Columbia and a flourishing native culture was built around them. The fishing industry had its beginning in 1866 when the new technology of canning was used to exploit the annual salmon runs. Means as varied as fishwheels, traps, horse seines, and all manner of hooks and nets were used to haul in vast quantities of chinook and cohoe.
Those pioneers learned to live with hard times and hard work and their spirit continues in today’s third and fourth generation gillnetters. But there are still some people alive who remember the glory days of the salmon and now their story has been recorded for posterity.
It was a tale waiting to be told and, as is often the case, it took an outsider to see the potential. He is Jim Bergeron, a mid-westerner who had moved here from Minnesota to attend Oregon State University’s marine science program. Bergeron had met many of the old-timers and knew the value of recording their memories. He was teaching at Clatsop County Community College in 1969 when he began looking for ways to increase the scope and effect of his courses.
Now the history of the fishery and the character of some of the families has been preserved in a 32 minute video cassette, “Work Is Our Joy-the story of the Columbia River Gillnetter”. The history that began there still seems to fit the whole of Clatsop county: it has the feel of an outpost at the NW tip of the Oregon country where a resilient community continues to wrest a living from the sea.
In just a decade the area became a magnet for European immigrants-in the 1880’s only 13% of an estimated 2,500 Columbia River fishermen were American-borne. It’s mainly these Scandinavians and Yugoslavians who created and defined the most distinctive of the salmon fisheries-the Columbia gillnet.
He assisted in starting the college’s commercial fishing program which continues to this day. Short, specific classes on a variety of marine subjects are offered to suit the needs of new entrants to the industry. (Jim is a man who has always seen beyond the short term in his work and it was an experience of his that led directly to the film project.)
After a stint mixing teaching and fishing in Alaska in 1970-1, Bergeron quit and went fishing for albacore full-time out of Astoria with his partner Art Andersen. After one season they converted their 76 foot Texas shrimpboat, the La Louisienne, to trawling and were finally getting things organised. Jim was the junior partner, with a masters degree in oceanography, Art was in his late 60’s and had spent his working life at sea.
“He had lived through great changes in the industry and he was a fine storyteller-whatever the occasion,” Bergeron remembered. “Even then I was vaguely aware that these yarns of his had a lasting value-that they were actually a historical record”. “I should be writing some of this down,” I often told myself.
“I came off watch one morning and tried to wake him”…to no avail. Art had died in his sleep. “He had lived a full life, you understand; but as time went by I couldn’t help but think of all his stories-his personal history-that was lost with him.”
And there were many other storytellers on the waterfront. In truth, he knew, almost everyone on the river had something to contribute to the record. During the conversion of the La Louisienne, Bergeron had worked with, and listened to, the shipwrights at Astoria Marine Construction talking about the heyday of wooden boatbuilding, the war years, Prohibition.
There were many fishermen now in their 80’s, their wives, children-and memories going back to the turn of the century. A whole generation and a way of life was swiftly passing. Rather than dwell on regrets he resolved that he would take a tape recorder out and start preserving that spoken record.
Jim became Sea Grant extension agent for Clatsop County in 1974. His wide-ranging interests, including mask carving and popular history, soon found many novel ways to promote education and information on the coastal environment to schools and colleges. With a couple of practice runs to define his approach the “Columbia River Gillnetter Oral History Project” finally began to take shape in 1988.
After many discussions with interested parties Bergeron called a meeting at the Columbia River Maritime Museum and invited everyone he could find who might participate in the effort. What politicians would call “a consensus” was arrived at.
The film was to be a joint venture between the Museum and Sea Grant. Some grant money was available and many donors pitched in to create matching funds, including the fishermen’s union, Salmon for All, marine suppliers and individuals. No less important was the moral support and ideas offered from many quarters. An operating budget was established which allowed the hiring of Larry Johnson, a Portland documentary film-maker as producer and photographer. It was understood by all concerned, however, that much of the work would be done on a non-profit basis. The final cost of the project was in the region of $17,500.
Together Johnson and Bergeron began locating likely candidates for their tape recorder (borrowed from the Library of Congress). Some were well known in the community, others kept their memories to themselves. Don Riswick, an active member of the Fishermens Protective Union, editor of the union paper, and still fishing at age 73, was able to direct them down a few backwaters and polled his members for old photographs and documents to illustrate the narration.
Over a period of a year 38 one-hour conversations were recorded on location and form the basis of the museum’s archive. In the video itself Johnson’s production expertise has skillfully blended old photos with his contemporary shots to produce a flowing visual effect One candidate Riswick knew was the father of union executive secretary Jack Marincovich.
At 83, Andrew was one of the six remaining inhabitants of Clifton, which is one of the last cannery villages still occupied. In the early days Yugoslavs, Greeks and Italians made up the population of 250, divided along national lines. “In 1922 the dance hall and skating rink burned down, but we got water in 1927” he remembers. The elder Marincovich still rose early to take long walks on the now-silent railroad tracks and to watch the river.
Oliver Dunsmoor is the oldest speaker. He was a spry 92 years and still likes to do a little sportfishing and hunting. His memory encompasses the family trip upriver to the Lewis & Clark exhibition of 1906, market hunting for ducks before the Great War and union struggles in the 1930’s. He was on picket boat duty in 1941 when a Japanese submarine shelled the shore and he fished in Alaska until he was 66.
He also has the distinction of having worked the river in the very last year of sail, when the first marine engines, like the Palmer two-cylinder, were treated strictly as auxiliaries. 80 years on he was still specific about the lack of a center board in the newly-motorised boats reducing their ability to point into the wind.
Cecil Moberg lost his sight in the early fifties, so he retired before linen nets gave way to synthetics and wood to fiberglass. He has a clear mental image of his family working in a small mill turning out 4,000 cedar floats a day, building home-made storage batteries for the first Wolverine engines, the shipwrights caulking at Booth’s Cannery, and the work of bluestoning the 12 ply-40 linen nets (dipping in copper sulphate) every 10 days. “We hand-hauled 250 fathoms of net 6 fathoms deep, and did it several times a night”. Even now Cecil can weave the image with his words and take the listener back to another time.
Arnold “Toots” Petersen still lives in the east end of Astoria in the village the new immigrants called Alderbrook. His house overlooks the uppertown station of the long defunct Union Co-operative Packing Company. He reflected on 1933 when the winter price was 1/2 a cent per lb. “But we struck in the spring for 6 cents a lb. and by fall we were getting 10cents per lb.!” 100 lbs of fish was a good night’s work at that price.” He always fished alone, making as many as a seven sets by hand in a single day.
These old fishermen (and many more of their comrades) recall the era of unlimited catchs-and rock-bottom prices in the 30’s. And the “June hogs”, fish that hit the scales at 50-100 lbs, loaded down with fat for a 1,000 mile swim to the upper Columbia. Without fail they point to the Grand Coulee as the cause of the precipitous decline-or the beginning of the end-of the glory days on the river. They watched as each new dam turned the spigot more tightly, cutting the flow of young fish to a trickle. It is a tribute to a way of life that it withstood such blatant and unthinking progress upstream and that people stayed to fight the powers that be.
To condense all of this in a half-hour presentation, hard choices had to be made. An hour’s recording might result in a twenty second clip…..or nothing. Eileen Martin of Skamokawa, a professional writer and married to a gillnetter, wrote a script with the aid of Hobe Kytr, a folklorist and musician who was now education co-ordinator at the maritime museum. Since this is a “living history” they had to consider the many differing viewpoints represented in the archive-many fishing families already felt the film was a community property.
But to have any larger effect it also had to hold the interest of the general viewer or student.The process of editing the material into an entertaining, professional program was a taxing one. It underwent multiple revisions for the best part of a year before the whole group was satisfied.
The title comes from the motto of the Korpela family gillnetters for four generations. In 1896 Matt Korpela wrote home to Finland recalling the saying “Beginning is always difficult, work is our joy, and industry overcomes bad luck”. It still rings true today and “Work is our Joy” has already found its way into the vocabulary of the waterfront. Overall, the film uses a blend of straight fact and nostalgia to create a memorable record.
At the premier screening in December 1989 over a hundred copies were sold. If there was any complaint it was only that the film was too short. “I considered that to be praise coming from the gillnetters themselves”, Bergeron explained. The worst would have been if anyone had felt it was too long!”
Financially, the film has broken even with video cassette sales at the museum and through the Sea Grant office, allowing Bergeron to recoup his stake. It has been hailed as a pioneering effort in the field and an inspiration to efforts throughout the country.
The film has been seen by some legislators and officials responsible for regulating the river and so has become a tool to save what is left of the fish runs. The Columbia had a unique fishery centered on the return of the salmon with run after run for nine months of the year. It is the oldest ongoing industry in the Pacific Northwest and has been destroyed in a manner that is equally remarkable: not by ignorance at sea or invisible pollution, but by a giant series of hydro-electric projects that once thrilled and inspired the nation.
Now trapped between drift-netting on the high seas and spawning groung destruction on shore the salmon fishermen have become a leading force for conservation and moderation on the river. They crusaded for the cleanup of sewage and industrial dumping, now they fight dioxin contamination from pulp mills, and radioactive runoff from Hanford.