_ Columbia River was
4) with fish. The arch-
‘cs of these fish flecked
fier like waves as they
upstream in hordes which
ree weeks to pass a point
che river had trenched a
4: mile wide. Twenty. foot
ey surmounted in mighty
nd they turned the ‘shal-
Woeks of thesheadwaters
seething mass of fins,
Silvery flanks.
wether Lewis and Wil-
lark, the first white men
§ -ney down the -Columbia
hey had seen the great-
ff, reseurces in the land.
-the frontiersmen were
B-e that in the swift water
led by the salmon there
7 too, a mysterious force
' of transforming the
M the continent which they
plored. Lewis and Clark
‘nothing of hydroelectri-
@they did not know that
ley they had followed
tj the mountains to the
i contained more latent
ipower than any | other
- in North America. Nor

svelopment of this unseen
gr; might bring about the
ifevable day when the last
Eyk salmon would flip its
®. the Columbia.

i>, at tidewater 152 miles
athe sea, and Grand Cou-
700 miles upstream from
fville. These dams make
fle forty percent of the
Paium production for Am-
military aircraft. And
} are plans to construct
f more dams on the Co-
a, notching the river into
nt staircase and generat-
ve times the power pro-
3) in the whole TVA. [If
= roposal materializes, the
SFish and Wildlife Service
jady with a corollary plan
fF calls for the most tre-
B ous biological experiment
f nerican history.

j save the principal fish
f in the nation, a commer-
resource capitalized at
300,000, the Fish and Wild-
tervice may have to trans-
downstream to rivers
tidewater all the salmon
trout that now spawn in
-ibutaries of the Columbia
hen Bonneville and Grand
i

e@

anderstand the reasons for
‘1e experiment, it is neces-
to understand the life
of the most remarkable
sure of this hemisphere—
zreat Chinook or king sal-
of the Pacific seaboard.
sther beast, bird, or fish has
neredible an existence.

he baby salmon emerge four
ive months after the adult

have deposited millions <of -

far back in one of the
intain ranges which drain
: the Columbia River. This
renerally at the bottom of
aming, gravel-strewn creek.
sr a year in what biologists
“the parent stream’ the
have developed into finger-
s five or six inches _ long.
y drift dewn the creek, and
n innumerable other tribu-
es, and finally into the main

they reach the sea, and
-e they remain for the bulk
‘their life. Exactly where
ly go no one is sure. After
-2e years in the Pacific the
inon—a fingerling no longer
a a strong,
/ enough to conquer
ids and tear a hook from an
urler’s line—heeds the call of

am of the Columbia. So at”

fighting fish_

A Great

iological Experiment

the river, just as once it re-
sponded to the urge of the sea.
The salmon fights its way up-
stream, stemming freshéts" and
dodging nets and traps. Beside
it swim all other salmon which
drifted down the Columbia
more than three years before
and have survived the perils of
yiver and ocean. They thrash
through rapids, over falls, up

ladders at Bonneville Dam, and ~

deep into the uplands. Each fish

hunts a paticular creek or lake...

This is what makes the Pa-
cific salmon unique among wild
ereatures. The niigrating Chi-
nook does not seek any creek
or lake, although the Columbia
is ribbed with ten thousand
tributaries, but rather the one
creek or lake where half a de-
cade earlier it emerged from
the ege.

After it enters, fresh water
across the Columbia’s bar a
Chinook never feeds again. It
will strike at a lure but will
not take bait. The oily tissue
beneath the salmon’s_ scales
must power it all the way to
the parent stream. This oil is
its fuel. Thus for countless
epochs the strongest, stoutest-
hearted, and - biggest salmon
specimens on earth have spawn-
ed in the final headwaters.
Once the female fish has laid
her eggs and the male has fer-
tilized them, the life cycle of
the Chinooks is completed. They
drift downstream, tail foremost,
and die within 24 hours.

Only one factor ever varies
the pattern of this strange
existence. If the salmon can-
not reach the parent stream, it
perishes without spawning.

Ss
F a series of dams is strung
across the Columbia the

Fish and Wildlife Service be--

lieves the one solution may be
“to transplant the salmon runs
inhabiting the upper tributaries
to the rivers of the lower Co-
lumbia.”’ Can this be done? Ex-
traordinary though the experi-
ment sounds, a similar one on
a smaller scale has been going
on for the past five years, and
has met with remarkable suc-
cess. g

When Dr. Ira.N. Gabrielson,
director of the Fish and Wild-
life Service, first saw - Grand
Coulee Dam looming above the
Columbia like a great crenel-
ated fortress, he knew that no
Chinook ever would spawn
again in the ultimate  head-
waters of the country’s main
salmon waterway. For as long
as steel and concrete might
endure, the 800 miles of river
and the 100,000 square miles of
watershed behind Grand Coulee
were cut off as a spawning
ground.

Bonneville Dam the fish could
pass via wide, watery ladders.
Bonneville, despite its 518,000
kilowatt capacity, is only 72
feet in height. Grand Coulee,
largest edifice ever reared by
man, towers 550 feet above the

Columbia’s granite bed. Water’

crashing over its parapet falls
twice as far as Niagara Falls,
with a roar heard for miles
across the arid plateau of the
Inland Empire. Not even the
biggest salmon, which — since

time immemorial have spawned.

in the headwaters of the Colum-
bia, could pass this battlement.
In addition, the 151-mile lake
formed back of the dam so rais-
ed the temperature of the river
the that most of the migrating

= 13 — P.A. MAGAZINE SECTION

salmon would be sure to die
before they attained the spawn-
ing grounds. Chinooks en route
to spawn are extremely suscep-
tible to water variations.

Gabrielson and his associates
answered this unique challenge
with a unique solution. In 1939
they began trapping all the fish
ascending the upper Columbia.
The salmon ‘were caught in
specially designed cages at
Rock Island. Dam, a_ small
structure a little below Grand
Coulee.

From the Rock Island traps
the salmon were poured into
long, 1,000-gallon tank trucks.
Oxygen pumps and ice cham-
bers kept the water
trucks at‘the same temperature
as the Columbia River. Alumin-
um paint warded off the glare
of the sun. At a speed of 45
miles an hour, the fleet of eight
silvery vehicles rolled up into
the Cascade Mountains to the
little town of Leavenworth,
Washington, where the Fish
and Wildlife Service had built
the biggest fish hatchery in the
world. Here the salmon were
artificially propagated. Each
female fish was hit on the head
and split open for the precious
eggs, approximately 10,000 to
the female Chinook, consider-
ably fewer to the smaller spe-
cies. The sperm from the male
salmon then was squirted onto
the eggs. In fields of .troughs
and pools, the fingerlings thus
were hatched and reared.

Finally the baby fish made
their own excursion in the oxy-
genated tank trucks. They were
driven to the sources of the
Methow, Entiat, Okanagan, and
Wenatchee Rivers and there
dumped into the water. These
streams join the Columbia be-
low Grand Coulee Dam — the
essential fact of the whole ex-
periment.

It manifestly is impossible
for salmon ever to spawn
again above Grand Coulee.
The naturalists of the Fish
and Wild]ife: Service were at-
tempting to school the off-
spring of the salmon-~ that
spawned above Grand Coulee
to take as their own parent
streams tributaries which
flow into the main river below
Grand Coulee.

e
AS “Uncle Sam’s Fish Col-
lege” as this undertaking

has been dubbed, trained its
pupils? This past spring and
fall told the tale. Up the Col-
umbia forged the salmon* which
five years before had been the
first class in the Fish College.
They were the offspring of the

fish originally trapped at Rock

Island.

The weirs in the Rock Island
traps were lifted for these voy-
agers. They were allowed to
swim on through. The natural-
ists. watched breathlessly. The
critical question was whether
the salmon would turn into the
mouths of the Entiat, Okanag-
an, Methow and Wenatchee
Rivers or whether they would
migrate on to Grand Coulee and
perish in the man-made Niag-
ara billowing over the crest of
the dam.

Like well-drilled battalions,
the fish swung off up the rivers
in which they had been liber-
ated as fingerlings four years
before. No stragglers swam on
to Coulee’s impassable. barrier,
answering the upland call that
had lured their ancestors. Chi-

in the

By Richard L. Neuberger

nooks marked for the Entiat
and Methow swam _ unhesitat-
ingly into those white watered
streams. Blueback salmon, a
Columbia River version of the
small but meaty Alaskan sock-
eye, spawn only in rivers with
a lake at their source — rivers
like the Okanagan and Wenat-
chee, into which the bluebacks
turned as though they had been
coached by a West Point drill-
master.

No longer will fish ascending
the upper Columbia be trapped
at Rock Island and artificially
hatched at Leavenworth. The
gates in the traps have been
lifted permanently. The parent
streams of theSe salmon are
now rivers on the downstream
side of Grand Coulee. After op-
eration of Uncle Sam’s Fish
College from 1939 to 1944, five
complete cycles of salmon have

« been put through the process.

For the time being the exper-
iment has succeeded — beyond
their wildest dreams, some ich-
thyologists say. But this, after
all, solves only. part of the
problem of saving the salmon
runs.

In the past only about ten
percent of the Columbia’s sal-
mon have spawned back of
Grand Coulee. They have been
the largest fish in size but com-
paratively few in numbers.

hat about the others? Most
of the salmon find their parent
stream between Bonneville and
Grand Coulee. These are the
fish which must be transplanted
if the other projected dams are
built. Will artificial propaga-
tion and transplanting’ be suc-
cessful when the number of
salmon involved is multiplied
many times? Hatchery fish sel-
dom have the vitality and
stamina of their wild brethren.

There are other obstacles to‘

be overcome if the vast salmon
industry is.to be kept alive.
The incursions of civilization on
the miraculous life cycle of the
salmon are not limited to cut-
ting off the upland breeding
grounds. Survival of the salmon
depends on three conditions:

@ Enough fish must escape
the commercial nets at sea and
near the mouth of the Columbia
to get upstream to spawn.

@ The upstream spawning
grounds must be protected from

pollution and diversion, as welk

as blockade; and

@ The fingerlings must be
able to migrate safely to the
ocean.

These ‘conditions have not
been met for many years. They
are not being met now.

@

[* 1855 when the first trains

of the Northern Pacific were
swaying through the Columbia
Gorge, canneries scooped out of
the Columbias wide waters 31,-
493,000 pounds of Chinook sal-
mon. The canneries are still
hauling fish out of the river—
though by 1940 their output had
been reduced by almost half.
And the salmon are subject to

peril from other sources too.
Trollers take a deadly toll at

sea. Cannery fishermen at
Swiftsure Bank, off the en-
trance to Puget Sound, have

caught nearly $10,000,000 worth
of salmon every year for many
decades. Swimming upstream,
the fish must run another
gauntlet of nets. Indian spears-
men at Celilo Falls have a
treaty with the United States
government, negotiated in 1855,
which allows them to fish in the

Columbia River for “as long as
grass shall grow on the hills
and the sun shall set in the
sky.”

In recent years the settlement
and exploitation of the Pacific
Northwest have been greatly
accelerated. Developments
which might logically have re

quired several decades have
been compressed into a dozen
months. Water which once a

tired hiker could drink now
bears the chemical residue of
paper mills and metal plants
and the sewage of new mush--
rooming war communities. Nei-
ther salmon nor the insect and
crustacean life which’ sustains.
them as fingerlings can com-
pete with this pollution and
waste.

Even the fingerlings that do
not have to cope with hazards
of this sort must take their
chances with man,made  ob-
structions on their way down to
the sea. At Bonneville Dam,
where the fish ladders have
proved successful and the re-
turning salmon traverse them
quickly and easily, the little
fish on their way to the sea are
at the mercy of the river. They
cannot pick out the ladders.
They must take the course of
least resistance. Often they do
not~ find the fingerling by-
passes provided especially for

them —— concrete flumes which
honeycomb the powerhouse.
Most of the fingerlings

are
swept over the spillway. In the
maeistrom: at the base of the
dam some of the baby fish die.

Biologists have come to the
conclusion that perhaps 25 per-
cent of the fingerlings going
down the Columbia are killed
by the stunning impact of the
Bonneville spillway.

On the wall of Dr. Gabriel-
son’s office hangs a map show-
ing how man-made encroach-
ments have gradually shrunk
the spawning areas available to
salmon in the Columbia Basin.
An impassable dam here, un-
screened irrigation ditches
there, -indiscriminate -dumping
of sewage and chemical wastes
of a hundred towns, logged-off
slopes, dredging for minerals=—
all this has blacked off nearly
two-thirds of the lakes and
ereeks where fish originally
spawned. Today only a few ma-
jor tributaries still offer sanc-
tuary to the fish which come
home from the sea with the
autumn equinox.

; To provide adequate spawn-
ing ground it may be necessary
to move the entire salmon run
downstream and to blow up the
dams on the Clackamas, Sandy
and several other rivers near
the tidewater. The plan con-
templates trapping all migrat-
ing salmon in the Bonneville
Dam ladders and propagating
them in a series of immense
hatcheries far larger than the
facilities at Leavenworth. Then
the resultant fingerlings would
be released in the few available
rivers near the sea.

HE likelihood of successful
transfer downstream is sub-
ject to many imponderables. Is
there room in the lowland trib-
utaries for the immense aquat-
ic life of the Columbia? Will
fish adapted to the high moun-
tains spawn in rivers at tide-
water? How many salmon will
be lost in the elaborate trans-
planting process? Will the vi-
tality of the species be irre-
trievably sapped by the inter-
vening hatchery propagation?
At what point does biology

rebel against man’s intrusion?
And at what point does the
— Continued on Page 14

SATURDAY, JULY 7, 1945