Klamath River tribe members protest at PacifiCorps offices in Portland in 2006 to demand removal of four dams on the Klamath. They won. | Photo: Patrick McCully, some rights reserved
The people who have lived along the Klamath River for millennia are now facing crisis levels of violence, disease and depression. Diabetes and heart ailments run rampant in their communities, and suicide rates have skyrocketed.
To save his people, Leaf Hillman, Director of the Karuk Tribe's Department of Natural Resources, believes there is one thing to do: Bring back the salmon.
We're salmon people, says Hillman, a tribe member in his early fifties who lives in the riverside town of Orleans. Our very identity is based on salmon.
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His tribe, working with the neighboring Yurok and Hupa tribes, has been at the front lines of the political battle to save and restore the Klamath's dwindling Chinook runs, both by demanding better management of water flowing out of the upstream reservoirs and by calling for removal of four dams that make hundreds of miles of salmon habitat inaccessible. In protests and marches the Klamath basin tribes have often targeted PacifiCorp, which owns the Klamath's dams. They have crashed company meetings and even dumped bucketfuls of toxic river algae - which thrives in the slow-moving, sun-warmed reservoir water - on the front steps of PacifiCorp's Portland, Oregon headquarters. They've done the same several times at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Sacramento office.
The tribes, working together as the Klamath Justice Coalition, have also negotiated over dam removal with state and federal agencies, and soon their efforts are going to pay off. The giant concrete barriers, built between World War I and the 1960s, are now slated to be removed - which will certainly go down in the books as one of the greatest environmental and cultural victories in the West.
Salmon, primarily Chinook but also coho, were the core of many California Indians' nutrition, wealth and culture. For young Karuk boys, catching and killing a Chinook was an important rite of passage, and the villages along the river subsisted on salmon almost all year. Of several seasonal runs of Chinook, the spring run was the most plentiful and important on the Klamath. Using nets and spears, fishermen caught tens of thousands of the big fish, which often weighed more than 40 pounds. Tribes on other river systems along the north coast of California and in the Central Valley were similarly dependent on Chinook salmon.
Klamath River and tributaries | Map: Wikimedia Commons
But in the space of less than a century, the salmon mostly vanished from many of California's watersheds. As European Americans flooded westward, they dug away mountainsides to hunt for gold, cut down forests and grazed cattle in fragile watersheds. They heavily fished the salmon, too. These industries all took their toll on both upstream spawning habitat and the stock of adult fish.
The biggest blow to the West's salmon came in the dam-building era of the 20th century. The giant concrete barriers gave the Americans electricity and water for irrigation. However, because the dams blocked the salmon's access to their spawning grounds, the runs collapsed. In the San Joaquin River, the Friant Dam, built during World War 2, eliminated the Chinook entirely by the late 1940s. In the Sacramento watershed, Folsom, Oroville and Shasta dams had similar effects.
Six dams were built on the Klamath River, and today more than 300 miles of former salmon habitat are inaccessible because of them. The dams also cause warm, sun-baked water to flow through the lower reaches of the river, posing a serious and deadly threat to salmon and trout, which depend on cold water. In 2002 near-bathtub temperatures in the middle and lower reaches of the Klamath caused an outbreak of deadly protozoans that killed tens of thousands of adult Chinook before they had a chance to spawn. The disaster affected other species, too.
Habitat enhancement efforts aimed at supporting salmon and steelhead populations have been funded for years by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). CDFW even built a hatchery just downstream of the Iron Gate Dam with the explicit intent of mitigating the impacts of the Klamath's dams. But Hillman says the hatchery hasn't worked very well. He says the loss of spawning habitat resulting from the Iron Gate Dam's construction in the 1960s was too great an impact to overcome for hatchery managers, whose job was to collect adult salmon gathered in the waters below the dam and manually blend their eggs and sperm in trays.
Four years after the Iron Gate Dam went in, the returns of the spring run fell off the cliff, Hillman says. There weren't even enough fish left to collect their eggs and make new fish.
Salmon numbers in the Central Valley and in the Klamath have continued to dwindle further, even 50 years after the last dam was built. This year, just 50,000 Chinook are expected to return to lay and fertilize their eggs before dying in the riffles of the Klamath and its tributaries - one of the river's poorest returns on record.
Watch Tending the Wilds segment on Salmon, Keeping the River
All told, California's historic annual returns of perhaps four million Chinook, plus another million or so steelhead and coho, have dwindled to about a tenth their historical size. One of the largest and most remarkable runs of salmon lost to the U.S. government's dam-building frenzy was the winter-run Chinook, a strain unique to the upper Sacramento River watershed but which the construction of Shasta Dam essentially eliminated. When this happened, the Winnemem Wintu tribe, which historically dwelt in the foothills below Mount Shasta, saw their p
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Klamath River tribe members protest at PacifiCorps offices in Portland in 2006 to demand removal of four dams on the Klamath. They won. | Photo: Patrick McCully, some rights reserved 
