A History of Salmon in California

Spawning coho salmon | Photo: Bureau of Land Management

The unthinkable happened in 2008: California ran out of salmon. Drought had starved the state's rivers, already seriously depleted by diversions of water for California's farms and cities. The fall run of Sacramento River chinook salmon was once a wildlife wonder to rival the herds of the Serengeti and the Great Barrier Reef. In 2008, it collapsed. The Sacramento's water was too warm, too choked with algae and salt, and too non-existent to allow the fall-run Chinook to survive their trip from their birth waters down to the Pacific Ocean. Federal officials closed the California chinook ocean fishery.

They kept the fishery closed for another year after that.

It wasn't just chinook in the Sacramento River. By January 2009, so few coho salmon had returned to the Lagunitas Creek watershed in Marin County, north of San Francisco, that one fisheries biologist told the San Francisco Chronicle the fish are missing. They are gone.

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It was an overstatement, but only a small one. The spawning coho's numbers had merely dropped by 89 percent since they left the watershed as new adults three years earlier. Lagunitas Creek, whose tributaries run mainly through protected land, had been considered a poster child for the possible survival of coho salmon on the California coast. Fans of coho salmon in other watersheds had looked to the Lagunitas Creek run for inspiration. In late 2008, that inspiration turned to despair.

Salmon throughout California were in trouble that year, but the collapse of the state's healthiest runs of both coho and chinook commanded special attention. For a while. The salmons plight has intensified since then, as has the states drought. But public attention has shifted away from the chinook and the coho.

Watch the salmon segment of our show Tending the Wild: Keeping the River

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the collapse of California's salmon runs in the two centuries between 1809 and 2009. Mentions of California salmon runs by the first American settlers were often taken as hyperbole of the kind usually employed by mine promoters and real estate speculators. There were stories of walking across the Feather River using spawning chinook as stepping stones. Some wrote of harvesting a years' supply of meat in a few hours by standing in a stream with a pitchfork and shoveling salmon onto the bank.

A useful and somewhat more restrained description comes from a contemporary writer who himself had a reputation for stretching the truth until it was so thin you could read newsprint through it. In 1873, in his book Life Amongst the Modocs, the poet Joaquin Miller wrote one of the first elegies to California's disappearing salmon:

These fish in the springtime pour up these streams from the sea in incalculable schools. They fairly darken the water. On the head of the Sacramento, before that once beautiful river was changed from a silver sheet to a dirty yellow stream, I have seen between the Devils Castle [Castle Crags] and Mount Shasta the stream so filled with salmon that it was impossible to force a horse across the current. Of course this was not usual, and now can only be met with hard up at the heads of mountain streams, where mining is not carried on and where the advance of the fish is checked by falls on the head of the stream. The amount of salmon which the Indians would spear and dry in the sun and hoard away for winter under such circumstances can be imagined.

There are five species of salmon found naturally in California rivers and streams, or six, depending on how you define salmon. Of these, only two species (or three, depending) occurred in large enough numbers before the settlement of California to have been significant to either the state's ecological cycles or Native culture.

Ocean-phase coho salmon | Image: NOAA

Those two salmon species are the chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, the largest of all the Pacific salmon, and the smaller coho, Oncorhynchus kisutch. Every swimmable stream of any size connected to the Pacific from Santa Cruz on north had runs of either coho or chinook, or both, prior to the advent of industrial society. Coastal streams from the Oregon line as far south as Baja California held that problematic depending on how you define salmon salmon species, the steelhead. If the steelhead had two feet, one of them would be planted in the salmon category and the other in trout. It's the same species, Oncorhynchus mykiss, as the rainbow trout. Scientists have found no genetic distinction between steelhead and rainbow trout sufficient to explain the radical difference in their lifestyles. That difference? Rainbow trout stay in fresh water their whole lives, while steelhead head downstream into the ocean, grow large, then return to their natal creeks to spawn. Unlike chinooks and coho, steelhead survive spawning fairly often. After spawning, those lucky steelhead swim back out to sea for another circuit on the reproductive merry go round.

Ocean-phase chinook salmon | Image: NOAA

That leaves three other species of salmon: the pink, chum, and sockeye. It's probably stretching the definition of native to refer to sockeye salmon as native to California: they usually don't venture south of the Columbia River to spawn. A few have wandered into the Klamath River from time to time, and humans have deliberately planted sockeyes in Tahoe and other California lakes, from which a few sometimes escape. Planted, landlocked sockeye salmon are called kokanee by anglers.

Pink and chum salmon are truly native to California: they're just not abundant. Even before the state's salmon runs collapsed, just a few pink or chum salmon could be found in the state's major rivers during spawning time.

The salmon life c

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