PHOTO ESSAY

Salmon and the Restoration of the Rogue

by Roger Dorband

FOR SEVEN YEARS, I PHOTOGRAPHED southern Oregon's Rogue River, intending to celebrate the waterway I had grown up on by creating a series of photographs that depict the river from its headwaters to the Pacific. I believe I boated all of the Rogue's navigable waters, hiked every mile of designated trail along its shore, and drove, repeatedly, all of the highways and secondary roads that touch it.	1
Because of the Rogue's reputation, I was not surprised that fishing and fish, particularly salmon, emerged as major themes in the visual story of the river. Although I did not make a conscious effort to capture images relating to salmon and steelhead, their presence frequently arose in association with fishermen along the riverbank or in driftboats passing by, the Cole Rivers Hatchery, and fish ladders at two dams. The sight of the great fish jumping at Rainie Falls or of a carcass rotting in the shallows brought the drama and poingnancy of the salmon's life cycle into sharp focus.	2
The images reproduced here, including historic photographs, are published in my book, The Rogue, Portrait of a River. Recognizing the environmental challenges faced by the Rogue and its fish, I decided to include text in the book that would tell the story of salmon from the time they were the sustenance of Native Americans through the early era of the commercial fishing industry, commenting finally on sport fishing and salmon's status as a touchstone of the health of waterways in the Pacific Northwest.	3
For millennia, salmon sustained the lives of Native people who lived along the streams and rivers of the Pacific Northwest. The oldest carbon-dated artifacts found along the lower Rogue River indicate that the region has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years, and probably much longer. Native peoples' cultures maintained a vital connection to fish through ceremonies honoring salmon and rituals supplicating their seasonal return. The people saw their interconnection with the salmon and the rivers as the sacred foundation of their culture.*	4
The light-infused world of migrating salmon is seen here through the fish counting window at Gold Ray Dam near Medford, Oregon. A video camera monitored by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission tracks mostly hatchery-born salmon as they return upriver during their spring and autumn runs. All photographs courtesy of the author, unless otherwise noted
The salmon migrations of the early twentieth century are legendary in the stories of old-timers who still live along the lower Rogue. Their parents spoke of runs so large they could be heard coming upstream. The sound, which Zane Grey termed a "souse" in his writings, was usually heard at night when great schools of fish were on the move.	5
Fisherman A.H. Mock displays his catch from six hours spent fishing on the Rogue River near Grants Pass. Courtesy of Josephine County Historical Society
Spring run salmon have returned to their spawning bed, in this case the holding pond at Cole Rivers Hatchery, where they will be killed and their eggs artificially inseminated. The fry are raised at the hatchery until they are large enough to manage the journey downstream. In 1887, Robert Hume helped the United States Fish Commission establish the Rogue-Elk Hatchery, which was a mile downstream from this one.
Some of the stories may be apocryphal, but there is much in the historical record to substantiate the claims. On June 13, 1913, crews of five drift boats out of Grants Pass used gill nets to bag 5,000 pounds of salmon in one day.* At the end of the season, the Grants Pass Daily Courier reported that local gill netters who fished the fifteen miles of river between Grants Pass and Hog Creek had bagged over 100 tons of salmon. During that season, most fish were caught at the mouth of the river by cannery fishermen. Even if gill netting was permitted today, such catches would be impossible.	6
It is even more difficult to imagine the magnitude of salmon runs prior to the degradation caused by gold mining during the 1850s. During the few years that the big rush was on in the Rogue country, entire creeks that had provided spawning beds for thousands of fish were rerouted to provide water flow for the sluice boxes essential to placer mining. Mining activity also choked the river with silt, which depressed the reproductive cycle of the fish. No sooner had the years of large-scale mining ended on the river and the salmon begun to recover, than forty years of heavy commercial fishing began on the Rogue.	7
The salmon fishing industry on the Rogue resulted from San Francisco and Portland's booming populations developing a taste for salmon. At the same time, a huge demand for canned salmon was emerging in England. The market for salmon was so large by the late 1880s that Robert Hume of Astoria was able to establish a fishing enterprise of such magnitude at the mouth of the Rogue that he became known in the industry as the Salmon King of Oregon.† Hume's land holdings gave his gill-netting fleet access to both sides of the river for twelve miles upstream from the ocean. Controlling virtually the entire fish population on the Rogue, Hume's company caught, processed, and shipped salmon from the river by the hundreds of tons over his thirty-two-year career there. During its most productive five-year span — from 1888 through 1892 — the company hauled over five million pounds of salmon from the mouth of the Rogue.	8
There are many photographs from the days of the gill-netting industry that show fishermen striking jaunty poses in front of a riverbank strewn with huge salmon. We now know that their efforts were too efficient, too successful. In spite of salmon being released from the Cole Rivers Hatchery on the Rogue, there has been no return to the numbers of fish recorded in those days, in part due to the overfishing of that time. In modern times, salmon runs have been further degraded by the use of pesticides in the Rogue River valley, the impact of logging in the watershed, toxins from the lumber industry escaping into the watershed, sewage and waste disposal, the commercialization of the river and, of course, the building of dams.	9
Gillnetters on the Rogue River show off a night's catch of large Chinook salmon in about 1915. Gillnetting on the Rogue River entailed spending the night drifting down a fifteen-mile stretch of the river, frequently stopping to lift heavy nets laden with fish, and then boarding horse drawn wagons at dawn for the ride back to town. Courtesy of Josephine County Historical Society
Several large salmon runs in recent years indicate that conditions in the river may be improving. Some environmental scientists now theorize that the large runs are the result of long-term cycles in the ocean's on-shore temperature. Unfortunately, the data is hampered by the short span in which accurate temperature recording has been made. Further confounding the issue is the phenomenon of global warming, the causes and impacts of which we are just beginning to confront.	10
The presentation of environmental issues here is necessarily cursory, but one fact stands out: Today, the Rogue is a poor reflection of its former abundance. If our legacy for future generations is to be something other than remnants and leftovers, we need to acknowledge our responsibility as a society to preserve, protect, and replenish rivers such as the Rogue. Though the problems are rampant, there are many encouraging signs that the will to protect and restore the Rogue and other rivers is growing. The efforts of environmental groups to procure that protection are founded on and sustained by a hopefulness born of the realization that positive change can be made on the Rogue, a living, still-beautiful river that can be restored to its former abundance.	11
During gillnetting runs the men — such as those in this photograph, taken near Grants Pass in about 1915 — would sleep for a few hours during the middle of the day, have a hearty meal, and be back on the river by late afternoon. Courtesy of Josephine County Historical Society
Mathew Berg, a rancher from Merill, Oregon, poses with a fifty-three-pound salmon caught in September 2001 at Rainie Falls in the Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue. The fish is lashed to his backpack for the two-and-a-half-mile hike to the nearest road.
Zane Grey poses with two steelhead on the Umpqua River. About catching a steelhead on the Rogue River, Grey wrote: "If moments could be wholly all-satisfying with thrills and starts, and dreads and hopes, and vague, deep full sense of the wild beauty of the environment, and the vain boyish joy of showing my comrades my luck and skill — if moments of life could utterly satisfy, I experienced them then. It took what seemed a very long time to tire and lead that steelhead, but at last I accomplished it.... That was the moment to have released him. I had the motive, but not the unselfish appreciation of him and his beautiful Rogue, not that time. He had been too hard to catch and there across the river stood those comrades of mine. Instead I lifted him up in the sunlight for them to see" (Rogue River Feud, 1929). Courtesy of Zane Grey Inc.
A fly fisherman tests the waters at dusk near Casey Park. Fly fishing equipment is used in pursuit of trout or steelhead, a large trout species that, like salmon, spends several years in the ocean before returning upstream. As a sport fish, it is steelhead, not salmon, that has made the Rogue a famous fishing steam.
Three fishermen in a driftboat on the Rogue River have just landed a salmon near Casey Park, a few miles upstream from Shady Cove, Oregon.
The salmon's carcass will decay and break apart, providing a food source for its offspring before they begin their journey down the Rogue River to the Pacific Ocean.
Notes * See Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1996). * Florence Arman, with Glen Woodridge, A River to Run (Grants Pass, Ore.: Wildwood Press, 1982). † See Gordon B. Dodds, The Salmon King of Oregon (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1959).

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.