The Salmon: The Extraordinary Story of the King of Fish

Tricking salmon into net-ends or ‘bunts’ was a brain-teaser which produced ingenious contraptions. The Indians worked out that salmon could be deflected by the appearance of pendant vertical lines which, had they attempted, the fish could have swum through. But the salmon opted to go in the direction of the tidal current and could be fooled into the upper layer of the water even though the water below was a lot deeper. A loose cats-cradle of connected lines, kept in place by sinker-weights and buoys, was enough to direct the salmon to where spear-wielding fishermen awaited them.

Bunches of rye grass were tied to the floor of the loose cradle of line to create the illusion of a floor or river-bed. This kept the fish in the river’s upper level heading for the denser-woven net near the shore through which they could not escape. Guile and knowledge of the quarry were essential in the capture of this turbo-charged fish. A salmon can outswim any creature in the river, and indeed most in the ocean.

In some ways it is peculiar that the Indians never developed the art of rod-angling. In the Azores today medium-sized fishing boats go to sea to take tuna, armed with bunches of fishing poles which are fished manually by fishermen just as day-boat anglers jig for pollack and mackerel. Rod and line is simply the best way of catching tuna. Additionally, rod-caught fish remain clean and attract the highest prices in the market.

The Indians approximated to this with line-fishing by trolling. Trolling from canoes took place in the bays and inlets before the fish range was narrowed by the confinement of rivers. A witness at the time describes what the Nootka Indians did:

‘For slimness and invisibility the braided leaders were made from women’s hair, or in rougher water from the quills of birds or porcupines. A hook was baited with fresh sprat or herring, and the line was attached to the solo canoeist’s paddle. The whole rig was sunk with small sinker stones. As the oarsman moved his paddle back and forth a slow jerking movement of the hook attracted the salmon. The paddle was then handled in such a way that the salmon was boated.’

You may ask, what were the hooks made from in a culture without metal? It is ingenious. ‘Bentwood’, or wood of hemlock, balsam, fir or spruce branches were used, but taken only from the places there were knots. For knots were denser than ordinary wood and instead of floating, sank. This wood was shaved to the right slimness, then steamed and pressed into a hook-shaped mould. Deer tallow rubbed onto the hook before cooling prevented the hooped construction re-opening. The barbs, lashed on, were fashioned from bone.

The ways in which Pacific-coast salmon were utilised once extracted from their natural element were diverse. Presumably some were used to fuel the energies of hungry fishermen and trappers and eaten fresh. Summer diets consisted of berries and shellfish; salmon was a burst of marine protein. But the bulk of the harvest was preserved for winter by drying and smoking. Nineteenth-century photographs show Indians dip-netting, scoop- and bag-netting and catching salmon in a multifarious manner, with the racks of fish drying in the background. Just as the weirs were often enormous structures involving the use of entire trees, and very long and strongly built, the drying-racks could be structures bigger than houses. Fir boughs protected the fish from direct sun and racks were positioned to catch warm winds for drying. Anything near ground level would attract grizzlies, hence the structures were built aloft.

Weather was all-important. There were good seasons for curing and drying fish, which was ideally done outside. If it had to be done inside, as much of the salmon harvest as could be accommodated was brought in. But for the really large-scale curing, space was needed, and that relied on clement conditions. Complete failure to cure the winter food supply successfully could lead to local starvations. There are a number of peoples, like the Han of the Yukon River, who critically depended on salmon runs for their survival over winter.

The V-shaped drying-racks could handle hundreds of salmon sides. Caches for salmon were built on stilts both to catch the wind and to keep bears off, and they were considerable structures. Some were the size of residential log cabins. There is a photograph of a cache built on several different floors climbing a single tree and connected by ladders. The Indians had wooden tongs for lifting fish. Strainers for removing them from cooking-pots were constructed of seal-ribs. Knives were made of mussel shells, and fish skins were dried on triangular blocks designed to stretch them. The number of varying utensils created to manage the salmon harvest equals the refinement of a modern kitchen equipment range. But all came from at-hand natural products. Tube-like bottles were made from the hollow necks of sea-kelp fronds.

The salmon were not only used for preserved food and skins. On the Fraser River the oil was taken from decomposing salmon bodies which had been left in troughs in the sun to rot, allowing the oil to seep to the bottom. Oil was procured too from the livers of dogfish and cod, and also from the bodies of eulachon (small oily river fish captured in shoals). Salmon roe was hung separately on racks and eaten when decomposed. Alternatively, salmon roe was sunk in boxes below the tide and rotted there before being consumed. Perhaps this is no more strange than raw salmon or gravlax being eaten in Scandinavia today. To many people, gravlax is the best salmon preparation of all.

The importance of the salmon in north-west Pacific culture is reflected in the artistry which was devoted to decoration of the tools deployed in their capture. Salmon was regarded as a sacred food resource with sacramental and life-saving qualities and was accordingly a repeat symbol in the region’s famous art. A nineteenth-century French missionary staying in a Huron fishing village described the eloquence of local preachers whose job it was to persuade salmon to come into the nets and be caught. His sermons were theatrical performances attended by the village in a hushed silence. Salmon, remember, possess souls.

Ceremonies preceded the opening of the fishing season. It was believed that salmon would reappear again only if their spirits had been properly appeased. The Indians regarded salmon spirits as closely linked to the human ones which subsisted upon their bodies. Salmon were seen as possessing a conscious spirit and their returning presence to their natal streams viewed as a voluntary act rather than the gene-driven survival ritual identified by biologists today.

If salmon failed to come back, the Indians believed they had broken sacred taboos, or in some way offended the spirit of the fish. Indeed, instead of perceiving the capture of the salmon as the wily manifestation of the skilled hunter’s art, the captured salmon was seen as complicit in its own capture. A willing participant in the scheme of things, the fish was taken only with its own consent, and its capture was dependent on certain conditions being fulfilled. In this sense the link between the salmon migration and the peoples who relied on them was similar to the relationship between the Saami of northern Scandinavia and Arctic Russia and reindeer.

The first salmon caught triggered more ceremonies. On the Lower Fraser the Tlingit peoples take the first sockeye to the chief who in turn carries it to his wife. She thanks the salmon chief for sending this emissary. The whole tribe attends the ritual consumption of this first salmon following a rigid set of rules, cleansing themselves with a special concoction of plants beforehand.

The life-giving fish had returned and the rhythmic cycles of Nature are again underlined and confirmed. Instead of chewing the dried salmon cured in a previous year, people could again eat fresh salmon with the tang of the sea.

In addition, the returning silver salmon were seen as capable of dispelling diseases and sickness. Prayers reflected the belief that while the salmon were being eaten in the opening ceremonies their souls surveyed the proceedings from above. Is this why, without knowing it, the rod-angling fraternity hang salmon replicas on the fishing hut or the sporting-lodge wall?

Most tribes had a ritual involving the salmon bones being returned to the river or the sea. One tribe burnt the bones instead, although usually incineration was avoided. The purpose of the rituals was a new commitment to the cycle which would propitiate the salmon spirits and ensure their return in following seasons. There were ceremonies as the salmon was cut and prayers were intoned by senior citizens in the tribe. The fish was honoured. Not before this was done were other fishermen allowed to start fishing from the rest of the salmon run. Which of us Western rod anglers hasn’t toasted a first fish? Perhaps more often we have toasted lost fish, the expression on the face of the worsted angler being the most interesting. We observe remnants of old tribal manners without knowing why.

In one ceremony where the salmon is served on cedar planks the fish has to be handled so that the head is always pointing in the direction of the fish-run, or upstream in the river. The Lkungen tribe in Vancouver Island send their children to await the first salmon to arrive in the fishing boat. The children carry the fish up the beach and conduct a ceremony involving burnt offerings. Only children eat the first salmon, adults having to wait a few days for their share. Salmon bones may not touch the ground and in due course are returned to the sea.

Californian Indians of the Karuk tribe believed that the poles used to make the booth for keeping spears must be taken from the highest mountain or the salmon will see them, and also that they must be renewed every year. The reason is that otherwise old salmon will have told young salmon about them. This tale not only humanises salmon, giving them the faculty of human sight, but removes the distinction between dead or alive salmon. Breaches of tradition entail the failure of fishing effort; these were societies saturated with faith in the spiritual.

James George Frazer, recounting some of these beliefs in his early twentieth-century magnum opus, The Golden Bough, points out that in regarding salmon as having spirits equivalent to human ones the salmon-dependent tribes’ philosophy chimes with the modern view of the indestructibility of energy. Energy assumes new forms but does not vanish when one energy-vehicle is transmuted into another – as when fish becomes food. This makes sense of tribal beliefs in the immortality of animal souls as well as human ones.

Amongst tribes less reliant on salmon but more able to catch, say, halibut, the reverence and ritual are invested in that fish instead. But for the majority of the coastal cultures on this seaboard, one or more of the five salmon species were the principal food resource. Beliefs about salmon outnumber those of any other fish.

In her study of these subjects, Hilary Stewart records several salmon stories she encountered amongst the coastal tribes. One maintained that the first salmon to arrive were scouts. Correct treatment of the scouts ensured the bulk of the run following. Several tribes believed salmon were really people who lived in undersea communities. Some of the artwork reinforces this with, for example, a fish carving in an oblong piece of wood with a human in its stomach.

The readiness with which catch and release has been adopted in western European fishing circles surprises some people. Fishermen go misty-eyed. Seen as a spiritual enactment, it all makes more sense. Early people tried to ensure a salmon future spiritually, modern people try and ensure it biologically, but the two are in reality blurred.

Twin children in the north-west Pacific were believed to have a special rapport with salmon, and this was a widespread notion. If twins were born in the village, an unusually large salmon would arrive in the river afterwards. A wayward citizen could halt the salmon run by burying a salmon heart in a clam shell or in a burial ground. If salmon eyes were kept overnight in the house without being eaten, all the salmon would disappear. A shell knife had to be used in the ceremonial cutting of salmon or there would be thunder. Only old women past childbirth could work on, or repair, salmon nets. And because people enjoyed eating the sweet inner bark of springtime hemlock, salmon must too, and accordingly balls of it were adorned with feathers and sent downriver to satisfy the fish.

There were other taboos which required adherence if the salmon run was to carry on unimpeded. Freshly split planks could not be floated down the river and new canoes had to season before being floated. Hilary Stewart links this to the actual fact that extracts of fresh cedar are toxic to fish.

Rules abounded regarding the correct procedures for catching salmon. Children were not allowed to play with the sacred fish before they were cleaned. An offending child might even die. Salmon could not be taken up the beach from the canoes in a basket, but rather by hand. Anyone recently connected to birth or death rites should not handle or eat fresh salmon, risking the cessation of the run. The first salmon were not sold commercially in case the salmon hearts were destroyed or fed to the dogs, another potential risk to the run. A spear fisherman catching two fish with one thrust should not exhibit triumph, or the salmon already splayed on the drying racks would climb down and go back to sea.

The catalogue of means which the north-west Pacific cultures used for taking salmon could be continued. The tools and techniques they had for harpooning, spearing, jigging, snaring and ripping salmon are various and ingenious. They used whale baleen for snoods, bones for barbs, split roots for fish hooks. The subject is delightfully fruity.

Perhaps this is an anthropologist’s turf rather than mine. Where I think the key significance lies is in Peter Watson’s assertion that it was the abundance of the runs of Pacific salmon which has enabled the Pacific coastal peoples to continue lifestyles unadjusted to modern time in a way inconceivable without the extraordinary bounty of the salmon harvest. The various peoples who inhabited the lands around the Columbia River called the river ‘the great table’, where people could come at different times of year and get their slug of life-reviving sustenance.

Without that returning bonanza of fish which could so variously be prepared and cured and salted down, and preserved for use for over half a year later, the Pacific peoples would have had to trade, to open up avenues for the exchange of goods and generally interact with the rest of the continent in a different way. Their cultures would have changed long ago. The salmon harvest kept an undeveloped but environmentally benign culture in happy coexistence with the salmon runs for thousands of years. Up to a point, and we will revert to this later, it still does so now.

What has never been looked at is the degree to which human settlement was dictated by salmon runs. One might argue and even be able to prove that Vancouver, at the mouth of the Fraser River, was once used by native people as a salmon capture station. It is easy to imagine it; salmon are caught in Vancouver’s waterways now. Backed by the Rockies and without coastal roads and caravan routes trekking over open plains to the rear, maybe here, as was the case further north, a society existed for a long time in isolation from other trade centres, hemmed in by the mountains and living primarily on fish, most of which were salmon. Salmon were the cultural lynchpins. But maybe this is not only true in the Americas …

North European and Scandinavian cities are mostly sited on river-mouths. Mostly they were salmon rivers. Now that it is known that sea voyagers traversed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus, sea travel has an ancient pedigree. No one knows how, but 50,000 years ago humans crossed the water from Indonesia to Australia. Boats that could cross the ocean could cruise the coastline up and down. That may be so, but there is another reason why cities were built on river-mouths, and that is because the larder that needing filling was thus ideally located beside the conveyor belt containing the food. The food was migratory fish.

In the twenty-first century salmon cling to survival in a few rivers in northern Spain and in select French rivers down to the Spanish border. But even today the French have a delightful and powerful folk memory of ‘le saumon’.

One time I was sent by a magazine on a grayling fishing trip to a river in the south-west of France. It had rained stupendously, so my fishing guide and I forgot the fishing and enjoyed a repast in a dripping camping ground which was memorable for the wonderful goat’s cheese which his own flock had contributed. With little to do I looked at the rule book for local fishermen. At the back was a section on salmon fishing. To my surprise there was a long and detailed chapter delimning precisely how and when salmon could be caught and all the attendant rules. I expressed surprise to my guide that there were indeed any salmon in the river. He said casually that in fact there were not; the chapter on salmon was there to satisfy just such fishermen as myself, whiling away the time and dreaming of fish that might be – dreaming of fish that only existed in different places, where there were not hydro dams up and down the river, and where pollution had been addressed, and where water-flow permitted their existence. Perhaps only in France would you find that chapter about a fish from another place, but it rather enhanced the occasion for me.

Next day we got back to the action on the grayling and I thought several times of the possibility that somewhere on this river, sometime, there could be salmon again too. The concept had become embedded. The salmon as a cultural entity had a significance despite being absent as a living fish.

The Atlantic salmon has been a lifeline of survival for early Man since the Stone Age. As G.E. Sharp, counterpointing survival with angling, said in 1910, ‘The caveman’s necessity has become the rich man’s hobby.’ It has been, as for the north-west Pacific Indians, the most reliable source of returning protein of any. It swims into the larder voluntarily and, unlike the fleet-footed reindeer, need only be stopped from going out again. Seals are large lumps of meat easily overtaken and knocked on the head, but they only make landfall once a year for pupping and their meat is unsuitable for variable curing. No wonder some of the Pacific tribes enunciated heartfelt thanks for salmon’s bountiful re-appearance.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in firmly tying down what happened long ago in western Europe. It is known that Cro-Magnon man ate salmon from bones in middens on the River Dordogne. And the indigenous inhabitants of Scotland, the Picts, incised salmon on sacred stones, some of which survive to this day. But the food-remains legacy is not all that it might be.

One problem is that fish bones soften and disintegrate faster than animal bones; they are less durable. Where the middens full of clam and mollusc shells present an unarguable picture of shellfish consumption, salmon eating is much harder to ascertain from bone remains. Historians of Stone Age culture say that three-quarters of all animal bones were eaten by creatures, from deer down to voles, needing the calcium. This is prior to natural biological breakdown. We get only a whiff of what was consumed from rubbish deposits, even with animals and their harder bones. Fish bones are often long gone from recorders’ view.

Then there is a possible misinterpretation of the meaning of surviving bark and wicker artefacts. These are shown on the Pacific Northwest to have been used for fish capture. Stone Age historians on the east side of the Atlantic often imagine that these surviving creations were used for carrying things. They may, rather, have been used to trap fish. What were suitable materials for doing this on one seaboard may reasonably be assumed to have been suitable for the same purpose on another.

Then most of the evidence of a salmon culture determining settlement in western Europe may lie underneath the coastal cities which have grown where there were once river-mouth fishing villages. Of England’s cathedral cities, eighteen of twenty-five are on salmon rivers – either a coincidence, a practical matter relating to easier travel using water, or something to do with an easily obtained food resource. Who knows? My guess is that salmon presence played a part in human settlement locations. Salmon may have determined early settlement. If it is trouble to take the food to the people, take the people to the food.

If you deduce early diet from drawings and rock art depictions, fish appear as well as deer. Perhaps the fact that the hides of deer were vital for clothing made deer more integral to survival, but in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum there is a woman’s marriage coat described as of the Gilyak tribe from the lower Amur River in eastern Siberia, made of 60 Pacific salmon skins and dated to about 1900. On the upper back are appliqué semi-circular panels simulating fish scales. There are similar garments in other collections.

Not only were salmon skins used in ceremonial occasions, but Icelanders, inhabitants of the Gaspé Peninsular in Quebec, and the Ainu from the Kuril Islands off Japan, all used salmon skin for clothes and shoes. The Ainu used the tougher skins of spawned salmon for making winter boots. My wife, even, is in on the act. She had a business making fashionable items from salmon skins, with a customer base including celebrities. Of course she did! With its delicately inscribed, miniature, cupped ring patterns and very tough texture it is fabulous material.

Today most Atlantic salmon run rivers in only seven countries: Britain, Ireland, Norway, Canada, America, Russia and Sweden. But European rivers at one time mostly possessed salmon populations. Spain, Denmark, Portugal, France and Germany had rivers suited to salmon breeding, as did the countries round the Baltic. The Rhine, Seine, Loire, Douro, Gudena, Oder, Elbe and Weser hosted large populations of the silver visitor.

There is a dearth of statistical information about pre-industrial catches of salmon in Europe, but the few titbits which can be found conjure up a picture of abundance which is reminiscent of the north-west Pacific. A late-eighteenth-century Spanish study claims that 2,000 salmon a day were caught during the season in the province of Asturias. Another writer extrapolating from this considers that 10,000 salmon a day were landed every day in north Spain in the eighteenth century. Adding to this calculation figures for fishing rentals, which were high, Anthony Netboy in Salmon: The World’s Most Harassed Fish, written in 1980, says that the annual harvest in Spain might therefore have been up to 900,000 fish. Remember, Spain is a salmon country with some of the smallest salmon rivers. Human populations were low then. Salmon were a key ingredient of survival.

France has the shape and physiognomy of a major salmon location. Long winding rivers meander placidly through forests and farmland and course through verdant green valleys. When Caesar colonised Gaul in 56 BC the legions witnessed salmon leaping in the Garonne, and noted a fish-eating people. Salmon and mullet were the delicacies. Taking their cue from the natives, the Romans investigated salmon flavour and took the salted product back home.

The medieval period is perceived only from flashes of comment, but it is known that salmon were traded over long distances. Anthony Netboy says that by the thirteenth century salmon were being exported from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Berwick and Perth to England and the Continent. That is a fact that takes a while to fully appreciate. Salmon, then, was a major trade item from early time, like gold. By the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the value of Scotland’s salmon exports was £200,000 – an enormous sum.

Better-detailed is the trade established by Glaswegian merchants sending salted-down salmon to Flanders, Holland and France in the eighteenth century. ‘Kippering’ was the name given to a method involving decapitating the fish, removing the insides, including any roe, and splitting it down the middle. The cure was dry, with the preserving agents, principally salt, being absorbed into the flesh. Saltpetre, brown sugar, even rum, might be added. The salmon would lie in this concoction for two days, after which it was dried either by heat from a kiln or by sunlight. Sun-drying could take five weeks. Smoking as done in those days involved the same initial process as today, with the fish in the round then being exposed to wood-smoke.