The Passing of the Salmon

Seventy years ago the chinook salmon of California was an important natural resource, as famous throughout the world as the gold, the redwood trees, and the city of San Francisco. With a prodigal disregard for the future, hundreds of thousands of pounds of salmon were taken from the rivers and canned for shipment to all parts of the world. The present-day salmon fisheries of the Columbia River and Alaska were nonexistent in the seventies of the last century—then the entire industry was restricted to San Francisco Bay and the lower Sacramento River. Any other than “California Salmon” was unheard