The Snake River, the Dams, and the Salmon

The Snake River rises in Yellowstone country and runs eleven hundred miles before it joins the Columbia at the Oregon-Washington border. For most of its length it is the defining fact of Idaho geography, the drainage that determines where farms grow, where cities sit, and where the fish go, or did go.

Salmon and steelhead once ran from the Pacific up the Columbia and into every accessible tributary of the Snake system. Indigenous peoples had depended on them for thousands of years. Settlers canned them. Scientists have estimated that before dam construction, somewhere between ten million and sixteen million adult salmon returned to spawn in the Columbia-Snake basin each year.

Then came the dams. Grand Coulee on the Columbia went in first, in the nineteen thirties. The Snake acquired its own series: Brownlee, Oxbow, and Hells Canyon in the nineteen fifties and sixties blocked the upper Snake entirely, with no fish passage. Lower on the river, four dams built between nineteen sixty-two and nineteen seventy-five, the Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite dams, extended barge navigation all the way to Lewiston but cut off the upper Snake runs from the ocean entirely.

The debate over those four lower Snake River dams has defined Idaho environmental politics for four decades. Snake River chinook salmon and sockeye were listed under the Endangered Species Act in the early nineteen nineties. The sockeye that returned to Redfish Lake near Stanley numbered in the single digits in some years during the nineties. Recovery efforts, hatchery programs, and spill protocols have helped somewhat. The question of whether to breach the four lower Snake dams has been litigated, studied, and argued since at least nineteen ninety-seven, with tribes, fishing communities, environmental groups, and agricultural and shipping interests all staking out positions they hold with religious conviction. As of this recording, the dams still stand.