Salmon and the Dammed Columbia: A River's Long Reckoning

Every autumn, for tens of thousands of years, the salmon came back.

They came from the Pacific Ocean in waves that early observers described as making the rivers appear to boil. Chinook salmon, the largest of the Pacific species, ran the Columbia River system from its mouth to reaches more than nine hundred miles inland. Coho, sockeye, steelhead, chum. The runs overlapped across the seasons in a biological system of extraordinary complexity and scale. Historical estimates for the peak Columbia River salmon runs range from ten to sixteen million fish per year, numbers that supported every living thing in the watershed, from bears and eagles to the cedars that grew along the banks, fertilized by the decomposing bodies of fish that had spawned and died.

For the Indigenous peoples of the Columbia Basin, the Yakama, the Warm Springs, the Umatilla, the Nez Perce, the Chinook nations, the Wasco, and dozens of smaller communities, salmon was the center of everything: diet, ceremony, trade, cosmology. The treaty negotiations of the eighteen fifties in which the United States secured much of their land explicitly preserved the right to fish at their usual and accustomed places in perpetuity. The United States government reserved those rights knowing full well what it was reserving.

The dam era changed the equation. Bonneville Dam was completed in nineteen thirty-seven, the first major federal dam on the lower Columbia. It generated electricity that powered the cities and factories of the Pacific Northwest, and it blocked salmon migration to every river above it. Fish ladders were installed as a compromise. The treaty tribes were not consulted in their design.

Between nineteen thirty-seven and nineteen seventy, the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation built more than sixty large dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries. The Grand Coulee Dam on the upper Columbia, completed in nineteen forty-two, had no fish passage at all. The salmon runs above Grand Coulee, some of the longest-distance migrations on earth, went extinct. The Dalles Dam drowned Celilo Falls in nineteen fifty-seven, ending thousands of years of continuous human occupation and fishery at the most important salmon trading site in North America.

The numbers that followed were stark. By the late twentieth century, Columbia River salmon runs had dropped to roughly two to four percent of their historical levels. Seventeen distinct populations of Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead were listed under the Endangered Species Act. The dams had generated electricity and irrigated farms and created recreation reservoirs. They had also dismantled one of the most productive fisheries in the world and broken the treaty rights the federal government had specifically promised to honor.

Debates about breaching the four lower Snake River dams, which block the primary salmon-bearing tributaries in Idaho, have been ongoing since the nineteen nineties. As of twenty twenty-six, no dam has been breached, though the Biden administration reached a framework agreement with treaty tribes on the question in twenty twenty-three, and the issue remains unresolved in Congress.

The salmon are still coming back. In reduced numbers, in diminished runs, but coming back. The river and the fish have not given up. Whether the humans responsible for the dams will make room for them remains, in twenty twenty-six, an open question.