Skokomish and Hood Canal: The River They Could Not Get Back

Hood Canal is a long, narrow fjord-like inlet at the eastern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. It is not actually a canal; the name was given by British naval captain George Vancouver in seventeen ninety two, honoring a British admiral, and has stuck despite having nothing to do with any artificial channel. The Skokomish people who lived at its southern end and in the Skokomish River delta had a name for it that described the water itself, not an English administrator's whim.

The Skokomish signed the Treaty of Point No Point in January of eighteen fifty-five, reserving the right to fish, hunt, and gather at their usual and accustomed places. Their homeland centered on the river delta where the Skokomish enters Hood Canal. The salmon runs in that river system were among the most significant on the eastern Olympic Peninsula.

In the century that followed the treaty, the river was dammed, the estuary was diked, and the salmon runs collapsed. The Cushman Dams, completed in nineteen twenty-six and nineteen thirty, flooded significant portions of the upper river corridor and altered flow patterns that the fish runs depended on. The diking of the estuary for agricultural use changed the lower river's character in ways that took decades to fully document.

The Skokomish pursued restoration through litigation and negotiation for generations. Federal courts required dam operators to provide some mitigation for fish passage. Habitat restoration work has continued into the present. Some of the salmon runs are improving. Some of the damage, particularly to the estuary and to habitat destroyed by reservoir flooding, is of a kind that does not restore in any human timeframe.

The canal is still beautiful. The fish are still fewer than the treaty promised.