Mentioned: Historian Tim Troll, author of Sail for Salmon: The Early Years of Commercial Fishing in Alaska’s Bristol Bay; the Alaska Prospectors Society; Will Rogers; plans for after winning the lottery; Bristol Bay; federally-recognized tribes; Ohio; Oklahoma; commercial wooden fishing boats; the National Park Service’s five regions of Alaska; Douglas Adams; the great Salmon Nation; the sudden urge to read about canneries.
MY new home state is a continual state of fascination for me. Alaska! I have lived in a handful of mostly Midwestern states and, fingers crossed, Alaska is the last stop on my life’s journey. I see myself easily spending my old age learning something new about The 49 each day. Just the other evening, I attended a presentation hosted by the Alaska Prospector’s Society about the commercial wooden fishing boats of Bristol Bay’s salmon fisheries. And now I want to read up on a subject I never suspected would interest me: canneries. Even after spending several days vacationing in Monterey, California, I did not develop an urge to learn about canneries. But now that I am in Alaska, I am curious.
It is one thing to read that Alaska is “1/5 of the size of the contiguous United States,” but it is another thing to experience it first-hand. Alaska is enormous! In most places I’ve lived, if you become bored, you can simply drive to another state for the afternoon or weekend. Not here. To paraphrase a line from one of my favorite books, “Alaska is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Alaska.” (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984.)
A little bit about Bristol Bay — and please remember, I am not an expert, just a newish local who enjoys blogging. My favorite Department of Interior agency, the National Park Service (NPS), divides Alaska into five regions based largely on tourism and traveling rather than on strict geography or climate. The five regions are:
- Northwest & Arctic Region <– where Will Rogers died (the Cowboy Philosopher is from my original home state, Oklahoma, where we are mandated to reflect on him daily).
- Interior Region <– I am not certain, but I suspect a lot of the Alaska reality shows are filmed here. (Edited: I checked into this, and I was completely wrong. With a few exceptions, it appears that most of these reality shows are filmed in the Southcentral Region.)
- Southwest “be mindful that the Aleutian Islands are known to produce some of the most dismal weather conditions in the world” Region.
- Southcentral Region <– where I reside.
- Southeast Region <– where I will move if I win the lottery.
Bristol Bay is in the Southwest “part of the thrill of the adventure is getting to your destination” Region of Alaska. For those in the lower-48 gallery, Bristol Bay’s geographical size is comparable to that of Ohio, and it is located in the eastern arm of the Bering Sea. The Southwest Region cannot be accessed by road, which underscores why air travel is so vital in this state.
I also want to mention that nearly half of the federally recognized tribes are in Alaska. Take that, lower 48! Bristol Bay alone is home to 31 federally recognized Tribes. (For comparison, there are 38 federally recognized Tribes, including mine, the great Pawnee Nation, in Oklahoma.)
To learn more about Bristol Bay, the United Tribes of Bristol Bay and the Bristol Bay Native Corporation websites offer solid introductions. Additionally, the video below offers a glimpse of the area’s beauty. I hope to see it in person someday.
Historian Tim Troll gave the presentation I attended, and it was one of those talks where you keep thinking, “Wow, that is something else,” because it was so remarkably informative. I learned that Bristol Bay has the world’s largest wild sockeye salmon fishery. Each year, an average of 30 to 40 million sockeyes return to the area, so hatchery fish are never raised or released in those waters.
Mr. Troll centered his talk on the fishermen’s wooden sailing boats in which two-man crews lived and worked entirely on the water from Monday 6 a.m. straight through to Saturday 6 p.m. Imagine! Working, cooking, eating, arguing, laughing, sleeping, and working still more all happened on a circa 30′ boat. This Anchorage Daily News video provides us with a sense of these sailing boats, beginning at the 1:15 mark:
Bristol Bay’s canneries, established in the late 19th century, attracted fishermen from Italy, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. As Mr. Troll notes in one of his published articles, the canneries relied on wooden sailboats, which are boats “propelled by wind and crewed by two fishermen who pulled heavy cedar-corked linen nets by hand.” These roughly 30-foot vessels were known as Bristol Bay “double-enders” because their bow and stern shared the same shape. (My familiarity with sailboats growing up in Oklahoma was limited, so I had to look up which was which: the bow is the front of the boat, and the stern is the back.)
I have admired wooden boats for decades, which I first saw back in the 1900s at the Chicago International Boat Show and now read about in the pages of Boat International and Passagemaker magazines. These boats are gorgeous pieces of craftsmanship, and I did catch myself several months ago wondering if, in some alternative millionaire life, I would buy Stewart Brand’s houseboat (archived here) which is currently on the market. And while I am familiar with the historical — sometimes heartbreaking — roles wooden boats have played internationally, I had never deeply contemplated how much the smaller ones contributed to the local economies of the Tribes. And obviously, this meant that I did not understand how wooden sailboats later played such a pivotal part in the emerging global economies (and appetites) that the canneries contributed to. Listening to Mr. Troll describe them so vividly made those boats and their humans heroic.
Motorized boats replaced the wooden sailboats in the 1950s. And so the heart of the presentation was the story of restoring and sailing one of these boats, the Libby, McNeil & Libby No. 76. This is a 1936 double-ended gillnetter, twenty-nine feet long with a nine-foot beam. Mr. Troll walked us through the restoration process, the work of a small team that included sailmaker Frank Schattauer and boatwright Dave Seaman. He then described the journey of sailing it back through Bristol Bay (which included one land passageway). The crew visited several villages along the way, which provided many individuals with the opportunity to see the type of boat their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers once worked on. Afterwards, the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust and the Bristol Bay Historical Society Museum partnered to purchase the boat. The Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust has posted videos of this fascinating story on its webpage.
My takeaways are…everything. Really. As I mentioned earlier, I plan to learn more about canneries, particularly those in Alaska. I especially want to dig into the relationships between the canneries, the unions, the Native and non-Native fishermen, and the affected villages.
Also, my appreciation for commercial fishermen, past and present, has deepened in ways I did not expect. Back when I lived in Kansas, I had a handful of students who had worked on today’s commercial boats in Alaska, and those sounded rough enough. These wooden sailboats? I cannot even comprehend.
And so, thank-you to the Salmon Nation. You gift so much to us, Salmon! And thank you to the commercial fishermen whose skill, labor, and endurance feed us and keep the coastal villages’ traditions, cultures, and economies alive. Thank you to Alaska Native and Alaskan historians, writers, poets, artists, and TikTokers who so generously share your knowledge and experiences with us. Learning from all of you underscores how intertwined this place is — both within and to the outside — and how much care it deserves from us as its human stewards. Alaska is extraordinary, and it needs to be protected.
Wherever you live, dear reader, please pay attention to the politicians and businesses that treat it as expendable, because their decisions ripple far beyond this place.
– element 101
P.S. I also wanted to say that I am slowly learning Alaska’s regions, the topographies, the climates, and the names and locations of villages, islands, bays, inlets, glaciers, and all the glorious mountain ranges. I can finally hear mention of an increasing number of names without immediately pulling out a map. There is nothing wrong with using the map, of course, but it is nice to be able to visualize where something is right away, which feels like a small participation trophy in a state this humongous.
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