More than a
hundred years ago, Gus Peterson ranched the lonesome high desert
along the Owyhee River, just south of where it crosses the
Idaho-Nevada state line. And like the local Indians, Chinese miners
and other entrepreneurs, he hauled wagonloads of fresh wild salmon
to places like Tuscarora, Elko and Winnemucca, where the succulent
fish sold for as much as a dollar apiece. Indeed, salmon were a key
part of the fish and game trade that nourished the region’s mining
communities in the late 1800s.
Salmon were so important
that 19th century Nevada law prohibited dams without fish ladders.
So when Peterson built a dam on the South Fork of the Owyhee that
prevented chinook salmon from reaching this part of northeastern
Nevada, local sportsmen demanded that the state fish commissioner
force him to tear it out. “An effort will be made to have the
obstruction removed,” the Tuscarora Times-Review
reported May 3, 1889.
But Nevada’s fish-passage law,
still on the books, ultimately failed to save the state’s chinook
runs. In the early 1900s, private power and irrigation companies
started building permanent dams in Idaho and Oregon, blocking the
return of salmon and steelhead to this far-flung stretch of the
Columbia River Basin. The federal government joined the
dam-building frenzy, and Nevada’s last salmon vanished after the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation closed the gates on Owyhee Dam in
December 1932. Any hope of modifying those dams to restore fish
passage ended when the three massive Hells Canyon dams were added
to the main stem of the Snake River between 1958 and 1967.
Nevada’s love for its native wild salmon nevertheless
survived, and the state’s sportsmen now are campaigning for their
return. At their urging, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,
D.-Nev., has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission not to
renew Idaho Power Co.’s license for the Hells Canyon dams unless
the privately owned hydropower giant provides fish passage, as
mandated by its original license in 1955.
“Protecting
wild salmon was important then,” Reid said in a letter to the
federal power agency in August, “surely it is even more so today
with the species listed for protection under the Endangered Species
Act and the expansive improvements to fish passage technology.”
Reid is supported by a cross-section of Nevadans as well
as by the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, fisheries scientists, sportsmen
and conservation groups from several Western states. The region is
already facing the almost certain extinction of 13 stocks of wild
salmon and steelhead, unless the Bonneville Power Administration
and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers make significant changes in
the way they operate eight dams on the Columbia and Lower Snake,
downriver from Hells Canyon. The situation is so dire that U.S.
District Judge James Redden recently repeated his warning that he
will take over dam operations unless the BPA and Army Corps
dramatically improve their fish-saving blueprint.
With
Reid now majority leader – and longtime salmon foe Sen. Larry
Craig, R-Idaho, sidelined by a sex scandal – the 20-year impasse
over Pacific salmon recovery could finally be resolved.
“It puts Nevada at the table in terms of discussing the larger
Columbia Basin issues,” says Nevada State Assemblyman David
Bobzien, D-Reno. “For anyone who is concerned with salmon recovery
in the Columbia-Snake Basin, you have to wonder if this will break
the logjam.”
For centuries, between 10 and 16
million Pacific salmon swam hundreds of miles up the
Columbia and Snake rivers and their tributaries to spawn in their
natal lakes and streams. Tens of thousands of salmon reached
northeastern Nevada by way of the Owyhee, Bruneau and Jarbidge
rivers and Salmon Falls Creek – all major tributaries of the Snake.
A band of Indians called the Salmon Eaters caught and ate
Columbia Basin chinook along the Jarbidge River in Nevada more than
2,500 years ago. And the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes persuaded the
federal government to include Duck Valley in northern Nevada and
southern Idaho in their reservation in 1877 in part because of the
abundance of salmon and steelhead.
“Salmon were the
cornerstone of the tribes’ culture and religion,” says Tim Dykstra,
fish and wildlife director for the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes. Salmon
also were valuable for trade with other Indians and, later,
European Americans.
The people who flocked to
northeastern Nevada to ranch and mine in the 1800s revered the
salmon, says Robert McQuivey, former habitat division chief for the
state Department of Wildlife. “Almost every time a salmon was
caught, it was reported in the newspaper.”
The newspapers
also reported the toll dam building and mine tailings exacted on
the wild fish. In May 1889, the Owyhee Avalanche flatly stated that
salmon would become extinct on the Bruneau River if the Snake River
Ditch Company completed its Bruneau Valley dam without a fish
ladder or other fish passage. But the salmon kept coming; as late
as 1912, old-timers reported pitchforking fish right out of the
rivers. Then, in 1932, Owyhee Dam was finished – and so were
Nevada’s salmon.
“It’s a real tragedy there wasn’t more
emphasis on protecting (Nevada’s) salmon, when the dams were built
in Idaho and Oregon,” says Merlin McColm, a retired biologist for
the Nevada Department of Wildlife. “A lot of people would jump up
and down if we could get the salmon back. Think of what that would
do for the tourist industry. Even if you couldn’t catch them,
people would go just to see them.”
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Last summer,
representatives from a coalition of Nevada sportsmen’s
groups wrote Reid, encouraging him to challenge the Hells Canyon
relicensing. “The relicensing process represents a once-in-a
lifetime opportunity, and perhaps our last chance, to pave the way
for the return of the once-mighty salmon fishery to Nevada’s
northern rivers,” says Larry Johnson, who owns a geotechnical
engineering firm in Reno and is president of the Coalition for
Nevada’s Wildlife. “This project just stirs your excitement, your
anticipation of what could be. (And) it’s a wrong that needs to be
set right.”
Johnson, a member of the Konkow Band of the
Maidu Tribe, grew up spearing chinook salmon about 100 miles west
of Reno on California’s Feather River, where a dam also wiped out
the salmon. “They were a major part of our subsistence in the
winter,” Johnson says.
Members of the coalition, which
includes representatives from Safari Club International, Truckee
River Fly Fishermen, Nevada Bighorns Unlimited and other groups,
are quick to emphasize they aren’t “typical green
environmentalists.” “Most of us are pretty conservative,” says
Johnson, who has been involved in the construction of more than 40
irrigation and tailings dams in the region. Johnson and his fellow
sportsmen also work with mining companies and livestock
organizations in their restoration efforts.
Coalition
members believe they can help restore salmon without instituting
the land-use restrictions that can come with the Endangered Species
Act. “This can be accomplished in ways that everyone gets a piece,”
Johnson says. “The last thing I want to see is a radical
environmental group filing suit saying grazing has to be cancelled
because of the return of salmon.”
Not all Nevada
sportsmen support the salmon restoration effort. Andy Burk of the
Reno Fly Shop says the money should be used for more feasible
projects than a fish-passage system. “I would rather spend that
money on riparian restoration on the Truckee and the East Walker”
rivers, Burk says.
Idaho Power attempted to operate a
fish-passage system at the first of the three Hells Canyon dams,
but it ultimately failed. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
then required the company to build salmon hatcheries as mitigation
for its failure to meet its fish-passage obligations.
That’s woefully inadequate, says Don Duff, a retired Forest Service
fisheries scientist and aquatic ecologist who worked in Nevada,
Utah, and parts of Idaho, Wyoming and California. “Hatchery fish
are subject to more diseases and you lose the genetic strains of
the wild fish that can survive.”
Duff and other
scientists believe fish passage in Hells Canyon is feasible. The
Shoshone-Paiute Tribes have proposed capturing salmon below the
Hells Canyon dams and then releasing them above the blocked areas.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is proposing a “trap and
haul” test program where juvenile salmon are collected at a weir in
Pine Creek, a tributary of the Snake, and trucked around Hells
Canyon Dam.
“If we can put people on the moon and
manufacture unmanned reconnaissance planes to use in the war, we
can get fish over these dams,” Duff says. “If we don’t do this, we
face the extinction of 13 fish species.”
History,
however, reveals the flaws in the fish-passage system. Fish ladders
have worked in the Cedar River watershed in western Washington,
where a single dam stands between chinook salmon and their spawning
grounds. But the eight-dam gantlet that migrating salmon have to
run on the Columbia and Snake rivers downstream from Hells Canyon
is another story. The dams continue to kill the majority of wild
salmon and steelhead despite fish ladders, nearly 30 years of
barging and trucking smolts around the dams, and the addition of
multimillion dollar fish-passage gadgets.
Indeed, the
Northern California Council Federation of Fly Fishers – which
supports Reid’s initiative – says the region cannot afford to focus
solely on the Hells Canyon problem. “It is our feeling that (Hells
Canyon) fish passage without improvements on the state of the
salmon in the Snake (River) in general won’t be helpful,” says C.
Mark Rockwell, vice president for conservation. The group is asking
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to hold hearings on the desperate
state of Columbia-Snake salmon because “frankly there is no time
left to keep talking,” Rockwell says. “It’s time for action and
only Congress can make that push.” Reid’s staff says he supports
such hearings.
Meanwhile, sportsmen, fish biologists and
other salmon advocates believe Reid’s involvement could help
prevent the remaining Snake River salmon and steelhead stocks from
becoming extinct, keeping their wild genetics alive and viable for
the day when there is again salmon passage all the way to Nevada.
“I may never catch a salmon,” says Johnson of the
Coalition for Nevada’s Wildlife. “It’s just the thought that my
grandchild might see that.”
“This should put more
pressure on the people who own the dams to finally do something,”
adds Tom Smith, president of the Truckee River Fly Fishers. “If
they don’t, sportsmen and politicians are finally going to take
action against them. It’s a big snowball they’re not going to be
able to stop.”
Ken Olsen has covered the
environment and natural resource issues throughout the West for
more than 20 years.
This article was made possible with
support from the William C. Kenney Watershed Protection Foundation
and the Jay Kenney Foundation.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Nevada stakes its salmon claim.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
