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There were plenty of dangerous ways to make a living in 1800s Oregon. Loggers would get crushed, sailors would get drowned and mill workers would get parts amputated every day.
But when it came to risk of death, nothing came close to salmon fishing at the mouth of the Columbia River.
The year 1880 was probably the worst year of them all.
“Some assume that as many as 350 fishermen lost their lives this season on the Columbia,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in September of that year. “The lowest estimate is furnished by William Johnson, who puts the number of victims at 200.”
The fleet of fishing boats in harbor, safely moored at one of Astoria’s
salmon canneries. (Postcard image)
To put that in perspective, there were a total of about 1,500 fishing boats working the river at that time, each with a crew of two men aboard. A fisherman starting out in May of 1880 had at best a one-in-15 chance of not surviving the season. Not even the clumsiest sawmill worker took a chance like that.
The dangers
So, what made the river so deadly? In the 1880 season, it was a combination of things.
Here’s how the fisherman ordinarily worked: They’d put out onto the river in one of those 1,500 boats just before low slack tide. The boats were 24-foot double-enders, each gaff-rigged with a small triangular sail and oars for the men; although there were small steam launches on the river in 1880, none of the fishing boats had an actual power plant on board.
The fishing crews would put their nets out and drift with the river’s current, which would take them out to the very mouth of the river, close to the bar. They would time it so that they’d get as close to the bar as possible without having yet entered it, when the tide would start coming in, bringing their nets back toward the boat. Then they would haul in their nets, deploy their oars and sails and, helped along by the incoming tidewaters, head for Astoria and safety.
So far, this sounds pretty simple. But here’s the part that made it such a deadly proposition: The closer you got to the bar, the better the fishing became. So fishermen had every incentive to get as close to the bar as they dared.
The bar, as you likely know, is the notorious “graveyard of ships” at the mouth of the river. At the bar, the river got very shallow, the bottom got sandy and clean, and the current got considerably faster.
Two and a half million cans of salmon, stacked in a warehouse at an
Astoria cannery, await shipment to hungry customers across the nation.
(Postcard image)
So, what happened if a fishing crew misjudged the tide and ended up on the bar itself? Well, that’s where things got really ugly. Remember, these guys were relying on the incoming tide to help push them inland. But the incoming tide is also the force that raises mammoth, freighter-killing breakers on the bar when it crashes into the Columbia’s powerful current moving in the opposite direction. So if a boat timed it wrong, and the tide didn’t start to turn in time to help it return to port, its crew members would find themselves in a desperate struggle, trying to muscle a heavy 24-foot fishing boat upstream against a current of 8 to 10 miles an hour.
Sometimes the crew’s exhaustive exertion would slow the boat’s drift enough that the tide could save them, and sometimes it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, the little boat would be swept into 40-foot breakers, amid which rescue was impossible and survival unlikely. (A gripping eyewitness account of exactly this scenario is given in the sidebar to the right, the one headlined "Another Fisherman Lost.")
A few fishing boats pulled into the bar did escape by pulling for the open sea, but not all of them survived the subsequent grueling and thirsty attempt to reach a beach.
What made 1880 such a special year was a particularly heavy snowmelt runoff in the spring. This made the tide tables almost useless — essentially, what happened was the ebb tide was extended for an extra half-hour each day, because so much more river water was coming down.
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This postcard image shows the Astoria fishing fleet, in matching 24-foot
double-ended fishing boats, on the river just inland from the Columbia
River Bar. Fishing was better closer to the bar, but the boats couldn’t
survive on the breakers there, and many fishermen — in some years,
hundreds of them — drowned there.
Even cautious fishermen would drift seaward, the tide would turn and they’d still have to pull for their lives to get free of the suction of the bar, because there was just so much more water coming down the river. Incautious fishermen, of course, had not a chance.
Another Fisherman Lost.
His Companion Tries in Vain
to Save Him.
ASTORIA — On Thursday morning last, Louis C. Webber and Tom Johnson, who fished with him for A. Booth & Co.’s cannery, drifted down with the tide with their net out until they had reached a point in the north channel a considerable distance beyond the cape, far out on the bar, and near the western curve of the middle sands. They allowed the net to drift on out, expecting the turn of the tide to drift it back toward them, and then, as usual, they would commence to take up and remove the salmon to the boat. At about 10:45 a.m. Thursday, the 27th, Webber being at the tiller and Johnson handling the net, the latter suddenly exclaimed: “Louis, we must get out of this, the fish are striking.” (The salmon, touching and striking the ground and their struggling causing a peculiar tugging on the net, showed Johnson that they were getting into shoal waters. They were then in about three fathoms.)
Webber said, “Oh, let her stop here.” Almost immediately after, they heard a low moaning noise, and Webber sung out to his companion, who had let go of his net and seized the oars, “Head her for the breaker!” which by this time had assumed shape and was rapidly nearing their boat, gaining in size and strength and rapidity as it approached. In attempting to turn the boat to the now coming breaker that she might meet it head on, one of the oars broke in Johnson’s hands, and the remorseless wave struck the broadside of the boat, lifting it onto its crest, turning it over and over as if it had been a cork, leaving both men to struggle for life’s breath in the seething waters.
Webber was washed out first. Johnson tried to maintain his hold of the boat, but, owing to its rotary motion, he was compelled to let go. The breaker having spent its force, the surface of the water to which both men had arisen became comparatively smooth. … He then saw the boom they used for their sail floating toward Webber and told him to seize it, and soon one of the Columbia Canning Co.’s boats (which was making toward them) would pick him up. This boat soon reached Johnson, but he told the men in it not to mind him but to go for Louis who was farther in the breakers than he was. Just then a second heavy breaker was fast coming, rolling relentlessly along toward the struggling man, and it would have been at the risk of almost certain death themselves had the newcomers approached the spot sooner. They could only wait to see if the poor fellow would be allowed one more chance for his life after being engulfed the second time. They could do nothing more just then.
They saw the cruel wave rear its crested head, and drawing the now helpless man in with the undertow, it lifted him up and then broke over him. After this they saw him no more, and it is probable that this is the last of Louis C. Webber until “the sea shall give up the dead that are in it.” …
Mr. Webber had been married but a few short months and the sincere sympathy of the community is extended to the widow in her sad bereavement.
— The Daily Astorian, May 30, 1880
The deadliest storm
And then there was the storm, on May 2 of that year. That storm is largely forgotten today, but it cast a horrible shadow over Astoria for decades afterward. It kicked up suddenly, when the boats were still drifting seaward with nets in the water, and turned the mouth of the river into a mini-bar. Those who survived did so by cutting their nets loose and pulling for shore.
The next day, the storm continued, but then abated just in time for the fishing tide, and the “treacherous lull convinced many of the fishermen who had escaped the dangers of the preceding nght to venture again upon the deep and cast their nets,” as the Oregonian’s Astoria correspondent put it. “Before they were aware, the storm recommenced and another night of horror for the poor fishermen had begun.”
On both nights, a little steamship named the S.S. Rip Van Winkle just happened to be ready to rush to the rescue, but it could only save boats that hadn’t yet drifted onto the bar. About 60 fishermen drowned in those two nights alone, and dozens of boats were lost.
Making fishing less lethal
Survival for a salmon fisherman got a lot more likely a few years after this, when the canneries started using small steamships to tow their fishing-boat fleets out and to retrieve them afterward. But even so, it was dangerous; once a boat was drawn into the breakers on the bar, it usually couldn’t be reached by rescuers.
A real measure of safety wouldn’t come for the bar fishermen until around the time of World War I, when the gasoline-powered “bowpicker” boats with enough power to buck the current were developed.
Today, we think of commercial fishing as a somewhat dangerous way to make a living, especially for the folks fishing for crab up in Alaska. But compared with how it was in Astoria 130 years ago, today’s “most dangerous catch” is a sunny-day picnic.
(Sources: Penner, Liisa. Salmon Fever: River’s End. Portland: Amato, 2006; Portland Morning Oregonian, 5-06 and 5-07-1880; Daily Astorian, 5-30-1880; San Francisco Chronicle, 9-04-1880)
