School for Salmon

Since Bonneville Dam was built in 1937, the great Chinook salmon, far & away the handsomest and most valuable fish in North America, has been fighting a game but losing battle for survival. As every schoolboy knows, the salmon lives under a mysterious compulsion: it must go back to its birthplace to spawn. The spawning grounds of the seagoing Chinook, which once supplied a tasty 17,000 tons a year to U.S. tables, are in the Columbia River's cool, green tributaries far up in the northwest mountains.

With the help of man-made ladders and elevators, the Chinook managed to get over Bonneville (170 feet high), but was stopped cold by the 553-ft. Grand Coulee Dam 450 miles farther upstream. In the last three years, Grand Coulee (aided by river pollution and other liabilities of civilization) has cut the Chinook population in half. And the salmon's troubles are only beginning. The Army and the Department of the Interior have high-priority postwar plans to build eight more great dams on the Columbia--which might mean the fish's finish.

But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has worked out a breathtaking scheme to make all this water power possible and salmon, too. This "most tremendous biological experiment in American history," described in the February Harper's by Richard L. Neuberger, is nothing less than a plan to teach the Chinook to forget the Columbia headwaters, spawn instead in the streams below Bonneville.

Uncle Sam's Fish College. The Fish and Wildlife Service has already proved, on a small scale, that the thing can be done. In 1939, while Grand Coulee was being built, the Service's fish experts began to trap salmon bound up river, rushed them by truck to a huge hatchery at Leavenworth, Wash. which Government biologists call "Uncle Sam's Fish College." There, far from their birthplace, the fish were propagated artificially--females were split open for their eggs and milt from the male salmon was squirted on them.

When the new-hatched Chinook had grown to fingerlings, they were marked (by fin-clipping) and dumped out to swim to the Pacific. When, four years later, the full-grown fish swam back up the Columbia to spawn, the biologists watched them anxiously. Sure enough, instead of heading for the waters above Grand Coulee, as their parents had done, the fish swam up the lower streams into which they had been dumped as fingerlings, and spawned there.

The biologists at Uncle Sam's Fish College think the plan will work for virtually all the Columbia's estimated 240,000 Chinooks--though it may result in a punier breed of fish. But oldtime fishermen are skeptical. Said Forest Ranger Grady Miller, gazing moodily at a Wallowa Lake dam that has completely destroyed a once-great salmon fishing ground: "Civilization and salmon don't mix."

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