If you cast a fishing line into the Columbia River in 1920, you’d better be ready for a fight. The Pacific Northwest was once home to an enormous strain of Chinook salmon, with specimens weighing 70 to 80 pounds — reaching as high as 125. These earned a hefty moniker: they were called “June hogs,” signifying both their size and the season to catch them.

Before the arrival of settlers, Native Americans lived off the salmon supply of the Columbia River Basin for thousands of years. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, “For millennia, mid-Columbia tribes who caught the fish at Celilo Falls used them for food but also for spiritual, ceremonial, and trade purposes.” On his expedition, William Clark described indigenous populations who took advantage of an abundant and ready food source. “The number of dead Salmon on the Shores & floating in the river is incredible,” he wrote on October 17, 1805. “At this season they have only to collect the fish, split them open, and dry them on their Scaffolds on which they have great numbers.”

A hand-tinted postcard image of a fish wheel on the lower Columbia River around 1910, facing upstream. Fish are channeled by weir into the pathway of the wheel. (Wikimedia)

In 1866, the first salmon cannery was constructed by Hapgood, Hume and Company in the Washington Territory. In the coming years, the area would become the salmon breadbasket of the United States, with cities like Astoria in the Oregon Territory prospering along with the industry. Beginning in 1879 the installation of fish wheels along the river enabled companies to enjoy supercharged yields. Canneries would construct wooden weirs to funnel fish through a small swimming passage, where fish wheels — large, rotating trapping mechanisms that would turn using energy from the river — scooped up migrating salmon. Thanks to slanted chutes at the bottom of each basket-like aperture, the turning device deposited writhing fish in a reservoir, where a worker would spear them and prepare them for the cannery.

Workers at the Columbia River Packing Association, a salmon cannery in Astoria, Oregon, in 1941. (Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

Fish wheels eventually proved too effective, and fish populations began to deplete, with gillnetters and fishermen downstream claiming upriver machines gobbled up all the fish. In 1928, they were outlawed in Oregon, and Washington followed suit eight years later.

But that didn’t quell the appetite for June hogs. In 1895, the Portland Oregonian recorded the capture of an 83-pound salmon, the largest caught that year. Angus McDonald, a Hudson’s Bay Company official from 1852 to 1872, posted near Kettle Falls, wrote, “Salmon as heavy as one hundred pounds have been caught in those falls.” And unlike many fish stories, there is photographic evidence. One picture from 1925 shows a fisherman in Astoria, Oregon, with his 85-pound catch. An older photo, also taken in Astoria, shows a pair of fishermen with two June hogs appearing to approach five feet in length.

The scramble for salmon in the Columbia River Basin created a boom that quickly plateaued. Thirty-nine canneries in the area saturated the market as early as 1883, as corporations who blocked off river passages with fish wheels met opposition from fishermen of modest means. Standoffs over prime fishing got tense. Historian Joseph Taylor mentions a fish wheel owner named I.H. Taffe, who “had a reputation for shooting Indians he caught fishing near his wheels or cannery at Celilo Falls.”