Tikchik village: a nineteenth century riverine community in ... - Cluster

VANSTONE: TIKCHIK VILLAGE 333Bristol Bay during the ninth decade of the last century.This remarkableindustry, one of the most significant commercial developmentsin the entire history of Alaska, from its very inception broughtsignificant and far-reaching changes to the area. In the last twodecades of the nineteenth century it was responsible for bringingabout major seasonal fluctuations of population which brought theEskimos of even the remotest villages into first-hand contact withmany different races and nationalities.There are five species of Pacific salmon ;the king or chinook, thered or sockeye, the pink or humpback, the chum or dog, and the silveror coho.All these salmon make spawning runs into the rivers ofBristol Bay, but it is the red salmon that is the most important fromThe rivers flowing into the bay are thea commercial standpoint.greatest red salmon spawning grounds in the world because these fishspawn only in lakes or in streams that flow into or out of lakes. Itso happens that most of the rivers flowing into Bristol Bay havenumerous lakes at their headwaters.The earliest fishing by Euro -Americans in Nushagak Bay wasfor salting purposes and was carried out by the Alaska CommercialCompany (Petroff, 1884, p. 16). It was the invention of the canningprocess, however, that provided a means by which the Alaska salmonruns could be utilized more fully, and between 1883 and 1903 tencanneries were constructed at various points on Nushagak Bay (Moser,1899, pp. 173-174; Cobb, 1931, pp. 462-463; Hawkins andDaugherty, 1958, p. 17).From the beginning there appears to have been little or no effortmade to utilize the local labor supply in the salmon canning industry.Most of the actual fishing was done by Euro-Americans, while workin the canneries was done by Chinese laborers. As might be expected,however, large numbers of Eskimos were attracted to NushagakBay during the fishing seasons and tent settlements sprang upnear the canneries every summer (Gregory and Barnes, 1939, p. 27).Gradually, though, some Eskimos were able to obtain employmentin the canneries even during the earliest years of the industry in spiteof what was obviously considerable prejudice against them and theirabilities as workers. In the early 1890's, for example, Eskimo canneryworkers in Nushagak Bay were averaging $48.50 per monthduring an average period of operation of 63 days (Porter, 1893, p. 218)and in 1900 the two canneries at Nushagak village employed 70 localpeople as opposed to 193 Chinese (Moser, 1902, pp. 203-204). Thefact is that even when Chinese contract labor was readily available.