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Dispersal and concentration: the slowly changing spatial pattern of the British Columbia salmon canning industry
Journal of Historical Geography, 14, 1 (1988) 22-36
Dispersal and concentration: the slowly changing spatial pattern of the British Columbia salmon canning industry Dianne Newell
The growth of staple industries has been essential to the development of Canada as a nation. Although the fishery is Canada's oldest staple industry, the rise of the Pacific salmon fishery, dominated by sahnon canning, is a largely twentieth-century development. Most research into the Pacific salmon canning industry has focused on Alaska, and no systematic study has been made of the complete evolution of the industry there or elsewhere on the Pacific rim. Also, little is known about the ways in which the changing distribution of cannery operations was a consequence of ecological factors (including the nature of the resource), technological change, business competition, labor shortages, or marketing considerations. By taking a spatial and ecological perspective, and using various cartographic and other historical records, this study has been able to determine the timing and pattern of spread and contraction of the industry as it developed in British Columbia over a 100-year period, through three lengthy and distinctive phases of change.
The notion that Canada has developed as a small, open economy engaged in the development of exports based on its natural resource endowment--the staples thesis--provides a popular general framework for examining the geographic spread of economic activity associated with export demand for natural resources. In the words of the country's best-known economic historian and major proponent of the thesis, Harold Innis: "The present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it. ''lq Accordingly, a considerable amount has been written on Canada's staple-producing regions. Yet seldom has the changing spatial pattern of production within those regions and over time been given detailed analysis. Such analyses are important because the changing spatial pattern of an industry is usually the result of fundamental changes for the industry, changes such as in the supply and quality of raw materials, in the availability of an appropriate workforce, in transportation and production technology, and in product markets. Such studies also supply the proper context for examining specific operations and districts at any particular time. In the absence of such studies, scholars have tended to make generalizations about staple industries based largely on the well-known operations and the most productive districts. An important case in point is the British Columbia salmon canning industry. The Canadian export-led boom of the period 1896 to 1929 is attributed generally to the rapid expansion of the wheat economy into the western prairies of Canada, but it was in fact more broadly based on a new generation of staples 0305-.-7488/88/010022 + 15 $03.00/0
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9 1988 Academic Press Limited
SALMON CANNERIES
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and on new forms of old staples, such as canned salmon, t21 The commercial salmon fishery of British Columbia is a relatively recent development in the long history of the Canadian fishery. Whereas the older Atlantic fishery was based on the production of salted and dried cod, a relatively untransformed natural resource, the Pacific fishery was based until recently on canned salmon, t31 Canning involved more domestic value added than salting or drying, It was an intrinisically industrial solution to the problems of food preservation in that it depended on tinplate production and large-scale factory organization. Furthermore, the Pacific salmon cannery operators quickly came to dominate the entire fishery, both salmon fishing and the business of catching and processing all the other varieties of fish, including shellfish. The growth and spread of the salmon canning industry was affected greatly by British Columbia's economic landscape. The British Columbia coast occupies the whole of the sea front between the 49th and 55th parallels of north latitude. As seen in Figure 1, it is made up of a great number of sounds, bays, and inlets, many of which stretch inland for considerable distances. With the exception of a few areas, such as the Fraser River delta, the coast is rugged and mountainous, with much of it inaccessible except by water. The camp-like cannery villages which sprung up in the protected tide-water locations evolved into major seasonal employment, transportation, communications, provisioning, and offseason storage centersJ 41These camps had much in c o m m o n with the province's logging and mining camps, yet compared to them, most of the canneries were active for extended periods; dozens of plants operated fairly continuously for as long as thirty or even fifty or more years (although rarely did they operate in every season), t51 At any given time there was tremendous variation in the size, function and, therefore, the complexity and value of the various operations, r61 The industry began in California in 1864 and rapidly spread northward to the Bering Sea. Alaska was the world base for the industry and British Columbia was the second most important. The British Columbia branch was always quite different from the American branches, however; it was always export oriented, more diversified, and more heavily regulated by the state (thus more stable). ~71As will be demonstrated, for the British Columbia salmon canning industry to remain competitive and still be profitable, the spatial characteristics constantly had to change in order to tap new areas and different species and varieties. The cannery operators then had to apply new technologies and business strategies compatible with the spatial strategies and changing market demands. By undertaking a major analysis of pack statistics, the cartographic record, and archival documents, it has been possible to identify and locate 223 individual sites at which salmon was canned in British Columbia from 1871, the year that the first successful cannery site was established, until 1966, the year that the last of the cannery sites was developed. N The number represents about 50% more cannery sites than had previously been thought to exist in the province. It is the purpose of this investigation to establish the geographical pattern of spread, fluctuation, and diversification of salmon canning operations within the coastal resource environment of British Columbia.
The resource environment
Everywhere on the Pacific, salmon migrate to their native freshwater streams to spawn in definite seasons of from two to six years, depending on the species. This spontaneous, one-way drive of salmon to the spawning grounds in great
24
D. NEWELL
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numbers over a short season made it ideal for canning. The fish could be caught relatively cheaply and easily in the inshore waters and river estuaries, where they congregated before beginning their ascent to the spawning beds, or in the mouths of the rivers and inlets themselves. At this point, while still in salt water, all species were in peak condition. The relatively high oil content of spawning adult salmon when caught in salt water, along with the red color and rich flavor, assured that the canned product would be highly marketable.
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The Pacific salmon was not a homogeneous resource. All five distinct species native to the North American coast were abundant in British Columbia, but from an economic point of view there were important distinctions in their life cycle, spawning habits, individual size, and the quality and color of flesh. [91 Of importance for understanding the spatial changes in this industry, the timing, intensity, and length of the annual cycles of abundance varied fi'om species to species and from one fishing ground to another. Runs for each species occurred earlier in the north than in the south, for example. Sockeye runs on the Fraser River were enormous every four years, then declined in each of the succeeding three years of the cycle. Yet much of the variation and fluctuation was not so predictable. The levels of intensity of fishing in previous seasons, other human activities (such as placer mining, logging, and railway construction), and variation in local weather conditions all influenced the absolute abundance of salmon each year. Local seasonal variation in weather and tidal conditions on the fishing grounds, the enforcement of weekly and seasonal "close" periods for fishing, and fishermen's strikes influenced how many and when salmon actually would be available for harvestingl Under such circumstances, this was a risky business for fishermen and cannery operators. Since fish were a c o m m o n property resource, it was extremely difficult for individual cannery operators to increase their own share of the total supply. And because the total pack was determined largely by the total supply of the raw resource each season, it was difficult for the industry to increase the output volume. I~~ Because of the speed with which salmon had to be processed after being caught, and because of the cyclical and seasonal gluts in the availability of raw salmon, cannery operators could not count even on canning all of the fish available to them in certain seasons and peak periods. The main issue was post-harvest loss because of the spoilage of raw salmon. The entire year's supply of a given species of salmon had to be caught during approximately six weeks when in season. Then, because of the extreme perishability, it had to be preserved within hours of being caught. The warmer the weather, the greater the distance from the fishing grounds to the processing plant, and the bigger the glut, the greater was the problem of spoilage. The technical difficulties in freezing and subsequently canning salmon with no loss in quality ~1~prevented operators from stockpiling the raw salmon for processing later. In the case of mass production of perishable products where high-volume, year-round production was possible, such as meat packing, operators were able to increase the volume and velocity of production simply by adopting mechanical continuous-process machinery and building larger plants. I~21 Key technological innovations had been introduced in the Pacific salmon canning industry from the 1880s onward, but the productivity gains were marginal (engineering efficiency is not always economic efficiency)J ~3J When operators adopted technological innovations in can-making, fish butchering, filling, and canning, they tended to limit their choices to the essential ones which served to eliminate waste and/or maintain or improve the quality of the pack. [:41 Plants could have been built with sufficient technical capacity to process the maximum supply of fish. But, given the short season and annual cyclical variation which characterized the Pacific salmon fishery, such a canning plant would operate at only a small percentage of capacity throughout the greater part of the season. Even in "big run" years, this under-capacity was a problem. :~SJ Thus, prior to the introduction of freezer boats and major innovations in high-speed ocean transport and brine refrigeration, which did not occur until
26
D. NEWELL
after World War II, salmon canneries had to be relatively numerous, small in scale, and located within a few hours travel of the fishing grounds, t~61 Within a given fishing district, the number of suitable cannery sites was relatively limited. Incidently, because so many of the canneries were eventually constructed in the vicinity of coastal Indian villages and fish camps, and because Indians fished and worked for the canneries in great numbers, it is usually assumed that the local sources of Indian labor played a decisive role in determining cannery locations. But, given the traditional dependence of the Native people on the salmon resource, good cannery sites were bound to be located close to the coastal Indian settlements and seasonal camps. [17] In truth, the key determinants for cannery locations were environmental (Figures 2 and 3). They included first, the proximity of the fishing grounds; second, a convenient source of fresh water (for canning, domestic, and possibly power requirements); third, a relatively protected harbor with access at high tide for fishing and supply vessels; and fourth, a good-sized tidal foreshore for a foundation of pilings and wharves, and a canning plant, outbuildings, and dwellings, t181
Spatial expansion: 1871-1928 Largely because of the nature of the resource and resource environment, the geographical expansion phase in salmon canning in British Columbia lasted for a remarkably long time: almost 60 years. Expansion did not take place as a smooth or continuous process, however. Rather, it occurred in a succession of four major waves, during which the industry established an increasingly complex, hierarchical and spatial system of salmon canning districts (Figure 1 and Table 1). The first provincial cannery was erected to can sockeye at the mouth of the Fraser River in 1871. Over the next two decades the industry spread rapidly, though on a small scale, into all of the main sockeye fishing districts on the coast--the Skeena and Nass rivers (over 800 nautical kilometers away), and Rivers and Smiths inlets (about half way along the mainland coast). Infilling occurred in the system as canneries were built in the "empty" sounds, inlets, and off-shore islands lying between the Skeena River and Rivers and Smiths inlets, and between the latter and the Fraser River district, and in the major sounds and salmon rivers on the west and east coasts of Vancouver Island. The pioneer Fraser River district canners and fishermen were initially inspired to migrate northward and westward in the 1880s and 1890s not simply by the need to increase their share of the sockeye pack, but to reduce the risks, and therefore the costs, of the widely fluctuating and relatively unpredictable supplies of sockeye available on the Fraser. Aggravating the problems of the Fraser River salmon industry was the rapid growth of the Puget Sound salmon industry during the 1890s, which depended for its supply of raw salmon on the runs of salmon heading for the Fraser. The salmon fishery on the Sound was only loosely regulated and involved the highly efficient trap method of fishing, which was banned in British Columbia. In this decade, the 1890s, the number of canning operations on the Fraser trippled to 43. A second wave of cannery site development occurred in the years 1902 to 1914. The early business boom for the Fraser River canning industry had ended in 1900 in a crisis of over-expnasion marked by bankruptcies, fishermen's strikes, and consolidations or mergers. E191There followed the largest ever sockeye
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run on the Fraser (1901) and government-sponsored regulations were tightened to limit the pressure on the Fraser River salmon stocks. I2~ Accordingly, the packing companies jostled for position in the industry. The large concerns were able to consolidate operations in the Fraser River district, erect new plants in and adjacent to the new sockeye districts developed in the previous few decades. Also being exploited were the biannual runs of the next most valuable species, pink salmon; it was for that reason that the last cannery district was opened, the Queen Charlotte Islands, in 1911. Again, over-expansion, ruinous competition, and governmental controls to limit the Northern salmon fishery was the result.[2~l The pattern of cannery operations which emerged just prior to World War I is indicated by examining closely the location and year o f initial development for each cannery site in the province (Table 1 and the analysis o f pack statistics in Figures 4 and 5). The peak period for new cannery site development occurred at the turn of the century. By 1901 (the " m e d i a n " year of new cannery site development), canneries had already been built on half o f the sites to be established in the province. By 1909, canneries had been erected at half of the cannery sites to be established outside the Fraser River district. Canned sockeye continued to reign as a percentage of the total provincial pack; however, according to the pack statistics represented in Figure 4, after 1902 the districts other than the Fraser River were responsible collectively for the bulk o f it. The basic network o f the industry was established well before 1914. Several generations of students o f the industry have assumed that its shift northwards occurred as the result of two later, quite specific events. The first of these was the rock slides at Hell's Gate on the Fraser River in 1913-1914, which destroyed a major sockeye spawning run. The other was the sharp rise in d e m a n d for the cheaper grades of canned salmon brought a b o u t by the world-wide food shortages during the war. I221 The main impact o f these events was to shift the industry permanently away from the canning of sockeye to the canning of the cheaper grades. The new emphasis on the cheaper grades in turn increased the value o f the newly-opened districts, such as the Queen Charlottes. The Fraser TABLE 1 Chronology of B.C. salmon cannery districts according to year of active site development, 1871-1966
Location
Year of New Construction
District
Sub-District
First Year
Last Year
Median Year
Total Sites
1. Fraser:
Fraser R. Vancouver Hbr. Skeena R. Prince Rupert
1871 1901 1876 1882 1881 I882 1890 1890 1883 1881 1895 1911
1965 1956 1929 1960 1918 1932 1927 1928 1929 1966 1934 1938
1894 1909 1901 1925 1896 1901-5 1901 1910-5 1909 1918 1919 1921 (1901)
74 14 20 9 12 14 11 8 5 2l 19 16 223
2. Skeena:
3. Nass River 4. Central: Rivers Inlet Coast Northern Outlying Southern Outlying Smiths Inlet 5. Vancouver I.: East Coast West Coast 6. Queen Carlotte Islands Total Source: "Site List" (author's files 1985).
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Years I
Figure 4.
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B.C. canned salmon pack, 1903-1967: Sockeye vs non-Sockeye pack. Source: Cicely Lyons, Salmon." Our Heritage (Vancouver 1969) appendix 40
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B.C. canned salmon pack, 1881-1956, by district. Source: Lyons, op. cit. appendix 36
SALMON CANNERIES
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River rockslides of 1913-1914 occurred at the high point in the sockeye cycle, so that the devastating effects on the resource were not evident until the next "big year", 1917. Beginning in 1917, cannery operators in the Fraser district compensated for the loss by exploiting the stocks of the other, cheaper species of salmon, all of which were abundant on the Fraser. They did not move necessarily into the other canning districts. During the early years of the war period few new canneries were built because new cannery construction continued to be curtailed by the government. Yet canned salmon proved to be an ideal food ration, t231 In order to meet the increased foreign demand, operators had to reactivate, and in some cases enlarge, as many of the existing plants as possible, to adopt technological innovations in processing (some of which had been available for a decade or more), and to can every species of salmon. In particular, they exploited the previously relatively untapped, lowest grade species, chum, which was abundant in all the districts and involved a fall fisheryJ 241 By 1916, the canning of the cheaper grades had advanced to the point where the non-sockeye pack had become more important in terms of output volume than the sockeye pack (Figure 5). The plants responsible for the bulk of this important production were located outside of the Fraser River district. In 1917 the official ban on new cannery construction was lifted, as was the ban on the use of gasoline motors on fishing boats in the North. E251This led to the third wave of expansion. The number of canneries operating simultaneously peaked; 87 plants produced the pack that season and, more importantly, every possible district was in full operation. After a brief lull during the post-war depression, new government regulations "opened" the industry to independent fishermen (white and Indians only) and removed all special restrictions on the Northern salmon fishery and canning industry. ~26jThese changes were accompanied by the all-too-familiar pattern of business failures and attempts at new consolidations and mergers. I27JThen, in the mid-1920s, there occurred a series of large runs of salmon, high prices, and good markets for the cheaper grades. ~2slThese events ushered in the fourth, final wave of expansion. The spatial outline established in the earlier decades was fleshed out as the last of the cannery sites were discovered and developed in the Skeena River and Central Coast districts (Table 1). The more marginal or specialized, non-sockeye fishing districts, such as the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands, were now fully exploited by the cannery operators. Contraction and diversification: 1929-1945
Although several dozen different packing companies produced the provincial canned salmon pack in the 1920s, only a handful of companies accounted for the bulk of it. t29jThis trend towards industrial concentration in the British Columbia industry mirrored the trend in the United States and the general business trend in Canada at the time. I3~ The handful of large packing companies that began to dominate after 1928 bought up existing plants or built new ones in as many of the salmon fishing districts as possible. They then began a major undertaking to rationalize facilities and eliminate competition. Despite these moves, new companies, including several cooperative ventures, entered the field. E311Unlike the earlier period, consolidation and new investment was not accompanied by extension into new areas. The outer limits of expansion had already been achieved. Instead, a lengthy period of spatial contraction began.
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D. N E W E L L
Although a dozen new plants were built, outdated or under-used plants were closed down or, if strategically located, were outfitted with fully-automatic, high-speed canning lines in order to pack the fish caught with gear belonging to the abandoned plants. Some of the abandoned cannery camps were adapted for new or more specialized uses for fishing stations, net and boat storage, and/or as regional cold storage facilities. Because many old plants remained in service on a standby basis for use in times of periodic good runs of salmon in the outlying areas, there were plenty of "sputters" in the process of contraction. But the annual reports of the provincial fisheries department indicate that from 1930 onward, the trend was there. I321 Only a handful of new cannery sites were developed after 1930 and the absolute number licensed to operate declined. Most of the new plants were located in the port cities of Vancouver and Prince Rupert (Table 1). Because of the world-wide depression and its effect on business and markets, the discrepancy between the number of salmon canneries licensed to operate and the number which actually operated grew larger over time. For the first time cannery operations in entire sub-districts failed to put up a canned salmon pack for one or more seasons; one sub-district, Smiths Inlet, shut down permanently after the 1938 season. As yet another signal of the structural changes, the number of licenses issued to fish processing operations other than salmon canning increased substantially. This is not surprising, since the provincial cannery operators had virtually no domestic market for their product and were losing their share of the export markets also. They therefore began processing more of the salmon pack for the fresh and frozen trade, stepped up the production of fish oil and fish waste, entered into the production of halibut and salmon liver oil which had become valuable as natural sources for the manufacture of vitamins, and experimented with the marketing of new specialty lines using salmon scrapsJ 331 This diversification was halted temporarily with the outbreak of World War II. During the war, all efforts were diverted to the canning of salmon and Pacific herring. I341 Immediately after the war, salmon canning ended in the marginal districts of the Nass River (permanently) and the Queen Charlotte Islands (for ten years)J 351 With contraction, a recognizable new cannery distribution pattern emerged at the local level. Unpredictable local environment changes at the sites, such as cannery fires, avalanches, silting, ice jams, and tide hazards, and changes in the location and richness of the local salmon fishing grounds, had rendered certain sites physically unsuitable for the economic operation of canneries. But the changes brought about by cannery operators and fishery officials themselves mainly created the local geographical shifts in cannery operations. Increased competition for raw salmon and the efficient enforcement o f government-sponsored conservation measures drew the fishing fleets away from the upstream tidal waters of rivers and inlets out toward open water. The new practice of the harvesting new varieties of fish, such as halibut, herring, and pilchards, which were caught in more open water, reinforced this shift. With the increase in size and deeper draft of the fishing and supply vessels that called at the canneries, the most advantageous sites were those located at the outlets of the salmon rivers and inlets, at the coastal margins, including the off-shore islands, and at the deep-water harbor sites at Prince Rupert and Vancouver. [361 The old cannery sites, located upstream at such places as New Westminster on the Fraser, Port Essington on the Skeena, and in Massett Inlet, in the Queen Charlottes (1, 2, and 3 in Figure 1) were abandoned eventually.
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Post-war spatial concentration When the wartime controls on salmon prices and exports of raw and canned salmon were lifted, canned salmon diminished dramatically as a proportion of the total volume and value of fisheries production in British Columbia. I371The provincial raw salmon supply did not show immediately a marked reduction in volume, although major hydro-electric developments were being planned for the important spawning rivers of the province that would make it difficult to maintain anadromous stocks. But salmon stocks everywhere had become highly erratic and thus less predictable. Moreover, as a result of the salmon harvesting methods used by fishermen over the previous eighty years, the runs were increasingly later in the season, when the quality had diminished considerably, and the average size of the fish was smaller. By 1947 British Columbia fishermen were permitted to export large volumes of raw salmon to cannery operators in the United States, where higher prices prevailed. All of these factors limited the amount of raw salmon available to provincial cannery operators and, therefore, drove up the price of canned salmon. The export markets for all North American canned salmon fell off as a result of the switch to the lower-cost producers in the Orient. Moreover, a variety of new, lower-priced fish products came on to the market as a substitute for canned salmon. These included canned tuna fish, fish cakes, pastes, chowders, and frozen fish sticks. These changes in the quality and availability of raw salmon and in export markets led to further diversification in processing and, in turn, to increased competition in all branches of fishing. In the ten years after 1945, the investment per person in the primary fishing operation was doubled as innovations in fish locating apparatus and in high-speed, all-weather, all-purpose transport were introduced and adopted on a grand scale, t381These innovations greatly increased the mobility, range, and efficiency of fishing vessels, which facilitated the shifting of the entire fish packing industry in the 1960s to a dozen large-scale, integrated plants located principally at Vancouver and Prince Rupert. In the centrally-located operations the canning lines were combined in a single plant with every other method of processing the Pacific catch. I391They were linked to their new, North American markets by rail and highway. By operating on a year-round basis, packers could make the most of their supply of salmon and other fish under any conditions of supply and market demand.
Conclusion Given this pattern of development, it is unfortunate that most studies of the British Columbia salmon canning industry have focused almost exclusively on only two periods: the pre-1900 era, when sockeye was the main commercial catch and the Fraser River district dominated the provincial fishery, or the post-1945 period, when the canning of salmon and the remote, isolated cannery operations were no longer the order of the day. Focusing on the initial development and final phases has resulted in a distorted picture of the slow transformation of the spatial pattern. Business concentration began in the first decade of this century but spatial concentration was not fully evident for another fifty years. Over the long period of contraction, the canning of salmon declined but other specialties developed to replace it. Also, the total number of sites at which salmon canning took place declined but the sites and facilities themselves usually continued to be used for fishery-related activities.
34
D. NEWELL
The sheer number, complexity, and the spatial and temporal distribution of salmon canning sites uncovered and analyzed in this study offer new important information about British Columbia's changing economic landscape and how the geographical pattern developed. With this knowledge, it is now possible to begin studying the impact of so many scattered, seasonal canning camps and districts on the regional economies of the coast. For example, the spatial expansion and subsequent contraction of this seasonal, labor-intensive industry, and its eventual concentration in large population centers, must have had a differential effect on seasonal work opportunities for the coastal population. 14~ Such an important issue as this cannot be raised, let alone addressed, so long as the historic canneries of the province continued to be viewed as mere extensions of the salmon fishery, or as countless, shapeless, appendages to the highest producing salmon canning district--the Fraser River. Indeed, it is not possible to make any major generalizations about the Pacific fishery based on one specialization and on a few sample points, as has been the traditional approach in studying the industry. Department of History,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6T 1 W5
Acknowledgements The research for this article stems partly from a project funded by the B.C. Heritage Trust. I am grateful to my co-investigator, Arthur Roberts, for his help at the research stage, and Jos~ E. Igartua, for his comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.
Notes [1] Harold A. Innis, The fur trade in Canada: an introduction to Canadian economic h&tory (Toronto rev. ed. 1970) 393; ibid., The cod fisheries: the history of an international resource (Toronto 1970 reprint) [2] William L. Marr and Donald G. Paterson, Canada: an economic history (Toronto 1980) 344 [3] There are two varieties of salmon (family Salmonide), Atlantic (genus Salmo) and Pacific (Oncorhynchus). Both are anandromous (spend their adult life in the ocean but return to their native freshwater stream to spawn). But only the Pacific variety dies after spawning or is wellsuited to being canned. M. C. Urquhart (Ed.), Historical statistics of Canada (Toronto 1965) 287-407; Canada, Department of Marine and Fisheries [title varies], Annual Report (Ottawa 1910 to 1975); Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics [hereafter DBS], Fisheries Statistics (Ottawa 1917 to 1940) Capital Invested table [4] Otis W. Freeman, Salmon Industry of the Pacific Coast Economic Geography 11 (1935) 109139; J. Lewis Robinson and Walter G. Hardwick, British Columbia." one hundred years of geographical change (Vancouver 1973) [5] See Cicely Lyons, Salmon." our heritage. The story of Canada's west coast salmon fishing industry (Vancouver, B.C. 1969); University of British Columbia library [hereafter UBC], Henry Doyle Papers, Box 6, file 22, Canneries operating now compared to what it is proposed to operate under amalgamation [c1924] [6] B.C. Fire Underwriters Association, Plans of Salmon Canneries (1924) Inspection Reports; John N. Cobb, Pacific salmon fisheries 4th ed. (Washington, D.C. 1930); How salmon is canned Pacific Fisherman Yearbook Supplement (January 1936) 15-20; Daniel B. DeLoach, The salmon canning industry (Corvallis, Ore. 1939); Homer E. Gregory and Kathleen Barnes, North Pacificfisheries, with special reference to Alaska salmon (San Francisco 1939) chapters 6 & 7; David J. Reid, The development of the Fraser River salmon canning industry, 1885-1913 (Ottawa 1973)
SALMON CANNERIES
35
[7] Gregory and Barnes, op. cit. chapter 10; W.A. Carrothers, The British Columbia fisheries (Toronto 1940), foreword by H. A. lnnis; Dianne Newell (ed. and compl.), A grown man's game: Henry Doyle and the rise o f the Pacific salmon canning industry (forthcoming); Richard A. Cooley, The politics o f conservation." the decline o f the Alaska salmon (New York 1963) 37 (Fig. 4), 38 (Fig. 5) [8] A. Roberts, D. Newell, and E. Higginbottom, SFU/UBC inventory o f historic salmon cannery sites, 8 Vols (unpubl. report, Simon Fraser University, Geography Department 1986); Dianne Newell, Surveying historic industrial tidewater sites: the case of the B.C. salmon canning industry IA 13 (1987) 1-16. Dr Robert Galois and Logan Hovis prepared the locational and temporal information for the site inventory [9] The five species native to the North American Pacific coast are sockeye, or blueback, Alaska red (O. nerka); pink or humpback (O. gorbuscha); chum, keta, or dog (O. keta); spring, tyee, king, quinnat, or chinook (O. tsehawytscha); and cohoe or silver (O. kiscutch) [10] Artificial propagation of Pacific salmon has not been very cost-effective, nor has salmon "farming" and "ranching" (not introduced until after World War II) been successful until the past decade. Jerry C. Towle, The Pacific salmon and the process of domestification Geographical Review 73 (1983) 287-300; James E. Fralick, Feasibility of salmon farming as a small business in B.C. (unpubl. M.A. thesis, UBC 1978) [I 1] See M. E. Standsby and J. Dassow, Use of frozen salmon for canning Commercial Fisheries Review 13 (1951) 20-25 [12] Alfred Chandler, Jr, The visible hand." the managerial revolution in American business (Cambridge 1977) 28%299 [13] Patrick O'Bannon, Technological change in the Pacific Coast canned salmon industry, 18641924 (unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of California, San Diego 1983); and Duncan A. Stacey, Sockeye & tinplate: technological change in the Fraser River salmon canning industry, 1871-1912 (Victoria, B.C. 1982) [14] Dianne Newell, The economics of technological change in the salmon canning industry of British Columbia, 1871-1945 (paper presented to the Southern Economic Association meeting, New Orleans 1986); Doyle Papers, 5/6, The process of canning salmon, by Henry Doyle, 1920; How salmon is canned, op. cit. [15] Canada, Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects, The eommercialfisheries o f Canada (Ottawa 1957) 4, 38-39; Gregory and Barnes, op. tit. chapters 6 & 7 [16] Reid, op. cit. 54-70; Ed Cepka, West Coast vernacular canneries Architecture Forum 4 (1981) 17-19 [17] Rolf Knight, Indians at work: an informal history o f native Indian labour in British Columbia 1858-1930 (Vancouver 1978) 28~,0, 78-100 [18] See note 8; William Ross, Salmon cannery distribution on the Nass and Skeena Rivers of British Columbia, 1877--1926 (unpubl. B.A. graduating essay in Geography, UBC 1967) 1330, 74-100 [19] Carrothers, op. cit. 5-16 [20] Canada, Dominion-British Columbia Fisheries Commission, 1905-1907, Report and recommendations (Ottawa 1908); Newell, A grown man's game, chapters 1 & 2 [21] Lyons, op. cit. 270-271; Canada Report o f the Dominion-British Columbia Boat Rating Commission, 1910 (Ottawa 1911) [22] Even H. A. Innis himself promoted this idea (Carrothers, op. cit. ix~) [23] Association of Alaska Salmon Packers and Puget Sound Canners Association, Canned salmon: the ideal army and navy ration (Seattle 1915[?]) [24] Canada, Department of Naval Service, Fisheries Branch, Fisheries Inspection Report for B.C. (Ottawa 1917 to 1921) [25] Canada, Royal Commission on the Salmon Fisheries and Canning Industry in British Columbia, Report o f the Speeial Fishery Commission, 1917 (Ottawa 1918) [26] Canda, British Columbia Fisheries Commission, Report and Recommendations, 1922(Ottawa 1923) [27] Lyons, op. cit. 245-293 [28] Carrothers, op. cit. 52-53 [29] Doyle, Canneries Operating Now, op. cit.; Lyons, op. cit. 273-277 [30] Gregory and Barnes, op. eit. 106fl, Marr and Paterson, op. tit. 415ff [31] Lyons, op. cit. 401-413; Wallace Clement, Canada's coastal fisheries: formation of unions, cooperatives, and associations Journal o f Canadian Studies 19 (1984) 5-33 [32] British Columbia, Department of Fisheries, Annual Report o f the Commissioner o f Fisheries [title varies] (Victoria 1934 to 1945) Licenses Issued table
36
D. NEWELL
[33] DBS, op. cit. (1930-1940) The Fish and Fish Products Marketed (B.C.) table [34] B.C., Fisheries Report (1940 to 1945); Dianne Newell, Food for war: Great Britain's grip on Canada's Pacificfishery during WW II (Canadian Historical Association), Historical Papers (forthcoming 1988) [35] B.C. Fisheries Report (1945 to 1975) [36] Ross, op. cit. pp. 78-79, noted this pattern for the Skeena and Nass rivers but it was in fact a province-wide trend [37] Data source: B.C. Fisheries Report (1945 to 1975); Canada, Fisheries Report (1945 to 1975) [38] Canada, Commercial Fisheries, op. cit. 8 [39] Canfisco Cannery spotlights policy: concentration at key points [Prince Rupert] Pacific Fisherman 49 (1951) 37-40; Integrated salmon cannery operation Pacific Fisherman 49 (1951) 55-59; Lyons, op. cit. 491-564 [40] Rolf Knight, Work camps and company towns in Canada and the U.S.: an annotated bibliography (Vancouver 1975) 1-11
Centre for Metropolitan History
A new Centre for Metropolitan History has been established by the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). The Centre will promote research into the history o f metropolises in general and o f L o n d o n in particular, providing both a forum for the exchange of ideas t h r o u g h seminars and a practical service for those interested in the history of L o n d o n by bibliographical work, by organizing and processing data, and by disseminating news of research in progress. Those wishing to know more about the Centre's role should write to Miss H. J. Creaton, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, L o n d o n WC1E 7HU.
Dispersal and concentration: the slowly changing spatial pattern of the British Columbia salmon canning industry Dianne Newell
The growth of staple industries has been essential to the development of Canada as a nation. Although the fishery is Canada's oldest staple industry, the rise of the Pacific salmon fishery, dominated by sahnon canning, is a largely twentieth-century development. Most research into the Pacific salmon canning industry has focused on Alaska, and no systematic study has been made of the complete evolution of the industry there or elsewhere on the Pacific rim. Also, little is known about the ways in which the changing distribution of cannery operations was a consequence of ecological factors (including the nature of the resource), technological change, business competition, labor shortages, or marketing considerations. By taking a spatial and ecological perspective, and using various cartographic and other historical records, this study has been able to determine the timing and pattern of spread and contraction of the industry as it developed in British Columbia over a 100-year period, through three lengthy and distinctive phases of change.
The notion that Canada has developed as a small, open economy engaged in the development of exports based on its natural resource endowment--the staples thesis--provides a popular general framework for examining the geographic spread of economic activity associated with export demand for natural resources. In the words of the country's best-known economic historian and major proponent of the thesis, Harold Innis: "The present Dominion emerged not in spite of geography but because of it. ''lq Accordingly, a considerable amount has been written on Canada's staple-producing regions. Yet seldom has the changing spatial pattern of production within those regions and over time been given detailed analysis. Such analyses are important because the changing spatial pattern of an industry is usually the result of fundamental changes for the industry, changes such as in the supply and quality of raw materials, in the availability of an appropriate workforce, in transportation and production technology, and in product markets. Such studies also supply the proper context for examining specific operations and districts at any particular time. In the absence of such studies, scholars have tended to make generalizations about staple industries based largely on the well-known operations and the most productive districts. An important case in point is the British Columbia salmon canning industry. The Canadian export-led boom of the period 1896 to 1929 is attributed generally to the rapid expansion of the wheat economy into the western prairies of Canada, but it was in fact more broadly based on a new generation of staples 0305-.-7488/88/010022 + 15 $03.00/0
22
9 1988 Academic Press Limited
SALMON CANNERIES
23
and on new forms of old staples, such as canned salmon, t21 The commercial salmon fishery of British Columbia is a relatively recent development in the long history of the Canadian fishery. Whereas the older Atlantic fishery was based on the production of salted and dried cod, a relatively untransformed natural resource, the Pacific fishery was based until recently on canned salmon, t31 Canning involved more domestic value added than salting or drying, It was an intrinisically industrial solution to the problems of food preservation in that it depended on tinplate production and large-scale factory organization. Furthermore, the Pacific salmon cannery operators quickly came to dominate the entire fishery, both salmon fishing and the business of catching and processing all the other varieties of fish, including shellfish. The growth and spread of the salmon canning industry was affected greatly by British Columbia's economic landscape. The British Columbia coast occupies the whole of the sea front between the 49th and 55th parallels of north latitude. As seen in Figure 1, it is made up of a great number of sounds, bays, and inlets, many of which stretch inland for considerable distances. With the exception of a few areas, such as the Fraser River delta, the coast is rugged and mountainous, with much of it inaccessible except by water. The camp-like cannery villages which sprung up in the protected tide-water locations evolved into major seasonal employment, transportation, communications, provisioning, and offseason storage centersJ 41These camps had much in c o m m o n with the province's logging and mining camps, yet compared to them, most of the canneries were active for extended periods; dozens of plants operated fairly continuously for as long as thirty or even fifty or more years (although rarely did they operate in every season), t51 At any given time there was tremendous variation in the size, function and, therefore, the complexity and value of the various operations, r61 The industry began in California in 1864 and rapidly spread northward to the Bering Sea. Alaska was the world base for the industry and British Columbia was the second most important. The British Columbia branch was always quite different from the American branches, however; it was always export oriented, more diversified, and more heavily regulated by the state (thus more stable). ~71As will be demonstrated, for the British Columbia salmon canning industry to remain competitive and still be profitable, the spatial characteristics constantly had to change in order to tap new areas and different species and varieties. The cannery operators then had to apply new technologies and business strategies compatible with the spatial strategies and changing market demands. By undertaking a major analysis of pack statistics, the cartographic record, and archival documents, it has been possible to identify and locate 223 individual sites at which salmon was canned in British Columbia from 1871, the year that the first successful cannery site was established, until 1966, the year that the last of the cannery sites was developed. N The number represents about 50% more cannery sites than had previously been thought to exist in the province. It is the purpose of this investigation to establish the geographical pattern of spread, fluctuation, and diversification of salmon canning operations within the coastal resource environment of British Columbia.
The resource environment
Everywhere on the Pacific, salmon migrate to their native freshwater streams to spawn in definite seasons of from two to six years, depending on the species. This spontaneous, one-way drive of salmon to the spawning grounds in great
24
D. NEWELL
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British Columbia salmon canning districts, 1871-1966
numbers over a short season made it ideal for canning. The fish could be caught relatively cheaply and easily in the inshore waters and river estuaries, where they congregated before beginning their ascent to the spawning beds, or in the mouths of the rivers and inlets themselves. At this point, while still in salt water, all species were in peak condition. The relatively high oil content of spawning adult salmon when caught in salt water, along with the red color and rich flavor, assured that the canned product would be highly marketable.
SALMON CANNERIES
25
The Pacific salmon was not a homogeneous resource. All five distinct species native to the North American coast were abundant in British Columbia, but from an economic point of view there were important distinctions in their life cycle, spawning habits, individual size, and the quality and color of flesh. [91 Of importance for understanding the spatial changes in this industry, the timing, intensity, and length of the annual cycles of abundance varied fi'om species to species and from one fishing ground to another. Runs for each species occurred earlier in the north than in the south, for example. Sockeye runs on the Fraser River were enormous every four years, then declined in each of the succeeding three years of the cycle. Yet much of the variation and fluctuation was not so predictable. The levels of intensity of fishing in previous seasons, other human activities (such as placer mining, logging, and railway construction), and variation in local weather conditions all influenced the absolute abundance of salmon each year. Local seasonal variation in weather and tidal conditions on the fishing grounds, the enforcement of weekly and seasonal "close" periods for fishing, and fishermen's strikes influenced how many and when salmon actually would be available for harvestingl Under such circumstances, this was a risky business for fishermen and cannery operators. Since fish were a c o m m o n property resource, it was extremely difficult for individual cannery operators to increase their own share of the total supply. And because the total pack was determined largely by the total supply of the raw resource each season, it was difficult for the industry to increase the output volume. I~~ Because of the speed with which salmon had to be processed after being caught, and because of the cyclical and seasonal gluts in the availability of raw salmon, cannery operators could not count even on canning all of the fish available to them in certain seasons and peak periods. The main issue was post-harvest loss because of the spoilage of raw salmon. The entire year's supply of a given species of salmon had to be caught during approximately six weeks when in season. Then, because of the extreme perishability, it had to be preserved within hours of being caught. The warmer the weather, the greater the distance from the fishing grounds to the processing plant, and the bigger the glut, the greater was the problem of spoilage. The technical difficulties in freezing and subsequently canning salmon with no loss in quality ~1~prevented operators from stockpiling the raw salmon for processing later. In the case of mass production of perishable products where high-volume, year-round production was possible, such as meat packing, operators were able to increase the volume and velocity of production simply by adopting mechanical continuous-process machinery and building larger plants. I~21 Key technological innovations had been introduced in the Pacific salmon canning industry from the 1880s onward, but the productivity gains were marginal (engineering efficiency is not always economic efficiency)J ~3J When operators adopted technological innovations in can-making, fish butchering, filling, and canning, they tended to limit their choices to the essential ones which served to eliminate waste and/or maintain or improve the quality of the pack. [:41 Plants could have been built with sufficient technical capacity to process the maximum supply of fish. But, given the short season and annual cyclical variation which characterized the Pacific salmon fishery, such a canning plant would operate at only a small percentage of capacity throughout the greater part of the season. Even in "big run" years, this under-capacity was a problem. :~SJ Thus, prior to the introduction of freezer boats and major innovations in high-speed ocean transport and brine refrigeration, which did not occur until
26
D. NEWELL
after World War II, salmon canneries had to be relatively numerous, small in scale, and located within a few hours travel of the fishing grounds, t~61 Within a given fishing district, the number of suitable cannery sites was relatively limited. Incidently, because so many of the canneries were eventually constructed in the vicinity of coastal Indian villages and fish camps, and because Indians fished and worked for the canneries in great numbers, it is usually assumed that the local sources of Indian labor played a decisive role in determining cannery locations. But, given the traditional dependence of the Native people on the salmon resource, good cannery sites were bound to be located close to the coastal Indian settlements and seasonal camps. [17] In truth, the key determinants for cannery locations were environmental (Figures 2 and 3). They included first, the proximity of the fishing grounds; second, a convenient source of fresh water (for canning, domestic, and possibly power requirements); third, a relatively protected harbor with access at high tide for fishing and supply vessels; and fourth, a good-sized tidal foreshore for a foundation of pilings and wharves, and a canning plant, outbuildings, and dwellings, t181
Spatial expansion: 1871-1928 Largely because of the nature of the resource and resource environment, the geographical expansion phase in salmon canning in British Columbia lasted for a remarkably long time: almost 60 years. Expansion did not take place as a smooth or continuous process, however. Rather, it occurred in a succession of four major waves, during which the industry established an increasingly complex, hierarchical and spatial system of salmon canning districts (Figure 1 and Table 1). The first provincial cannery was erected to can sockeye at the mouth of the Fraser River in 1871. Over the next two decades the industry spread rapidly, though on a small scale, into all of the main sockeye fishing districts on the coast--the Skeena and Nass rivers (over 800 nautical kilometers away), and Rivers and Smiths inlets (about half way along the mainland coast). Infilling occurred in the system as canneries were built in the "empty" sounds, inlets, and off-shore islands lying between the Skeena River and Rivers and Smiths inlets, and between the latter and the Fraser River district, and in the major sounds and salmon rivers on the west and east coasts of Vancouver Island. The pioneer Fraser River district canners and fishermen were initially inspired to migrate northward and westward in the 1880s and 1890s not simply by the need to increase their share of the sockeye pack, but to reduce the risks, and therefore the costs, of the widely fluctuating and relatively unpredictable supplies of sockeye available on the Fraser. Aggravating the problems of the Fraser River salmon industry was the rapid growth of the Puget Sound salmon industry during the 1890s, which depended for its supply of raw salmon on the runs of salmon heading for the Fraser. The salmon fishery on the Sound was only loosely regulated and involved the highly efficient trap method of fishing, which was banned in British Columbia. In this decade, the 1890s, the number of canning operations on the Fraser trippled to 43. A second wave of cannery site development occurred in the years 1902 to 1914. The early business boom for the Fraser River canning industry had ended in 1900 in a crisis of over-expnasion marked by bankruptcies, fishermen's strikes, and consolidations or mergers. E191There followed the largest ever sockeye
SALMON CANNERIES
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run on the Fraser (1901) and government-sponsored regulations were tightened to limit the pressure on the Fraser River salmon stocks. I2~ Accordingly, the packing companies jostled for position in the industry. The large concerns were able to consolidate operations in the Fraser River district, erect new plants in and adjacent to the new sockeye districts developed in the previous few decades. Also being exploited were the biannual runs of the next most valuable species, pink salmon; it was for that reason that the last cannery district was opened, the Queen Charlotte Islands, in 1911. Again, over-expansion, ruinous competition, and governmental controls to limit the Northern salmon fishery was the result.[2~l The pattern of cannery operations which emerged just prior to World War I is indicated by examining closely the location and year o f initial development for each cannery site in the province (Table 1 and the analysis o f pack statistics in Figures 4 and 5). The peak period for new cannery site development occurred at the turn of the century. By 1901 (the " m e d i a n " year of new cannery site development), canneries had already been built on half o f the sites to be established in the province. By 1909, canneries had been erected at half of the cannery sites to be established outside the Fraser River district. Canned sockeye continued to reign as a percentage of the total provincial pack; however, according to the pack statistics represented in Figure 4, after 1902 the districts other than the Fraser River were responsible collectively for the bulk o f it. The basic network o f the industry was established well before 1914. Several generations of students o f the industry have assumed that its shift northwards occurred as the result of two later, quite specific events. The first of these was the rock slides at Hell's Gate on the Fraser River in 1913-1914, which destroyed a major sockeye spawning run. The other was the sharp rise in d e m a n d for the cheaper grades of canned salmon brought a b o u t by the world-wide food shortages during the war. I221 The main impact o f these events was to shift the industry permanently away from the canning of sockeye to the canning of the cheaper grades. The new emphasis on the cheaper grades in turn increased the value o f the newly-opened districts, such as the Queen Charlottes. The Fraser TABLE 1 Chronology of B.C. salmon cannery districts according to year of active site development, 1871-1966
Location
Year of New Construction
District
Sub-District
First Year
Last Year
Median Year
Total Sites
1. Fraser:
Fraser R. Vancouver Hbr. Skeena R. Prince Rupert
1871 1901 1876 1882 1881 I882 1890 1890 1883 1881 1895 1911
1965 1956 1929 1960 1918 1932 1927 1928 1929 1966 1934 1938
1894 1909 1901 1925 1896 1901-5 1901 1910-5 1909 1918 1919 1921 (1901)
74 14 20 9 12 14 11 8 5 2l 19 16 223
2. Skeena:
3. Nass River 4. Central: Rivers Inlet Coast Northern Outlying Southern Outlying Smiths Inlet 5. Vancouver I.: East Coast West Coast 6. Queen Carlotte Islands Total Source: "Site List" (author's files 1985).
2.4 2.2 2.0
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0.6
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1903
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:55
40
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60
67
Years I
Figure 4.
Fraser: sockeye
[~
Other: sockeye
Other: salmon
B.C. canned salmon pack, 1903-1967: Sockeye vs non-Sockeye pack. Source: Cicely Lyons, Salmon." Our Heritage (Vancouver 1969) appendix 40
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1881
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Figure 5.
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Fraser
1900
I0
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Skeena
50
~
40
50
56
Ofher
B.C. canned salmon pack, 1881-1956, by district. Source: Lyons, op. cit. appendix 36
SALMON CANNERIES
31
River rockslides of 1913-1914 occurred at the high point in the sockeye cycle, so that the devastating effects on the resource were not evident until the next "big year", 1917. Beginning in 1917, cannery operators in the Fraser district compensated for the loss by exploiting the stocks of the other, cheaper species of salmon, all of which were abundant on the Fraser. They did not move necessarily into the other canning districts. During the early years of the war period few new canneries were built because new cannery construction continued to be curtailed by the government. Yet canned salmon proved to be an ideal food ration, t231 In order to meet the increased foreign demand, operators had to reactivate, and in some cases enlarge, as many of the existing plants as possible, to adopt technological innovations in processing (some of which had been available for a decade or more), and to can every species of salmon. In particular, they exploited the previously relatively untapped, lowest grade species, chum, which was abundant in all the districts and involved a fall fisheryJ 241 By 1916, the canning of the cheaper grades had advanced to the point where the non-sockeye pack had become more important in terms of output volume than the sockeye pack (Figure 5). The plants responsible for the bulk of this important production were located outside of the Fraser River district. In 1917 the official ban on new cannery construction was lifted, as was the ban on the use of gasoline motors on fishing boats in the North. E251This led to the third wave of expansion. The number of canneries operating simultaneously peaked; 87 plants produced the pack that season and, more importantly, every possible district was in full operation. After a brief lull during the post-war depression, new government regulations "opened" the industry to independent fishermen (white and Indians only) and removed all special restrictions on the Northern salmon fishery and canning industry. ~26jThese changes were accompanied by the all-too-familiar pattern of business failures and attempts at new consolidations and mergers. I27JThen, in the mid-1920s, there occurred a series of large runs of salmon, high prices, and good markets for the cheaper grades. ~2slThese events ushered in the fourth, final wave of expansion. The spatial outline established in the earlier decades was fleshed out as the last of the cannery sites were discovered and developed in the Skeena River and Central Coast districts (Table 1). The more marginal or specialized, non-sockeye fishing districts, such as the west coast of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands, were now fully exploited by the cannery operators. Contraction and diversification: 1929-1945
Although several dozen different packing companies produced the provincial canned salmon pack in the 1920s, only a handful of companies accounted for the bulk of it. t29jThis trend towards industrial concentration in the British Columbia industry mirrored the trend in the United States and the general business trend in Canada at the time. I3~ The handful of large packing companies that began to dominate after 1928 bought up existing plants or built new ones in as many of the salmon fishing districts as possible. They then began a major undertaking to rationalize facilities and eliminate competition. Despite these moves, new companies, including several cooperative ventures, entered the field. E311Unlike the earlier period, consolidation and new investment was not accompanied by extension into new areas. The outer limits of expansion had already been achieved. Instead, a lengthy period of spatial contraction began.
32
D. N E W E L L
Although a dozen new plants were built, outdated or under-used plants were closed down or, if strategically located, were outfitted with fully-automatic, high-speed canning lines in order to pack the fish caught with gear belonging to the abandoned plants. Some of the abandoned cannery camps were adapted for new or more specialized uses for fishing stations, net and boat storage, and/or as regional cold storage facilities. Because many old plants remained in service on a standby basis for use in times of periodic good runs of salmon in the outlying areas, there were plenty of "sputters" in the process of contraction. But the annual reports of the provincial fisheries department indicate that from 1930 onward, the trend was there. I321 Only a handful of new cannery sites were developed after 1930 and the absolute number licensed to operate declined. Most of the new plants were located in the port cities of Vancouver and Prince Rupert (Table 1). Because of the world-wide depression and its effect on business and markets, the discrepancy between the number of salmon canneries licensed to operate and the number which actually operated grew larger over time. For the first time cannery operations in entire sub-districts failed to put up a canned salmon pack for one or more seasons; one sub-district, Smiths Inlet, shut down permanently after the 1938 season. As yet another signal of the structural changes, the number of licenses issued to fish processing operations other than salmon canning increased substantially. This is not surprising, since the provincial cannery operators had virtually no domestic market for their product and were losing their share of the export markets also. They therefore began processing more of the salmon pack for the fresh and frozen trade, stepped up the production of fish oil and fish waste, entered into the production of halibut and salmon liver oil which had become valuable as natural sources for the manufacture of vitamins, and experimented with the marketing of new specialty lines using salmon scrapsJ 331 This diversification was halted temporarily with the outbreak of World War II. During the war, all efforts were diverted to the canning of salmon and Pacific herring. I341 Immediately after the war, salmon canning ended in the marginal districts of the Nass River (permanently) and the Queen Charlotte Islands (for ten years)J 351 With contraction, a recognizable new cannery distribution pattern emerged at the local level. Unpredictable local environment changes at the sites, such as cannery fires, avalanches, silting, ice jams, and tide hazards, and changes in the location and richness of the local salmon fishing grounds, had rendered certain sites physically unsuitable for the economic operation of canneries. But the changes brought about by cannery operators and fishery officials themselves mainly created the local geographical shifts in cannery operations. Increased competition for raw salmon and the efficient enforcement o f government-sponsored conservation measures drew the fishing fleets away from the upstream tidal waters of rivers and inlets out toward open water. The new practice of the harvesting new varieties of fish, such as halibut, herring, and pilchards, which were caught in more open water, reinforced this shift. With the increase in size and deeper draft of the fishing and supply vessels that called at the canneries, the most advantageous sites were those located at the outlets of the salmon rivers and inlets, at the coastal margins, including the off-shore islands, and at the deep-water harbor sites at Prince Rupert and Vancouver. [361 The old cannery sites, located upstream at such places as New Westminster on the Fraser, Port Essington on the Skeena, and in Massett Inlet, in the Queen Charlottes (1, 2, and 3 in Figure 1) were abandoned eventually.
SALMON CANNERIES
33
Post-war spatial concentration When the wartime controls on salmon prices and exports of raw and canned salmon were lifted, canned salmon diminished dramatically as a proportion of the total volume and value of fisheries production in British Columbia. I371The provincial raw salmon supply did not show immediately a marked reduction in volume, although major hydro-electric developments were being planned for the important spawning rivers of the province that would make it difficult to maintain anadromous stocks. But salmon stocks everywhere had become highly erratic and thus less predictable. Moreover, as a result of the salmon harvesting methods used by fishermen over the previous eighty years, the runs were increasingly later in the season, when the quality had diminished considerably, and the average size of the fish was smaller. By 1947 British Columbia fishermen were permitted to export large volumes of raw salmon to cannery operators in the United States, where higher prices prevailed. All of these factors limited the amount of raw salmon available to provincial cannery operators and, therefore, drove up the price of canned salmon. The export markets for all North American canned salmon fell off as a result of the switch to the lower-cost producers in the Orient. Moreover, a variety of new, lower-priced fish products came on to the market as a substitute for canned salmon. These included canned tuna fish, fish cakes, pastes, chowders, and frozen fish sticks. These changes in the quality and availability of raw salmon and in export markets led to further diversification in processing and, in turn, to increased competition in all branches of fishing. In the ten years after 1945, the investment per person in the primary fishing operation was doubled as innovations in fish locating apparatus and in high-speed, all-weather, all-purpose transport were introduced and adopted on a grand scale, t381These innovations greatly increased the mobility, range, and efficiency of fishing vessels, which facilitated the shifting of the entire fish packing industry in the 1960s to a dozen large-scale, integrated plants located principally at Vancouver and Prince Rupert. In the centrally-located operations the canning lines were combined in a single plant with every other method of processing the Pacific catch. I391They were linked to their new, North American markets by rail and highway. By operating on a year-round basis, packers could make the most of their supply of salmon and other fish under any conditions of supply and market demand.
Conclusion Given this pattern of development, it is unfortunate that most studies of the British Columbia salmon canning industry have focused almost exclusively on only two periods: the pre-1900 era, when sockeye was the main commercial catch and the Fraser River district dominated the provincial fishery, or the post-1945 period, when the canning of salmon and the remote, isolated cannery operations were no longer the order of the day. Focusing on the initial development and final phases has resulted in a distorted picture of the slow transformation of the spatial pattern. Business concentration began in the first decade of this century but spatial concentration was not fully evident for another fifty years. Over the long period of contraction, the canning of salmon declined but other specialties developed to replace it. Also, the total number of sites at which salmon canning took place declined but the sites and facilities themselves usually continued to be used for fishery-related activities.
34
D. NEWELL
The sheer number, complexity, and the spatial and temporal distribution of salmon canning sites uncovered and analyzed in this study offer new important information about British Columbia's changing economic landscape and how the geographical pattern developed. With this knowledge, it is now possible to begin studying the impact of so many scattered, seasonal canning camps and districts on the regional economies of the coast. For example, the spatial expansion and subsequent contraction of this seasonal, labor-intensive industry, and its eventual concentration in large population centers, must have had a differential effect on seasonal work opportunities for the coastal population. 14~ Such an important issue as this cannot be raised, let alone addressed, so long as the historic canneries of the province continued to be viewed as mere extensions of the salmon fishery, or as countless, shapeless, appendages to the highest producing salmon canning district--the Fraser River. Indeed, it is not possible to make any major generalizations about the Pacific fishery based on one specialization and on a few sample points, as has been the traditional approach in studying the industry. Department of History,
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6T 1 W5
Acknowledgements The research for this article stems partly from a project funded by the B.C. Heritage Trust. I am grateful to my co-investigator, Arthur Roberts, for his help at the research stage, and Jos~ E. Igartua, for his comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.
Notes [1] Harold A. Innis, The fur trade in Canada: an introduction to Canadian economic h&tory (Toronto rev. ed. 1970) 393; ibid., The cod fisheries: the history of an international resource (Toronto 1970 reprint) [2] William L. Marr and Donald G. Paterson, Canada: an economic history (Toronto 1980) 344 [3] There are two varieties of salmon (family Salmonide), Atlantic (genus Salmo) and Pacific (Oncorhynchus). Both are anandromous (spend their adult life in the ocean but return to their native freshwater stream to spawn). But only the Pacific variety dies after spawning or is wellsuited to being canned. M. C. Urquhart (Ed.), Historical statistics of Canada (Toronto 1965) 287-407; Canada, Department of Marine and Fisheries [title varies], Annual Report (Ottawa 1910 to 1975); Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics [hereafter DBS], Fisheries Statistics (Ottawa 1917 to 1940) Capital Invested table [4] Otis W. Freeman, Salmon Industry of the Pacific Coast Economic Geography 11 (1935) 109139; J. Lewis Robinson and Walter G. Hardwick, British Columbia." one hundred years of geographical change (Vancouver 1973) [5] See Cicely Lyons, Salmon." our heritage. The story of Canada's west coast salmon fishing industry (Vancouver, B.C. 1969); University of British Columbia library [hereafter UBC], Henry Doyle Papers, Box 6, file 22, Canneries operating now compared to what it is proposed to operate under amalgamation [c1924] [6] B.C. Fire Underwriters Association, Plans of Salmon Canneries (1924) Inspection Reports; John N. Cobb, Pacific salmon fisheries 4th ed. (Washington, D.C. 1930); How salmon is canned Pacific Fisherman Yearbook Supplement (January 1936) 15-20; Daniel B. DeLoach, The salmon canning industry (Corvallis, Ore. 1939); Homer E. Gregory and Kathleen Barnes, North Pacificfisheries, with special reference to Alaska salmon (San Francisco 1939) chapters 6 & 7; David J. Reid, The development of the Fraser River salmon canning industry, 1885-1913 (Ottawa 1973)
SALMON CANNERIES
35
[7] Gregory and Barnes, op. cit. chapter 10; W.A. Carrothers, The British Columbia fisheries (Toronto 1940), foreword by H. A. lnnis; Dianne Newell (ed. and compl.), A grown man's game: Henry Doyle and the rise o f the Pacific salmon canning industry (forthcoming); Richard A. Cooley, The politics o f conservation." the decline o f the Alaska salmon (New York 1963) 37 (Fig. 4), 38 (Fig. 5) [8] A. Roberts, D. Newell, and E. Higginbottom, SFU/UBC inventory o f historic salmon cannery sites, 8 Vols (unpubl. report, Simon Fraser University, Geography Department 1986); Dianne Newell, Surveying historic industrial tidewater sites: the case of the B.C. salmon canning industry IA 13 (1987) 1-16. Dr Robert Galois and Logan Hovis prepared the locational and temporal information for the site inventory [9] The five species native to the North American Pacific coast are sockeye, or blueback, Alaska red (O. nerka); pink or humpback (O. gorbuscha); chum, keta, or dog (O. keta); spring, tyee, king, quinnat, or chinook (O. tsehawytscha); and cohoe or silver (O. kiscutch) [10] Artificial propagation of Pacific salmon has not been very cost-effective, nor has salmon "farming" and "ranching" (not introduced until after World War II) been successful until the past decade. Jerry C. Towle, The Pacific salmon and the process of domestification Geographical Review 73 (1983) 287-300; James E. Fralick, Feasibility of salmon farming as a small business in B.C. (unpubl. M.A. thesis, UBC 1978) [I 1] See M. E. Standsby and J. Dassow, Use of frozen salmon for canning Commercial Fisheries Review 13 (1951) 20-25 [12] Alfred Chandler, Jr, The visible hand." the managerial revolution in American business (Cambridge 1977) 28%299 [13] Patrick O'Bannon, Technological change in the Pacific Coast canned salmon industry, 18641924 (unpubl. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of California, San Diego 1983); and Duncan A. Stacey, Sockeye & tinplate: technological change in the Fraser River salmon canning industry, 1871-1912 (Victoria, B.C. 1982) [14] Dianne Newell, The economics of technological change in the salmon canning industry of British Columbia, 1871-1945 (paper presented to the Southern Economic Association meeting, New Orleans 1986); Doyle Papers, 5/6, The process of canning salmon, by Henry Doyle, 1920; How salmon is canned, op. cit. [15] Canada, Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects, The eommercialfisheries o f Canada (Ottawa 1957) 4, 38-39; Gregory and Barnes, op. tit. chapters 6 & 7 [16] Reid, op. cit. 54-70; Ed Cepka, West Coast vernacular canneries Architecture Forum 4 (1981) 17-19 [17] Rolf Knight, Indians at work: an informal history o f native Indian labour in British Columbia 1858-1930 (Vancouver 1978) 28~,0, 78-100 [18] See note 8; William Ross, Salmon cannery distribution on the Nass and Skeena Rivers of British Columbia, 1877--1926 (unpubl. B.A. graduating essay in Geography, UBC 1967) 1330, 74-100 [19] Carrothers, op. cit. 5-16 [20] Canada, Dominion-British Columbia Fisheries Commission, 1905-1907, Report and recommendations (Ottawa 1908); Newell, A grown man's game, chapters 1 & 2 [21] Lyons, op. cit. 270-271; Canada Report o f the Dominion-British Columbia Boat Rating Commission, 1910 (Ottawa 1911) [22] Even H. A. Innis himself promoted this idea (Carrothers, op. cit. ix~) [23] Association of Alaska Salmon Packers and Puget Sound Canners Association, Canned salmon: the ideal army and navy ration (Seattle 1915[?]) [24] Canada, Department of Naval Service, Fisheries Branch, Fisheries Inspection Report for B.C. (Ottawa 1917 to 1921) [25] Canada, Royal Commission on the Salmon Fisheries and Canning Industry in British Columbia, Report o f the Speeial Fishery Commission, 1917 (Ottawa 1918) [26] Canda, British Columbia Fisheries Commission, Report and Recommendations, 1922(Ottawa 1923) [27] Lyons, op. cit. 245-293 [28] Carrothers, op. cit. 52-53 [29] Doyle, Canneries Operating Now, op. cit.; Lyons, op. cit. 273-277 [30] Gregory and Barnes, op. eit. 106fl, Marr and Paterson, op. tit. 415ff [31] Lyons, op. cit. 401-413; Wallace Clement, Canada's coastal fisheries: formation of unions, cooperatives, and associations Journal o f Canadian Studies 19 (1984) 5-33 [32] British Columbia, Department of Fisheries, Annual Report o f the Commissioner o f Fisheries [title varies] (Victoria 1934 to 1945) Licenses Issued table
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D. NEWELL
[33] DBS, op. cit. (1930-1940) The Fish and Fish Products Marketed (B.C.) table [34] B.C., Fisheries Report (1940 to 1945); Dianne Newell, Food for war: Great Britain's grip on Canada's Pacificfishery during WW II (Canadian Historical Association), Historical Papers (forthcoming 1988) [35] B.C. Fisheries Report (1945 to 1975) [36] Ross, op. cit. pp. 78-79, noted this pattern for the Skeena and Nass rivers but it was in fact a province-wide trend [37] Data source: B.C. Fisheries Report (1945 to 1975); Canada, Fisheries Report (1945 to 1975) [38] Canada, Commercial Fisheries, op. cit. 8 [39] Canfisco Cannery spotlights policy: concentration at key points [Prince Rupert] Pacific Fisherman 49 (1951) 37-40; Integrated salmon cannery operation Pacific Fisherman 49 (1951) 55-59; Lyons, op. cit. 491-564 [40] Rolf Knight, Work camps and company towns in Canada and the U.S.: an annotated bibliography (Vancouver 1975) 1-11
Centre for Metropolitan History
A new Centre for Metropolitan History has been established by the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). The Centre will promote research into the history o f metropolises in general and o f L o n d o n in particular, providing both a forum for the exchange of ideas t h r o u g h seminars and a practical service for those interested in the history of L o n d o n by bibliographical work, by organizing and processing data, and by disseminating news of research in progress. Those wishing to know more about the Centre's role should write to Miss H. J. Creaton, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, L o n d o n WC1E 7HU.