History of Fish Traps
Fish traps were first used
by the Native Americans. White settlers observed the Indian fishing methods. Beginning
in the 1880s the white fishermen used fish traps extensively in the Puget Sound
area. Techniques for building traps came from the Native Americans, the
Scandinavian immigrants, from the New England settlers, and from the Canada
Maritimes.
By the turn of the century,
there were 400 traps in Puget Sound. Forty-two of the trap sites were located
at Pt. Roberts.
The Alaska Packers
Association and the Pacific American Fisheries were the biggest canneries to
own and operate fish traps in this region. The smaller canneries and gillnet
fishermen resented the giant fisheries for owning all of the best trap
locations. The smaller independent fishermen felt that the fish had been
unfairly kept from them. A few of them began to steal fish from the large fisheries’
fish traps, in the middle of the night. They felt that they had a right to
those fish. They were known as “fish pirates”.
A fish trap had hundreds and sometimes thousands of
salmon in its pot or spiller, each time it was emptied. It caught large schools
of sockeye at a time, as they migrated toward the mouth of the Fraser River to
spawn.
Fish traps were an efficient
method of catching large numbers of fish at a time. They caught so many fish at
a time that the government passed a law in 1934 that outlawed all types of
fixed fishnets. The law was passed in order to protect the supply of salmon.
When traps were outlawed in
Puget Sound, fishermen headed to Alaska. Fish traps were considered legal in
Alaska until 1958, when Alaska became a state.
The Pacific American Fisheries Company was established in
Fairhaven, in 1899.
It
was the largest salmon cannery in the world. It covered an area of 18 acres.
It
put out 6,500 cases of fish every day, with 48 cans in each case.
That
means that it put out 312,000 cans daily! 
In
1900, the Fairhaven P.A.F. employed 600 people. The average wage a cannery
worker made was $2.60 per day. When the
fish began to run, in the spring, the cannery came to life.
The
butchering work was done mainly by Chinese men. One of the easier and more
popular jobs in the cannery was filling cans. That job was usually done by
women and children. Women were also
hired to wrap and label the cans after they had been soldered shut.
The
P.A.F. owned eight steamboats, tugboats and launches. It also leased four other steamboats, so it operated 12 steamers
all together. The company owned seventy flat scows 
for bringing the fish to the canneries from the traps. P.A.F. also owned eight
large pile drivers and several pile pullers.
Business
was so good that P.A.F. had plans of catching fish as far North as Alaska.
Image Credit: Microsoft
ClipArt Gallery
Photos and linked
photos on this page are courtesy of the the
Whatcom Museum of History and Art.