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Zach Theiler<\/p>\n
March 27, 2026<\/time><\/p><\/div>\n<\/section><\/div>\n<\/header>\n\n \n Modern fish traps require pilings that are driven into the riverbed and netting that reaches across part of a river.Mac Holt<\/span>\n
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Key takeaways: Fish traps on the Columbia<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nFish traps were used by Native Americans to catch salmon on the Columbia River for centuries, then adopted by settlers\u2014and ultimately banned\u2014in Washington and Oregon.<\/li>\n
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Some environmental groups have tested the traps\u2019 impact on fish in hopes that the technology could return as a conservation tool. Now, a new pilot program is assessing their economic potential for the first time.<\/li>\n
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The reintroduction of fish traps has reignited their controversial history in the region.<\/li>\n
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In the late summer of 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark\u2019s Corps of Discovery expedition came upon a camp of Shoshone Indians, who gifted the haggard explorers a meal that raised their spirits.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was the first salmon I had seen and perfectly convinced me that we were on the waters of the Pacific Ocean,\u201d Lewis journaled.<\/p>\n
He knew that Atlantic salmon moved between ocean and river, inhabiting both saltwater and freshwater environments. The presence of salmon, he thought, surely indicated that he and his group were near their destination on the Pacific coast.<\/p>\n
What Lewis did not know was that those fish, caught in the Lemhi River in Idaho, had endured the longest migration of any salmon species on Earth. Certain sockeye salmon climb more than 6,500 feet as they swim from the Pacific upstream through the Columbia River and its tributaries, scaling waterfalls as tall as 20 feet to reach spawning grounds tucked in the snowcapped peaks of central Idaho. Unfortunately for the expedition, the mouth of the Columbia was still more than 600 miles away.<\/p>\n
As the explorers followed the river to the west, they encountered an astonishing population of salmon. Historians estimate that at the time, up to 20 million salmon migrated inland in the Pacific Northwest annually.<\/p>\n
A combination of factors\u2014including hydropower development, habitat loss, pollution, warming waters, overfishing and the introduction of hatchery fish\u2014drove a dramatic decline in salmon population over time. By the late 1970s, those legendary runs had declined by nearly 97 percent. Today, approximately one million salmon and steelhead, an endangered species of trout often grouped with salmon, remain in the region. Seventeen salmon populations are listed as threatened or endangered on the West Coast.<\/p>\n
Amid the wide-ranging threats to salmon, conservationists are considering whether a tool known as the fish trap could help protect endangered populations. The traps corral fish into a fenced-off area of the river, where they can then be harvested or released safely. The practice gained popularity among early settlers racing to catch salmon\u2014but in the mid-20th century, following bitter disputes among fishers over the technology, Oregon and Washington banned it.<\/p>\n\n \n A fish trap stretches across the Columbia River, funneling salmon into a corral where they can be either harvested or released.<\/p>\n
Mac Holt<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn 2025, those states authorized three fish traps to operate on the Columbia River\u2014making them the first to harvest commercially in the region in nearly 100 years. The effort was the initial phase of an experiment to test whether the traps could be an economically viable alternative to gillnets, the leading method for catching salmon.<\/p>\n
Other experiments, too, have trialed the traps for their economic and conservation potential throughout the past decade. But even as some people see promise in the tool, the work has reopened old wounds in the local fishing community\u2014dredging up long-buried controversies and resurfacing the fish trap\u2019s fraught history.<\/p>\n
The rise and fall of the fish trap<\/h2>\n For millennia, Native American tribes throughout the Columbia River basin used a fish-trapping technique known as a weir to harvest only the fish they needed.<\/p>\n
But fishers could exploit the trapping technique if they chose. As European settlers expanded west in the 19th century, they drove pilings into the riverbed and set up their own industrial versions of fish traps, explains Donella Miller, a member of the Yakama Nation and the fishery science manager for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.<\/p>\n
With little regulation or regard for the environment, a strategically positioned trap could catch roughly 73 tons of salmon in a season. The number of commercial fish traps along the river proliferated, and by 1889, approximately 400 were in operation. The volume of salmon caught by these traps sometimes overwhelmed canneries to the point of waste.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were only processing what they could in a day, and the rest was just thrown out,\u201d Miller says.<\/p>\n
Installing a trap was expensive, so deep-pocketed businessmen were often the ones who profited from the technique. But the relatively cheap costs for running them once built, paired with the abundant salmon supply, allowed trappers to drive down the market price of salmon and out-compete fishers who used gillnets, long curtains of mesh that entangle fish by their gills.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why there was so much resentment of the traps on the river,\u201d says Irene Martin, a historian who has published three books about fishing communities on the Columbia. \u201cIt was used as leverage against commercial fishermen, particularly gillnetters, in terms of prices.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n A salmon swims in a fish trap. The design allows fish to swim through various chambers with minimal disturbance.<\/p>\n
Mac Holt<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAnimosity toward the fish trap operators grew. Disgruntled gillnetters were known to steal fish from trappers, earning notoriety as \u201cfish trap pirates.\u201d But gillnetters also organized formally, and in one incident, members of a prominent gillnetter union that had gone on strike because of low salmon prices destroyed fish traps on the Columbia. In May 1896, they shot at a boat carrying two nonunion fishermen\u2014likely gillnetters not participating in the strike or fish trap workers\u2014murdering one and injuring the other.<\/p>\n
But not all fishermen resented the trap owners\u2014some dreamed of becoming them. One was the Swedish immigrant John C. Peterson, who spent years laboring in a commercial fishery along the river at the turn of the century.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t own the boat; the company owned the boat. He didn\u2019t own the net; the company owned the net. And he didn\u2019t make any money,\u201d explains Peterson\u2019s grandson, Blair. \u201cBut he saw the fish traps operate, and he saw the money that was being made.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to family legend, during the Klondike Gold Rush, Peterson left for Canada\u2019s Yukon Territory in 1897, with hopes of striking it rich to buy a fish trap. The gamble paid off. After finding gold, he sailed back to Sweden to get married, regaled his bride with promises of financial opportunity, then returned to the Columbia River six years later.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first thing he did was buy two fish traps in Chinook, Washington,\u201d says Blair. \u201cAnd he made money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peterson expanded his operation and purchased seven more traps, earning his place among the elite fishermen garnering blame for monopolizing harvests.<\/p>\n
Despite their reputation for catching scores of salmon, between 1927 and 1934, fish traps took only 21 percent of the salmon and steelhead harvest on the Columbia\u2014second to gillnetting, which took 60 percent. But lobbying efforts by gillnetters and other interest groups persuaded Washington and Oregon voters to ban the traps in 1934 and 1948, respectively.<\/p>\n
That put Peterson out of business. His son\u2014Blair\u2019s father\u2014had left school to work on the traps, and the ban made him jobless at 20 years old with a sixth-grade education. The loss stung for years.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad never, ever brought up the word \u2018trap,\u2019\u201d Blair says.<\/p>\n
Salmon populations in peril<\/h2>\n\n \n A Chinook salmon, also known as a \u201cking salmon,\u201d is the largest Pacific salmon species and often the most highly valued by fishers.<\/p>\n
Roger Tabor, public domain<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nFollowing the ban, salmon runs continued to decline amid habitat loss, overfishing and dam development.<\/p>\n
To address the dwindling fish population, government and tribal groups have released farmed salmon into the Columbia for decades. The basin\u2019s first hatchery launched in 1877, and today, more than 200 hatcheries operating along the basin release an estimated 140 million juvenile salmon and steelhead into the river each year.<\/p>\n
Although the hatcheries have bolstered salmon runs, scientists now understand that inbreeding between wild and hatchery fish can have detrimental effects on the genetics of wild salmon\u2014making them prone to disease, reducing their size and stamina, and impeding their ability to complete the arduous journey to their spawning grounds.<\/p>\n\n \n Fishers can visually distinguish between wild and hatchery salmon because hatchery salmon have the adipose fin removed for identification.<\/p>\n
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWild and hatchery salmon typically swim together, so dragging a gillnet through these runs will inevitably capture some endangered species as bycatch\u2014and when those fish are released, they can die from their injuries. Government regulations permit fisheries only a certain number of endangered species bycatch deaths, called \u201cimpacts,\u201d each season. Once a fishery reaches this limit, it must stop harvesting. These regulations have reduced the harm to many threatened stocks.<\/p>\n
Still, conservation groups have been looking for approaches that better allow fishers to selectively catch hatchery fish\u2014while sparing as many endangered species and wild fish as possible. As the nonprofit Wild Fish Conservancy searched for such a technique, they heard about someone experimenting with fish traps on the banks of the Columbia. Reviving his grandfather\u2019s embattled method, that man was Blair Peterson.<\/p>\n
Resurrecting the fish trap as a conservation tool<\/h2>\n One night in 1998, the younger Peterson was sitting at a bar in his hometown on Puget Island, Washington, when a friend mentioned that he had come across Peterson\u2019s grandfather\u2019s name while helping his wife clear out city courthouse records.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll be damned,\u201d thought Peterson. Looking through the dumpster-bound files, he discovered the original blueprints of his grandfather\u2019s pound nets, a style of fish trap. Peterson felt compelled to save the historical records but left them untouched for the next three years.<\/p>\n\n \n Blueprints of John C. Peterson\u2019s early fish traps turned up in city courthouse records on Puget Island, Washington, in 1998.<\/p>\n
Blair Peterson<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nPeterson, a former gillnetter, says he was working as part of a Washington State-led fish data collection project in 2001, which he understood to be monitoring the presence and health of various species in the Columbia. That\u2019s when something triggered his memory.<\/p>\n
He recalled historical pictures of fish traps and that the fish had swum in the corral before being harvested. \u201cWhen you saw the old black-and-white photos of the fish in a fish trap, they\u2019re all alive,\u201d Peterson says.<\/p>\n
He speculated that pound nets might be a good tool for monitoring fish for the project. The challenge was that nobody had built one on the Columbia River in roughly 70 years. But Peterson had the blueprints.<\/p>\n
It took him more than a decade to gain the permit required to pilot the pound net on the Columbia as a research project. In 2013, he finally built a prototype using his grandfather\u2019s notes and tested it out.<\/p>\n\n \n Blair Peterson sits by pilings driven into the riverbed for a fish trap.<\/p>\n
Blair Peterson<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThat was when the Wild Fish Conservancy, based near Seattle, learned of his experiment. The organization met with Peterson and eventually became intrigued by the traps\u2019 potential for sustainable commercial fishing\u2014informed by their historical use by Native American tribes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that they can be used sustainably, because they were used sustainably for thousands of years to harvest salmon up and down the coast,\u201d says Emma Helverson, the executive director of the Wild Fish Conservancy.<\/p>\n
Between 2013 and 2020, the nonprofit partnered with Peterson and other commercial fishers to run initial experiments, testing the fish trap\u2019s ability to selectively harvest hatchery fish and reduce bycatch mortality of endangered species.<\/p>\n
Over years of experimenting, backed by grants from institutions like Patagonia and government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they improved John C. Peterson\u2019s blueprints with 21st-century practicalities. Today, fish traps are equipped with underwater cameras and electronically controlled gates that allow for the fish to be selectively harvested with minimal handling and exposure to air.<\/p>\n
Research indicates that fish caught in the traps have a more than 91 percent post-release survival rate, depending on the species caught and how the trap is used. Today, the Wild Fish Conservancy embraces fish traps as the sustainable strategy it was looking for.<\/p>\n\n
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