How Canned Salmon Became Big Business in Gold Rush San Francisco

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Walk along San Francisco Bay near Ghirardelli Square, and it’s hard not to be intrigued by the three masts jutting into the sky at Hyde Street Pier. It looks like a pirate ship straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean. But the 301-foot-long square-sailed ship isn’t a Hollywood prop, it’s a piece of history from a time when San Francisco was the largest and most consequential seaport on the West Coast.

Known as the Balclutha/Star of Alaska, the ship is part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, and it’s one of the best physical reminders of a once-booming San Francisco industry — salmon canning. In the early 20th century, the Star of Alaska was part of the Alaska Packers’ Association fleet. It was the salmon canning industry’s largest and most influential company, and their headquarters were in San Francisco.

Every summer, ships like the Star of Alaska sailed to remote, wild southeastern Alaska, full of all the gear, material, food and people required to run a salmon cannery.

The start of fish canning in California

Two brothers, William and George Hume, moved out to California in the 1850s to seek their Gold Rush fortunes. They were from a fishing family in Maine and put those skills to good use when they arrived in the Golden State. They caught salmon in the Sacramento River. This was before widespread access to electric refrigeration, so the brothers sold the salmon either fresh or preserved in salt.

Their friend, Andrew Hapgood, was a tinsmith and had experimented with canning oysters back in Maine. When he followed the Humes out to California, the three men joined forces to open the first West Coast salmon cannery in 1864.

“After two years, they decided to move the cannery north to the Columbia River,” said James Chiao, an amateur historian who has spent years researching the history of salmon canning. Originally from Taiwan, Chiao worked in the Alaska canneries in the 1970s to earn money to pay his college tuition.

Chiao said that back in the 1860s, the fishing was good in Oregon. Each of the three business partners soon opened his own cannery along the Columbia. In 1970, George Hume, who was white, hired 12 Chinese laborers to work in his cannery.

“[Hume] found their work satisfactory, better than his other workers,” Chiao said. “It became the success formula. If you want to be successful, you need to have the capital. You need to have the technology — how to make the cans. And number three, you need Chinese workers.”

By 1874, there were 13 canneries along the Columbia River and 95% of the cannery workers were Chinese, Chiao said.

But the rapid growth of the salmon canning industry was hard on the salmon populations in Oregon. Soon, the cannery operators had their sights set on even bigger fishing grounds — Alaska. The Humes, Hapgood and several other big canning companies banded together to form the Alaska Packers’ Association, which operated out of San Francisco.

Immigrant workforce suffers poor conditions

The salmon canning industry exploded once it moved to Alaska. According to the Alaska Historic Society, Alaskan canneries shipped 36,000 cases of canned salmon in 1883. Just eight years later, that number had increased to 789,347 cases. It was one of the largest industries in Alaska at the time and had a huge economic and political impact on the region.

To produce that much salmon, the companies had to ship thousands of workers to Alaska and haul all the tin, machinery, food and other goods required to sustain a workforce in a remote location for several months. San Francisco was the first big shipping hub for the industry and later, Portland and Seattle would also become important departure points.

The Star of Alaska, the sailing ship anchored in San Francisco Bay, is set up as a museum to showcase what the conditions would have been like for cannery workers traveling to the salmon fields. The boat was strictly divided based on class and occupation. The captain’s quarters were at the back of the ship to limit the rock and sway. His quarters had sumptuous furnishings designed specifically for a ship, made of exotic woods and decked out with plush cushions. He had his own kitchen pantry, bedroom, bathroom and sitting room.

On the same level, but closer to the middle of the ship, were the sleeping quarters of the fishermen. The space is fairly large, with portholes that let in light and air along the sides.

“The fishermen for Star of Alaska would have mostly been Italian or Scandinavian men living and working in the Bay Area,” said Sabrina Oliveros, a park ranger at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.

She said there were about 80 of them, and they were unionized workers employed directly by the Alaska Packers Association. They also doubled as sailors on the ship for the voyage.

Down below, on the tween deck and accessible by a narrow ladder, were the sleeping quarters for the cannery workers, commonly known as the “Chinese Gang” because in the early days of the industry, almost all the workers were Chinese.

“There would have been anywhere from 100 to 300 cannery workers who were transported on ships like this going up to Alaska,” Oliveros said. “And they came back down on the same ship.”

Their quarters were small and cramped. Bunks were stacked three high, each without enough room to sit up. There was no natural light or fresh air. Men would smoke and gamble by lamplight.

“I was sweating from the heat of my companions, I was seasick, I was vermin-covered, and I must admit, I was downright homesick,” wrote Max Stern in a serialized account of going undercover as a cannery worker in 1922.

Stern was a white newspaper reporter who had heard of the squalid conditions for cannery workers and set out to shine a light on them. He describes buying himself a job by promising to purchase a prescribed set of exorbitantly priced goods from an outfitter, most of which were subpar or nonexistent. His account is riddled with the many ways that labor contractors and cannery owners took advantage of the cannery workers.

When the Star of Alaska was sailing, it was not uncommon for the journey north to take close to 40 days. And when they arrived, Stern writes the conditions on land weren’t much better than those he experienced on the ship. He describes bunkhouses with walls so thin that an icy wind whipped through the boards while water lapped the floor.

He and the rest of the cannery workers first made the wooden crates and tin cans that the fish would be stored in. Then, when the fishermen started bringing in large quantities of fish, they worked long hours butchering, cleaning, chopping and canning the salmon.

For the first 40 years of the industry, all this work was done manually and the Chinese workers gained a reputation for their fast and skilled butchering. The best could clean and butcher three fish per minute. But in 1903, things started to change.

“This machine is a central artifact of this exhibit,” Park Ranger Oliveros said while gesturing at an 8-foot-tall iron contraption on board the Star of Alaska. “It was designed to start replacing human labor. The earliest versions of the salmon butchering machine could have done like 50, 60 fish in a minute.”

The advent of mechanization coincided with a shortage of Chinese workers due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was passed in 1882. Already, canneries had been hiring more Japanese and Filipino workers, but the salmon butchering machine signaled the end of a majority-Chinese cannery workforce. By the 1920s and ’30s, there were very few left.

Decline of the salmon canning industry

Cannery workers fought for and won the right to unionize in the 1930s. With unionization, there were fewer opportunities for labor contractors and other middlemen to take advantage of workers. Wages and conditions improved, but decades of overfishing meant salmon populations were on the decline. The peak of the Alaska salmon canning industry was in 1936.

Canned salmon was an important provision for soldiers during World War II, but after the war, consumer tastes started to shift towards canned tuna and frozen fish. Native Alaskans were fighting for more sovereignty and better fishery protections (PDF), making it more difficult for canneries to operate with impunity as they had done for much of the industry’s early history.

Canneries still exist in Alaska today, and much of the salmon we eat is still caught in Alaskan waters. However, it’s far more common now for the fish to be flash-frozen and shipped around the world to be eaten fresh.

The cannery workers who pioneered the salmon canning industry have been largely forgotten, but historians like James Chiao and park rangers like Sabrina Oliveros at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park are working to preserve their legacy.

Episode Transcript

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Olivia Allen-Price: I’m Olivia Allen-Price. And you’re listening to Bay Curious. Nowadays, if you’re eating fish out of a can, it’s likely tuna. But in the early 20th century, canned salmon was far more popular.

Advertisement Sound: Whitneys the quality canned salmon from Alaska’s world famous waters. Serve Whitney’s salmon in baked seafood salad, salmon loaf, or molded salmon ring.

Olivia Allen-Price: This advertisement for Alaskan canned salmon is from the 1950s, but the salmon canning industry has roots in California, starting in the mid-1800s.

Advertisement Sound: Whitneys, whitneys, whitneys … For a tasty dish with zing, a can of whitneys is the thing.

Olivia Allen-Price: The biggest canning companies were headquartered in San Francisco. And seasonal workers boarded ships in San Francisco to get to those Alaskan waters. There’s even a piece of this history still floating out in the San Francisco Bay!

Sabrina Oliveras: It’s not exactly a pirate ship, but if you let us tell you the story, there were some pretty nefarious things going on.

Olivia Allen-Price: Today on Bay Curious, we trace the salmon connections between San Francisco and Alaska … and learn about the early workers who made the industry possible. Batten down the hatches; there are rough seas ahead! Stay with us.

Sponsor message

Olivia Allen-Price: Starting in the mid-1800s, Salmon canneries were big business along the West Coast, stretching all the way up to Alaska. San Francisco played an outsized role in the industry — and especially in providing the workers who did the tough, dirty, low-paid work in the canneries. Bay Curious editor and producer Katrina Schwartz starts us off in Bristol Bay, Alaska, in the 1970s.

Katrina Schwartz: Imagine a stretch of marshy ground in an isolated bay. A nondescript factory built on a pier hunkers near the shore surrounded by a few low bunkhouses and a smattering of cabins. Patches of melting snow dot the ground. It’s austere. Lonely. Beautiful.

James Chiao: Such a remote place. No radio. No newspaper, no TV. So you’re totally cut off from the outside world. My name is James Chiao, and I am an immigrant. I was born in Taiwan.

Katrina Schwartz: James and his brother Philip worked at the salmon canneries in Alaska in the 1970s for several summers during college. James stood next to a machine that gutted and cleaned the salmon. A more seasoned co-worker stood next to him, pulling the eggs out of the fish. James took care of any that slipped by.

James Chiao: The salmon, the fish would come in on a conveyor belt passing, I’d say maybe 60 to 80 fish per minute. So they were flying by.

Katrina Schwartz: James would stand there clad in tall rubber boots and full rain gear, water flushing the fish carcasses down a conveyor belt, sometimes working a 16- or 18-hour shift.

James Chiao: It was noisy. There’s water and blood everywhere.

Katrina Schwartz: He says it was mind-numbing, repetitive work, but he didn’t mind. It was a nice change of pace from studying. The scenery in Alaska was fantastic. And the money was good.

James Chiao: When I was attending University of Washington, the tuition was probably over $1,000 a year. And I was able to make in two months enough money to pay my tuition.

Katrina Schwartz: James remembers that time fondly. It was a unique experience, but not his real life. He went on to become an electrical engineer. And when he retired a few years ago, he began reflecting on his life, thinking back to those summers in Alaska in the ’70s. And he started to do a little research about the salmon canning industry, which dates back to the 1860s. He was interested to learn he wasn’t the only immigrant to find themselves canning salmon in Alaska. Far from it.

Music

James Chiao: I think we should go back, you know, to the Hume brothers.

Katrina Schwartz: Brothers William and George Hume were fishermen originally from Maine. They moved to California, like so many others, to seek their fortune. When they arrived, they started catching and selling salmon. Now, these were the days before electric refrigeration was widely available … so they sold the salmon either fresh caught or preserved in salt. So when their buddy from Maine, Andrew Hapgood, moved out to California and brought materials to can and preserve fish with him, they knew they had a good business idea.

James Chiao: In 1864, they founded the first salmon cannery in on the Sacramento River.

Katrina Schwartz: It didn’t take them long to realize runoff from mining was killing the salmon. So they moved their operations to the Columbia River in Oregon. The Humes, who were white, hired 12 Chinese workers to do the canning.

James Chiao: He found their work satisfactory. Better than his other workers.

Katrina Schwartz: The Transcontinental Railroad was almost complete, and Chinese laborers who had immigrated to the U.S. were looking for more work. The Hume brothers hired them through the same contractors who found workers for the railroads and paid them a similarly low wage. Other salmon cannery owners along the Columbia copied the Humes business model.

James Chiao: Almost like it become the success formula. Look, if you want to be successful, you need to have the capital. You need to have the technology. How to make the cans. And number three, you need Chinese workers.

Katrina Schwartz: James says by 1874, there were 13 canneries along the Columbia River and 95% of the cannery workers were Chinese. Pretty soon, the Humes, and most of the other cannery owners, moved their operations to Alaska, where the really big salmon runs were. San Francisco was the biggest city on the West Coast. Everything flowed in and out of its seaport.

James Chiao: The components are all in San Francisco.

Katrina Schwartz: The fishermen and cannery workers. All the supplies and provisions needed for the trip. And, of course, the vessels that carried it all to Alaskan waters. The Hume brothers’ company joined up with several other big canneries to form the largest salmon canning company, the Alaska Packers Association. It was headquartered in San Francisco and shipped canned salmon all over the world.

Sound of creaking of ship

Sabrina Oliveras: We are we are right now around the main deck of the Balclutha/Star of Alaska, right under the main mast. My name is Sabrina Oliveras, my title is Park Ranger Interpretation Exhibits and I work at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

Katrina Schwartz: James and I meet Sabrina on board the Balclutha … a sailing ship built in 1886 … and known as the Star of Alaska when it sailed as a cannery vessel. It’s one of the best physical reminders of the salmon canning trade still floating in the Bay. It was on a ship like this that salmon cannery workers would begin their long journeys. The Star of Alaska was strictly divided based on social class and occupation.

Sabrina Oliveras (giving tour): So right now, we are where we call the Captain’s Saloon.

Katrina Schwartz: The captain’s quarters are at the far back of the ship, where the rock and sway of the ocean is less noticeable. He would have had a private bedroom, bathroom, pantry and sitting room.

Sabrina Oliveras: This also was where a captain would hold office while in port. So you know he’d have to like entertain other merchants or captains or ship owners and all that, which is why it’s nice, and it has a skylight, detailed glasswork.

Katrina Schwartz: Beautiful hardwood floors, plush seats.

Sabrina Oliveras: Yeah, plush seats.

Katrina Schwartz: Towards the middle of the ship, but still on the same level, were the fisherman’s quarters.

Sabrina Oliveras: The fishermen for Star of Alaska would have mostly been Italian or Scandinavian men, you know, living and working in the Bay Area.

Katrina Schwartz: There were about 80 of them, and they were unionized workers for the Alaska Packers’ Association. They also acted as the sailors on the month-long journey up to Alaska.

Sabrina Oliveras: There’s probably like over 10 portholes that you can open.

Katrina Schwartz: Portholes mean there was sunlight and fresh air. Once the ship arrived in Alaska, the fishermen would be in charge of catching the salmon. But the canneries also needed people to butcher, chop and can the fish.

Sabrina Oliveras: There would have been anywhere from 100 to 300 cannery workers who were transported on ships like this going up to Alaska, and they came back down on the same ship. They would have lived below decks in the area. We now call the tween deck

Walking downstairs

Katrina Schwartz: To get there, we take the stairs, thoughtfully installed by the park for visitors. Back in the day, the cannery workers would have used a ladder only about a foot-and-a-half wide.

Sabrina Oliveras: We are looking into an area where on either side of us, there are three levels of bunks. This is a representation of what they called at the time the Oriental Quarters or in some sources they call it Chinatown.

Katrina Schwartz: The space is cramped. The bunks short, with not even enough room to sit up.

James Chiao: To me, this is amazing. I’ve never thought of someone stay here in this kind of condition for over four weeks, right? Takes about 30 days, 33 days to travel from San Francisco to Bristol Bay.

Katrina Schwartz: James says when he went to work in the Alaska canneries, he could travel there in one day.

James Chiao: This place is so hot. And also, there’s no ventilation. And there’s no electricity. OK, we have a light here. So it was lit by candles or lamps. It’s just totally, you know, it’s not a very good experience.

Katrina Schwartz: Unlike the fishermen, who were mostly white, the cannery workers were not employed directly by the Alaska Packers Association. Instead, they were hired by independent labor contractors.

Sabrina Oliveras: The APA really just let the labor contractors do what they want, essentially, which is why they had so much power and there was so much opportunity to exploit. Because the APA would just say, you set the terms, we just want so-and-so amount of crates delivered at the end of it all.

Katrina Schwartz: At least two primary sources describe being forced to pay for passage on the ship, for specific clothes that often weren’t necessary, and for bedding as a condition of employment.

James Chiao: A lot of them were, you know, they spent so much money on their clothing, on outfit, and then there’s also gambling, and also they have to pay some of the canned food. So, usually, by the time they come back to San Francisco, all those money were subtracted off of their wages. So they have very little left.

Katrina Schwartz: Sometimes, workers would end the season in debt to the labor contractor, ensuring they’d come back for the following year.

Music

Katrina Schwartz: And so these ships, laden with men and supplies, would sail out from San Francisco and make their way to remote, wild southwestern Alaska every summer. One of the most detailed first-person narratives comes from Max Stern, a white newspaperman who went undercover on assignment as part of the so-called “Chinese Gang” in 1922. It didn’t take long for him to feel the pain of being in the lowest social class on the ship.

Voice reading the writings of Max Stern: I was sweating from the heat of my companions, I was seasick, I was vermin-covered, and I must admit, I was downright homesick.

Katrina Schwartz: After arriving in Bristol Bay, the first task in the cannery was to turn the metal they brought with them into cans.

Voice reading the writings of Max Stern: My job was testing cans. I would stand over a little tank of hot water, place a finished can into the basket, and with a foot lever immerse it. If there were any leaks, bubbles would appear.

Katrina Schwartz: In the late 1800s, decades before Stern was on his undercover mission, skilled Chinese butchers would spend long hours butchering, cleaning, cutting and processing the fish. Sabrina says a skilled worker could remove the fins, head, tail and entrails of three fish per minute. But around 1903, times were beginning to change.

Music

Sabrina Oliveras: This machine, it is a central artifact of this exhibit.

Katrina Schwartz: Back on the Star of Alaska, Park Ranger Sabrina shows us an 8-foot tall, massive iron contraption. Now called a “salmon butchering machine,” it was known by a more racist name when it was invented.

Sabrina Oliveras: It was designed to start replacing human labor. The earliest versions of the salmon butchering machine could have done like 50, 60 fish in a minute. So as you can imagine, like this machine was welcomed by the industry for a variety of reasons, one of which was, you know, he needed to keep producing more and more.

Katrina Schwartz: Cannery owners were eager to replace the workers who had made the industry possible. James Chiao again.

Jim Chiao: Even in their advertisements, they said they wanted to replace all the Chinese Butchers. And by the 1920s and ’30s, it did.

Music ends

Katrina Schwartz: By this time, the industry was feeling the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese labor was harder to find, and many roles were replaced by other Asian immigrants. First, Japanese … and later Filipino folks. Farmworkers in California would finish up the spring harvest and head to San Francisco to hop on a salmon boat bound for Alaska. When the summer fishing season was over, they’d return to California for the fall harvest.

Sabrina Oliveras: Which is why eventually, in the 1930s, when they started unionizing, it wasn’t just a cannery workers union; it was a canary workers and farm laborers union.

Katrina Schwartz (during interview): Wow, because it was the same folks.

Katrina Schwartz: Once the union came in, there was less opportunity for labor contractors to exploit workers, and conditions at the canneries improved. James Chiao says he benefited from those changes by the time he arrived in Alaska in the ’70s.

James Chiao: In general, I thought it was it was okay. It was decent.

Music

Katrina Schwartz: Much of the salmon we eat is still caught in Alaska, but canning isn’t the big business it used to be. The Alaska Packers Association eventually became part of the Del Monte conglomerate, which sold its last canneries in the early 1980s.

James Chiao: Oh yeah, there’s a huge change in how they process the salmon, how they just freeze the salmon and ship it to the supermarkets directly. So now, the canned salmon is no longer really something that we are familiar or used to. That’s a big change.

Katrina Schwartz: James says even in the ’70s, when he was working in Alaska, cannery workers rarely tried the product.

James Chiao: In the mess hall, we never got to eat salmon. So, many years later, I went to the grocery store and tried canned salmon. My goodness, it was no good! (laughs)

Katrina Schwartz: These days — few signs remain of the once booming salmon canning industry in San Francisco. Most of the companies have been sold off or moved elsewhere. But for James and the National Park Staff overseeing the Star of Alaska — the hard work and sacrifice of the workers who once kept them running hasn’t been forgotten.

Music end

Olivia Allen-Price: That was Bay Curious editor and producer Katrina Schwartz. Head to BayCurious.org to see photos from our trip to the Star of Alaska, plus archival photos from San Francisco’s salmon canning history. We’ll drop a link in our show notes, too.

I love episodes like this one … they open my eyes to something about the Bay Area that … frankly, I had no idea about. That’s one of our big goals here at Bay Curious, actually. And if you think we’re the mark, please consider leaving us a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you might listen. Kind words keep us going and help other potential listeners find our program. It only takes moment, and we really appreciate it. Thanks!

Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Extra support from Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Alana Walker, Jen Chien, Holly Kernan and the whole KQED Family.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.

I hope you have a wonderful week.