Canneries and salteries continued to be operated throughout the Sound. By 1924, the San Juan cannery had opened at Evans Bay collecting salmon from four or five fish traps in the area. Gorman and Company still had its cannery at Port Audrey in Drier Bay. The Pacific American Company operated a salmon cannery at Cannery Creek in Unakwik Inlet. Andrew Day purchased Fort Liscum in 1929 and started the North Pacific Seafood Cannery in 1933.

The White Act, Regulations & Fish Traps:

When Congress finally took up amendments to include Alaska in the White Act (a fisheries management and conservation bill), Delegate Sutherland spoke before hearings stating that "the present policy worked to the advantage of the packing interests and to the detriment of the Native fisherman." He strongly criticized the monopolistic practices of the packing industry. Unfortunately, the 1924 White Act bowed to the packers regarding the use of fish traps. Both the packers and the Bureau of Fisheries argued that the banning of fish traps would spell the end of the salmon industry in Alaska.

 

Fish traps were the most efficient and controversial means of catching salmon. Canneries promoted fish traps because they gave them a monopoly on all fish in the area. Independent fishermen opposed them for many reasons. Photo courtesy of the Valdez Museum & Historical Archives.

Following passage of the amended White Act, Commissioner of Fisheries, Henry O'Malley, visited Alaska to view conditions for himself. In December, he issued the new fishing regulations-stake net fishing was prohibited, fish traps were to be a mile and a half apart, limits were placed on drift nets, and dates for open and closed periods of the Copper River and Prince William Sound were set. No commercial fishing would be allowed on the Copper River from July 11 to August 19. From May 20 to July 10, the weekly closed period was extended from 36 hours to 48 hours. These closed periods were to allow salmon an opportunity to move upstream for spawning and for people living in the upper Copper River area to fish.

The new regulations touched off a heated controversy pitting supporters of the packers against resident white fishermen and Natives. The Cordova Times editor immediately ran an article praising the regulations saying that "There can be no conservation without stepping on somebody's toes."

In a letter to O'Malley, Cordova fishermen protested several points in the regulations but focused their main concern on the prohibition of stake net fishing on the Copper River flats. They pointed out that the prohibition would adversely affect 75 white and 160 Native fishermen. Only 20% of resident fishermen had boats. To switch to boats, they argued, would cost each fisherman an additional $2,000. They noted that the flats were a difficult, storm-prone area to fish by drift boats and that stake net fishing was safer. They also opposed the closed periods on the Copper River claiming that in 1924, without the stringent regulations, 60% of the fish made it up the Copper River to spawn.

The Native community sent a petition to Delegate Sutherland to present on their behalf to Commissioner O'Malley.

Before the fish traps started operating in the district it was no trouble for us to go out any day in the year and catch what halibut and codfish we needed. But now we go out for days and sometimes as long as a week and never catch more than one or two halibut and very few codfish.

Some of the fish traps up here at times catch just as many codfish and halibut as they do salmon. Those fish are bailed from the trap into the tender or scow, salmon, halibut, codfish and all, and consequently during the seven years that fishtraps have been operating here, they have practically killed off the halibut.

The companies here either don't care or don't stop to think that fish is the principal part of a native's food.

Now they are proposing a law doing away with stake net fishing on Copper River. That means that we will be deprived of making a living at red salmon fishing, as we have no money to buy boats for drift net fishing, and during the humpback season the fish traps catch all the fish that the canneries can handle, so we stand no show of making a living at humpback either.

If the traps are permitted to operate in the future, as in the past, and the new regulation on the Copper River Flats goes into effect, there will be no chance for a poor man to make a living at fishing any more.

Delegate Sutherland, himself, wrote O'Malley saying:

The point that should receive the most serious consideration of the Department is that the pitifully primitive fixed gear of the native fisherman is eliminated in the interest of fish conservation, while the more efficient and much more destructive appliance [fish traps] is permitted to operate.

I believe I am quite safe in the assertion that one successful fish trap in Prince William Sound will take more fish than all the stake nets operated by the natives in those waters, and this single trap will and does destroy more fish than all the staked nets in the Territorial waters.

To permit fixed gear to operate on an extensive scale in one section of Prince William Sound, and eliminate that operated on a much smaller scale in another section is certainly not equitable regulation of fishery, particularly when they both operate on the same run of fish.

The proper method of regulation would be to compel all fishermen in Prince William Sound to use only portable gear which would place them all on an equality, but if your Department is not disposed to do this, it should certainly make some effort to equalize the fixed gear so that the burden of conservation will not be borne by one class, and that class the one least able to bear it.

I trust that you may see your way clear to curtail fixed trap fishing in just proportion to curtailment of fixed net fishing. If conditions warrant the abolishment of the natives' puny fixed engine, they more certainly warrant the abolishment of the large operators' destructive and monopolistic method of fishing.

Dan Sutherland, Delegate from Alaska

On the other side, the Cordova Chamber of Commerce appointed a committee which issued an "exhaustive" report supporting abolishment of the stake-net fisheries and recommending that no changes be made regarding pink salmon in the rest of the Sound [i.e. fish traps]. Two days later, the Cordova Times printed a blistering attack against a Nebraska newspaper editorial that stated, "Whatever Congress does in the future relative to the fisheries in Alaska, it should be remembered that the Indian and his rights must be protected." The Cordova Times editorial argued that the Indians had plenty of food. "The Indians contend that the use of traps interferes with their right to make a living for the entire year during the brief canning season. And when they say this, they mean a living according to the standard of living they have learned from the white race. . . .The fact is that the Indians want a fishing monopoly that will permit them to make enough money in two or three months to live, as whitemen live, for twelve months. They want, in other words, three months of work and nine months of idleness."

William Paul Sr., a territorial representative and Alaska Native, proposed legislation that would tax the canneries' fish traps. The fish trusts' lobbyists complained somewhat disingenuously that such a tax would make it economically unfeasible for them to continue to operate in Alaska: "The canners have been taxed and regulated to the point where many of them have been seriously handicapped and additional taxation might force them into bankruptcy. . . ." (Cordova Times, 2/21/25). As has become a common practice for industries under attack in Alaska, the Canning Industry of Alaska took out large 1/4 page ads in local newspapers to explain their side of the controversy. According to the ads, 59% of territory's total revenue came from taxes on salmon fisheries. They failed to mention that these revenues in absolute numbers were minuscule when compared to the profits they were extracting.

In March, the Cordova Fishermen's Union petitioned Commissioner O'Malley requesting that fish traps be abolished in all of Prince William Sound. In May, the Bureau of Fisheries responded by amending its regulations: the weekly closed fishing period was reduced to its former 36 hours; drift nets were allowed up to 250 fathoms (1500 ft.) in length, and no changes were made in the prohibition of stake-net fishing or the number of fish traps. No Indian rights or needs were recognized.

Banning the hated fish traps became one of the rallying cries of Alaskans against the federal government and for Statehood. Delegate Dimond, who replaced Sutherland, repeatedly argued for Alaskan control of its fisheries and the gradual phasing out of all fish traps - a process Canada's fisheries completed in 1933. Dimond was no more successful than Sutherland. In 1939, the Bureau of Fisheries was transferred to the more conservation oriented Interior Department where it eventually became the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1941, the Fish and Wildlife Service reduced the number of fish traps in Prince William Sound from 42 to 17. Fish traps were only permitted at designated locations on Knight, Bainbridge, Chenega, Bligh, Hinchinbrook and Montague Islands and at Bidarka Point, Knowles Head, and Valdez Arm. But it was not until Statehood, when Alaska assumed control of its fisheries, that fish traps were finally abolished.