Canned at Karluk

by Anjuli Grantham

I admit it. I lusted over this Alaska Improvement Company can from the moment I read that Kodiak resident Nick Troxell had purchased it online. In fact, I went so far as to save a place for it in the fisheries exhibit that I am putting together, even though I was far from certain that it would become a part of the Baranov Museum's collection.

 

One of the newest objects in
the Baranov Museum's collection,
an old Karluk salmon can.

Now, I am very happy to report that the Baranov Museum has its first historic Kodiak salmon can. It joins a box end from an Alaska Packers Association cannery at Karluk and a handful of other objects related to the early history of salmon fishing and processing in the region to help document and interpret Kodiak's maritime heritage.

The story of canning salmon at Karluk ranks as one of the more important stories in the history of Kodiak, if not Alaska. Fisheries biologists around the world know and study the story of Karluk's fishery. The prodigious historic salmon runs boggle the mind and have inspired generations of research. In fact, one can trace the history of salmon biology to the Karluk River. It so happens that a team of fisheries biologists are in the final stages of creating a book that focuses on the history of science at Karluk. A History of Sockeye Salmon Research, Karluk River System, Alaska, 1880-2010 will be published this year.

Of course, it wasn't just scientists who were interested in Karluk's red salmon runs. Thousands of fishermen and cannery workers joined hundreds of Karluk villagers on the Karluk Spit, beginning in the 1880s. The first cannery to open on Kodiak Island opened on the Karluk Spit in 1882. The Karluk Packing Co. was financed by the Alaska Commercial Company and founded by two former AC employees, Oliver Smith and Charles Hirsch. These gentlemen salted salmon on the Karluk Spit prior to opening what was one of the earliest canneries in Alaska. Yet, word quickly got out about the massive salmon runs within the Karluk River. This is not hyperbole – it wasn't rare to catch 40,000 sockeye in a single beach seine set at Karluk in the 1880s and 1890s.

 

Karluk fishermen repair a beach seine.
(Kodiak Historical Society, P-325-1-a)

The salmon can within the Baranov Museum's collection dates from somewhere between 1889 and 1911. It was in 1889 that the Alaska Improvement Company began canning at Karluk. They built a cannery on the south side of the Karluk River, across from the Karluk Spit. Long after canning operations were transferred to the village of Larsen Bay, the beach was referred to as "the Improvement side." In 1898, the Alaska Improvement Company joined the Alaska Packers Association (APA). That was the end of the Alaska Improvement Company, but not of its labels. For brand affiliation, the APA continued to can under the Canoe brand. Further research is required to determine when the APA added its own insignia to the can. However, in 1911 all canning operations were moved to Larsen Bay. As a result, that was the last year that cans were made and filled on the Karluk Spit. Nonetheless, much of the salmon canned at Larsen Bay still was beach seined from the Karluk Spit.

To discover more about the journey of this salmon can, including information on the historic landscape from which it came, the Chinese cannery workers who packed it, the crude tools that formed it, and the fishermen that caught the sockeye within it, please listen to the radio program "Canned at Karluk." Included within the program are interviews with AHS Board President Katie Ringsmuth, fisheries biologist Richard Bortoff, and archaeologist Patrick Saltonstall.

The Karluk Spit. (NARA/ Kodiak Historical Society, P-356-22)