Salmon: History and Origins

Salmon is one of the oldest and most important fish in the human diet, and few foods carry such a span of meaning — from sacred gift to canned commodity to farmed staple. For thousands of years it was a purely wild harvest: a fish that hatched in fresh water, grew at sea, and returned each year to the very rivers of its birth, arriving in such reliable abundance that whole cultures organised their year around its run. For the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest it was, and for many still is, the foundation of life and a being honoured with thanksgiving in the First Salmon ceremonies; for the peoples of northern Europe and the North Atlantic it was a prized food protected by law a thousand years ago. This article traces what the documented record supports: the natural history of wild Atlantic (Salmo salar) and Pacific (Oncorhynchus) salmon; the ancient traditions of catching and preserving it by smoking, salting, and drying; the explosive rise of commercial fisheries and canning in the nineteenth century; and the invention and rapid spread of modern salmon aquaculture, pioneered in Norway in the 1960s and 1970s, together with the scale and controversies it has brought. Where a tradition is sacred or contested we present it respectfully and factually, and where the record is firm we say so.

What Salmon Is: Atlantic and Pacific
Salmon and Pacific Northwest Indigenous Peoples
The First Salmon Ceremony
Salmon in Northern Europe and the Atlantic
Smoking, Salting, and Drying
Commercial Fisheries and the Canning Boom
The Birth of Modern Salmon Farming
Scale, Industry, and Controversy
Wild and Farmed Salmon Today
Research Papers and References
Connections

What Salmon Is: Atlantic and Pacific

"Salmon" is not one fish but a group of related species in the family Salmonidae, split between two great branches. On one side is the Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar — a single species native to the rivers and coasts of the North Atlantic, from the eastern seaboard of North America across to the rivers of Europe, the British Isles, and Scandinavia. On the other side are the Pacific salmon of the genus Oncorhynchus, which ring the northern Pacific. Five Pacific species occur in North American waters, and their American Fisheries Society common names are Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), coho (O. kisutch), sockeye (O. nerka), chum (O. keta), and pink (O. gorbuscha). Two further species, masu and amago, occur only in Asia.

What binds these fish together, and what made them so central to human life, is their remarkable life cycle. Most salmon are anadromous: they hatch in cold fresh water, migrate downstream to grow and fatten for years in the open ocean, and then return — often to the very stream where they were born — to spawn. The Pacific species are famous for spawning once and then dying, their carcasses feeding everything from bears and eagles to the forest soil itself; Atlantic salmon may survive to spawn more than once. The practical consequence for people was the same on both oceans: at a predictable place and season, an enormous quantity of rich, oily, protein-dense fish would crowd up a river, there for the taking by anyone who knew where to stand. Salmon was never farmed in the ancient world; for nearly the whole of its history with humanity it was a wild harvest, and the cultures that depended on it built their calendars, their law, and in places their faith around the run.

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Salmon and Pacific Northwest Indigenous Peoples

Nowhere has salmon mattered more, or for longer, than among the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. For thousands of years the salmon runs of rivers such as the Columbia, the Fraser, and countless coastal streams were the central food source and a defining element of culture for nations including those of the Columbia River basin and the Northwest Coast. Salmon supplied the great bulk of the diet, and the seasonal harvest — caught with weirs, dip nets, spears, and traps at falls and narrows like the legendary fishery at Celilo Falls on the Columbia — shaped where people lived, when they gathered, and how wealth and trade flowed. Dried and smoked salmon could be stored for the winter and traded far inland, making the fish both daily sustenance and a form of riches.

Salmon was, and is, far more than food. In the traditions of many Northwest peoples the salmon are understood as a people in their own right and their return each year as a gift, a relationship of reciprocity and respect rather than mere extraction. The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, representing the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Yakama tribes, describes salmon as central to the tribes' spiritual and cultural identity and as part of a sacred covenant — the fish offering itself for the people's sustenance in return for the people's care of the rivers. This is living tradition, and it should be approached as such: the practices described here are not folklore of a vanished past but beliefs and ceremonies that many Indigenous communities continue to hold and practise today.

That centrality also makes the modern history of salmon, for these communities, a history of profound loss. Dams, industrial fishing, habitat destruction, and pollution caused catastrophic declines in the wild runs over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the inundation of Celilo Falls behind The Dalles Dam in 1957 ended one of the oldest continuously used fishing sites in North America. The struggle to protect and restore salmon, and the treaty rights tied to them, remains a central and ongoing concern for Northwest tribes.

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The First Salmon Ceremony

The most widely documented expression of this relationship is the First Salmon ceremony — a rite of thanksgiving held to honour the first fish of the returning run. Practised in varying forms by tribes across the Coastal, Puget Sound, and Plateau regions, the ceremony greeted the season's first salmon with respect and gratitude, often treating that first fish as an honoured guest or messenger. A common and well-attested element is the careful return of the salmon's bones to the water, in many accounts with the head pointed upstream, so that the salmon-people could be reborn and the run would return again the following year. The ceremony is, at heart, an act of reciprocity: the people give thanks and honour the fish, and in turn the salmon continue to come.

The custom is old and was witnessed directly by early outside observers. Members of the Lewis and Clark expedition recorded the arrival of the spring salmon and the "great joy" it brought among the native peoples of the Columbia in 1806, and other early explorers described the practice, in some places, of allowing the first salmon to pass unharmed for a set number of days at the start of a run before fishing began in earnest — an observance that also served to let early fish reach the spawning grounds. These accounts, taken together with the tribes' own oral traditions, attest to a ceremony of real antiquity.

Although the geographic reach of the First Salmon ceremony narrowed as the runs themselves collapsed, the tradition was never extinguished. It persists in many modern Indigenous communities, and contemporary First Salmon observances continue to be held. It is presented here as what it is: a respected and continuing spiritual tradition central to Pacific Northwest Indigenous identity, not a quaint relic. Out of respect, the deeper religious meanings of the ceremony are best heard from the nations who hold them rather than summarised by outsiders, and this page intends only to record, accurately and plainly, that the tradition exists, is ancient, and endures.

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Salmon in Northern Europe and the Atlantic

On the far side of the Atlantic, salmon held a comparably long — if differently shaped — place in human life. Atlantic salmon has been fished in the rivers of Europe since prehistory, and the fish appears in the art and diet of ancient northern peoples. Across the medieval period Salmo salar was a valued food, abundant enough in the great salmon rivers of Britain, Ireland, France, and Scandinavia that it could feed ordinary people, yet prized enough that its catch was worth regulating and fighting over. There is a persistent and frequently repeated claim that salmon was so plentiful in some rivers that servants' and apprentices' contracts limited how often they could be fed it; this is a popular tradition that is hard to pin to a firm primary source, and it is best treated as folklore rather than documented fact, even though the underlying point — that salmon was once far more abundant in European rivers than today — is true.

What is firmly documented is that the value of salmon led to early legal protection. Measures to safeguard salmon stocks and fishing rights in European rivers reach back roughly a thousand years, and across the centuries kings and parliaments passed laws governing close seasons, weirs, and the obstruction of salmon rivers. This long arc of regulation reflects a fish that mattered economically and was already, in places, under pressure from over-fishing and from the damming and milling of rivers — an early foreshadowing of the far larger declines to come. By the early modern and industrial periods, the rise of waterpower, weirs, and pollution had begun to choke many European salmon rivers, and historians have linked the spread of mill dams to long-term collapses in salmon stocks well before the modern era.

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Smoking, Salting, and Drying

Salmon, like all oily fish, spoils quickly, and a river that yields a year's worth of food in a few weeks is useless unless that food can be kept. The whole material culture of salmon therefore turns on preservation, and the three ancient answers — smoking, salting, and drying — appear independently on both oceans. In the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous peoples developed distinctive cold-smoking and air-drying methods that turned the catch into a hard, durable, jerky-style dried salmon that could be stored through winter and carried or traded over long distances; this dried and smoked fish was a cornerstone of the regional food economy for centuries. In northern Europe, smoking, salting, and drying salmon for preservation are traditions traced back to the Viking age, when keeping fish through the harsh Nordic year was a matter of survival.

Over time, what began as pure necessity matured into prized culinary craft. By the nineteenth century, Scotland had refined a cold-smoking technique — typically a salt-and-sugar cure followed by gentle smoking over oak — that produced the silky, delicately flavoured smoked salmon now famous worldwide, a delicacy that found favour among the wealthy. In the same century, smoked salmon also became woven into urban immigrant foodways: Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland are credited with bringing smoked-salmon (lox-style) traditions into London's East End, and similar traditions took root in New York, where cured salmon became a staple of the Ashkenazi Jewish table and of the appetizing shops that still sell it. The thread running through all of these is the same one that runs through every great fish cuisine: a food that had to be preserved to survive the season was transformed, by smoke and salt, into something so good that it outlived the necessity that created it.

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Commercial Fisheries and the Canning Boom

For most of history salmon was caught and eaten or preserved close to where it ran. The nineteenth century changed that utterly, and the agent of change was the can. Canning — sealing cooked food in airtight tinned-iron containers — meant that perishable salmon could, for the first time, be shipped anywhere in the world and stored for years, and it turned the Pacific salmon runs from a regional food into a global industrial commodity. The pivotal moment came in 1864, when Andrew S. Hapgood, together with the Hume brothers (the Hapgood, Hume & Company partnership), opened the first commercial salmon cannery in North America on the Sacramento River in California. Hapgood had already experimented with canning lobster and salmon on the Maine coast, and the firm packed its salmon by hand, sealing each can and boiling it. Nearly half the cans burst at the seams in the first year, but the venture succeeded and its product sold.

When the Sacramento runs proved too thin to sustain demand, the company moved north in 1866 to the mighty Columbia River, opening the first cannery there at Eagle Cliff and producing several thousand cases of canned salmon in its first season. From that beachhead the industry exploded up the entire Pacific coast over the following decades, spreading to Puget Sound, British Columbia, and ultimately Alaska, which became the heart of the world's canned-salmon trade. Hundreds of canneries lined the rivers and coasts, employing vast and ethnically diverse workforces — including large numbers of Chinese immigrant laborers, and later Japanese, Filipino, and Indigenous workers — and consuming salmon in quantities that earlier fishers could scarcely have imagined.

The human cost of that scale fell hardest on the wild runs and on the Indigenous peoples who depended on them. Industrial fishing wheels, traps, and nets intercepted the salmon before they could reach the spawning grounds or the traditional tribal fisheries upstream, and combined with dams and habitat loss the great runs began a long decline that has never been fully reversed. The canning boom was, in this sense, two stories at once: a triumph of industrial food preservation that fed millions cheaply around the world, and the beginning of an ecological and cultural crisis for the salmon and the peoples to whom they were sacred.

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The Birth of Modern Salmon Farming

For all the reach of the canneries, salmon remained, into the twentieth century, an essentially wild food — caught, never raised at scale. The single greatest change in the modern history of salmon was the invention of salmon aquaculture: learning to farm the fish in the sea. The decisive breakthrough came in Norway. Experiments with rearing salmon in net enclosures in the fjords were under way through the 1960s, and the pivotal moment is usually dated to 28 May 1970, when two brothers, Ove and Sivert Grøntvedt, placed young Atlantic salmon into a floating open net pen off the island of Hitra, on the coast near Trondheim. Those fish grew into the first successful generation of farmed Atlantic salmon, and the brothers harvested that first generation in 1971. The Norwegian Seafood Council and the industry mark this as the birth of modern salmon farming — a tradition now "50 years" old.

The early method was strikingly simple: collect juvenile salmon, hold them in nets suspended in the sheltered, cold, clean water of a fjord, protect them from predators, feed them regularly, and let them grow. The Norwegian coast, with its deep sheltered fjords and steady cold water, proved ideally suited to it. The idea worked, it was profitable, and it spread fast. Norwegian aquaculture grew explosively through the 1970s, and the government moved early to regulate it, with a dedicated law for salmon farms in 1973 to govern quality and the structure of the young industry. From its small beginnings on Hitra, salmon farming matured into a true industry in Norway through the 1980s and was taken up by Chile in the 1990s, before becoming the dominant way the world's salmon is now produced.

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Scale, Industry, and Controversy

The growth of salmon farming since 1970 has been staggering. By 2020, aquaculture was producing more than 2.6 million tonnes of farmed salmon a year, and farmed Atlantic salmon had become one of the most important products of all finfish aquaculture worldwide. Production is highly concentrated: a handful of nations — led by Norway, with Chile, Scotland, Canada, and the Faroe Islands — account for the overwhelming majority of the world's farmed salmon, and Norway alone produces around half of it. The practical result is that most of the salmon eaten today is farmed, not wild, and salmon has shifted from a seasonal luxury into an everyday, year-round, globally traded food — a transformation as profound, in its way, as the canning revolution a century before.

That scale has brought serious and well-documented controversy. Sea lice — parasitic crustaceans that thrive in the crowded conditions of net pens — are among the most significant problems facing the industry, and the pesticides and chemicals used to control them can affect the surrounding marine environment. Escapes of farmed fish are a persistent concern: escaped farmed Atlantic salmon can interbreed with and weaken genetically distinct wild populations, and large numbers have escaped over the years from farms in both Norway and Chile. Critics point as well to disease and high mortality in crowded pens, organic and chemical pollution beneath farm sites, the use of wild-caught fish in feed, and — especially along the Pacific coast of Canada and in Norway — the impact of farm-borne lice and disease on the wild salmon runs that remain vital to Indigenous communities. Proponents counter that farming relieves pressure on wild stocks and can supply protein efficiently, and the industry has pursued welfare standards, sustainability certification, and new technologies such as closed and land-based systems. The debate over how, where, and whether to farm salmon at scale remains genuinely open and is a live scientific, environmental, and political question.

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Wild and Farmed Salmon Today

Salmon today exists in two parallel worlds. The first is the wild fishery, now a fraction of its historic abundance and carefully managed. Many Atlantic salmon rivers in Europe and eastern North America have lost their runs entirely or hold only remnants, and wild Atlantic salmon is a conservation concern across much of its native range. The Pacific runs are healthier in places — Alaska in particular sustains large, actively managed wild fisheries — but many southern stocks, from the Columbia and Snake rivers to California, remain depleted and are the focus of intense restoration, dam-removal, and treaty-rights efforts in which Northwest tribes play a central role. Wild salmon, once so common it shaped the calendar of whole peoples, is now in many places a fish to be protected and rationed rather than simply harvested.

The second world is the farmed fishery, barely half a century old, which now supplies most of the salmon on the world's tables and has made the fish cheap, abundant, and available everywhere, every day of the year. The contrast between these two worlds frames the salmon's whole modern story. The same fish that was honoured as a sacred gift in a First Salmon ceremony, that fed Viking-age Scandinavia through preserved stores, and that built canning empires on the Columbia and in Alaska, is now mostly raised in net pens in cold fjords and shipped frozen across the planet. The arc is unusually complete: from a wild glut greeted with thanksgiving, through preservation, industrial fishing, and canning, to farming, global trade, and the hard modern questions of how to keep both the wild fish and the farmed industry healthy. Through all of it, salmon has remained what it was at the start — one of the richest and most valued foods people have ever drawn from cold northern waters.

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Research Papers and References

The references below combine peer-reviewed work on the history, ecology, and aquaculture of salmon with reputable cultural, historical, and fisheries resources and curated PubMed topic-search links. The Indigenous traditions discussed in this article — the First Salmon ceremony and the cultural and spiritual role of salmon — are presented as living cultural and spiritual practice and are documented here through cultural and historical sources rather than as medical claims. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only the stable DOI, PMID, or archive link is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

Glover KA, Solberg MF, McGinnity P, Hindar K, Verspoor E, Coulson MW, Hansen MM, Araki H, Skaala Ø, Svåsand T. Half a century of genetic interaction between farmed and wild Atlantic salmon: status of knowledge and unanswered questions. Fish and Fisheries. 2017;18(5):890-927. — doi:10.1111/faf.12214
Taranger GL, Karlsen Ø, Bannister RJ, Glover KA, Husa V, Karlsbakk E, et al. Risk assessment of the environmental impact of Norwegian Atlantic salmon farming. ICES Journal of Marine Science. 2015;72(3):997-1021. — doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsu132
Torrissen O, Jones S, Asche F, Guttormsen A, Skilbrei OT, Nilsen F, Horsberg TE, Jackson D. Salmon lice – impact on wild salmonids and salmon aquaculture. Journal of Fish Diseases. 2013;36(3):171-194. — doi:10.1111/jfd.12061
Lenders HJR, Chamuleau TPM, Hendriks AJ, Lauwerier RCGM, Leuven RSEW, Verberk WCEP. Historical rise of waterpower initiated the collapse of salmon stocks. Scientific Reports. 2016;6:29269. — doi:10.1038/srep29269 · PMID: 27411664
Liu Y, Olaf Olaussen J, Skonhoft A. Wild and farmed salmon in Norway – a review. Marine Policy. 2011;35(3):413-418. — doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2010.11.007
Salmon aquaculture, sea lice, and effects on wild salmon — PubMed: salmon aquaculture and sea lice
Escaped farmed Atlantic salmon and wild population genetics — PubMed: escaped farmed salmon and wild populations
History of Pacific salmon fisheries and Indigenous harvest — PubMed: Pacific salmon fishery history

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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