PORT ANGELES — Bernice Anderson and Adeline Smith have never witnessed an Elwha River free of man-made obstructions.
Yet the two Lower Elwha Klallam elders learned at an early age of the devastating effect the river’s dams had on their people through their own experiences and the stories of their parents and grandparents.
“The old timers used to get together and talk and say the fish is going to be depleted,” said Smith, 93.
“And it was already showing.”
Now, 98 years after the Elwha Dam was completed, the elders will soon witness an event their parents never thought would happen — the freeing of the river.
“They knew it was never going to be back to the same,” Smith said. “It would never be the same after what they went through.
“Times change, as the old saying is.”
The construction of the Elwha Dam was a hard blow to the tribe, already reeling from the rapidly changing world around them.
It blocked all but five miles of the river to migrating salmon and flooded sacred tribal sites.
The Glines Canyon Dam, eight miles farther upstream, was built in 1927.
Took up farming
Some tribal members remaining in the river valley took up farming and other skills they learned from white settlers as a means to adapt.
But they still never lost their close connection with the river and salmon it still supported.
“I remember eating fish three times a day,” said Anderson, 81.
“It was the only food we had.”
The elders said the dam not only blocked fish passage but at times starved its lower reaches of water.
They recalled witnessing fish struggling to survive in shallow water, and desperately bucketing water from nearby tributaries as an attempt to save them.
“I don’t know if it helped,” Smith said.
“We were just children then.”
Fishing laws
Still, they made do with the fish available to them, and recollection of the river before the dams gave way to more immediate concerns — the game warden.
Prior to the establishment of the tribe’s reservation in 1968 and the Boldt decision in 1974 that affirmed tribal fishing rights, Klallam members would face arrest if caught fishing in the river, they said.
Whenever a fish was caught, Anderson said, they would have to hide it or quickly take it back home to avoid arrest.
Sometimes they would distract the warden or would fish at night.
“We’d tell him we were just looking at the water,” Anderson said.
Georgianne Charles, Anderson’s daughter and Smith’s great-niece, described the dam removal project as a second step toward renewing the tribe’s way of life.
The Boldt decision, she said, was the first.
“I think the Boldt decision was one of the key factors to at least giving us the right to fish,” Charles, 57, said.
“The second factor is to be able to see the fish come back plentiful.”
Though unsure if the river’s historic runs will return, Smith and Anderson said they hope future generations will have a semblance of what their parents and grandparents had on the Elwha.
“We may have the dams removed,” Smith said, “but it will never be the same as it was before.
“But I am just hoping like my niece . . . she will see and her grand children and her great grandchildren will see the fish come up the dam.
“We don’t have to hide to go and fish like we did before.”
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
