Robert Deniston Hume
Encyclopedia
Robert Deniston Hume was a cannery
owner, pioneer hatchery
operator, politician, author, and self-described "pygmy monopolist" who controlled salmon
fishing for 32 years on the lower Rogue River
in U.S. state of Oregon
. Born in Augusta, Maine
, and reared by foster parents on a farm, Hume moved at age 18 to San Francisco to join a salmon-canning business started by two of his brothers. They later re-located to Astoria
on the Columbia River
, where they prospered. After the death of his first wife and their two young children, Hume moved again and started anew in Gold Beach
, at the mouth of the Rogue.
In 1877 Hume bought rights to a Rogue River fishery
, then built a cannery and many other structures and acquired all of the tidelands
bordering the lower 12 miles (19.3 km) of the river. He re-married, invested in a small fleet of ships and a salmon hatchery and expanded his business interests to include a store, hotel, newspaper, and many other enterprises in Gold Beach and in the nearby community of Wedderburn
, which he founded. Canning, shipping, and selling hundreds of tons of salmon over the years, he became known as the Salmon King of Oregon.
Hume often wrote editorials, engaged in litigation, appealed to legislators, and waged political campaigns to protect his business interests. Running as a Republican
, he was twice elected, in 1900 and 1902, to represent Coos
and Curry
counties in the Oregon House of Representatives
. According to his biographer, he voted self-interest first and conservative positions second, resisting Populist ideas in vogue at the time.
Among his publications were a series of articles about fish management, collected and reprinted as Salmon of the Pacific Coast in 1893. Despite his efforts to maintain a steady fish supply through egg-collecting and fish-rearing, salmon catches on the Rogue, rising in some years and falling in others, generally declined over time. Seventeen years after Hume's death in 1908, the state closed the river to commercial fishing.
in Portland.
Although Hume had prospered, buying several Columbia River canneries between 1872 and 1876, when his wife and children died, he sold most of his holdings and returned to San Francisco. There he bought a steamer, the Alexander Duncan, and searching for new purpose in life, traveled north along the Oregon coast. While visiting Ellensburg (later re-named Gold Beach), he decided to buy a salmon fishery near the mouth
of the Rogue River in Curry County
. There in late 1876, "he took up his career once again in one of the most isolated and desolate sections of the Pacific Coast".
, and other buildings and hiring fishermen, Hume opened his salmon business in 1877. He acquired ownership of all the tidelands
along both sides of the lowermost 12 miles (19.3 km) of the river; this gave him virtual control of fish populations migrating between the ocean and spawning bed
s upstream. Over the next 32 years, Hume's company caught, processed, and shipped hundreds of tons of salmon from the Rogue. Meanwhile, he remarried and expanded his business interests to include a store, hatchery, hotel, saloon, and sawmill, and other enterprises involving shipping, a newspaper (the Gold Beach Gazette), real estate, and ranching.
After a fire destroyed the hatchery and several other Hume buildings in 1893, he moved many of his holdings to the opposite side of the river, where he founded the city of Wedderburn
in 1895, naming it "in honor of the ancestral castle of the Humes of Scotland". Floating some of his unburned buildings to Wedderburn from Ellensburg, he added a new hatchery, offices, a new home, many other buildings, and a horse-racing
track. He started another newspaper, the Wedderburn Radium, and applied successfully for a post office, which opened in 1898 and was run by a Hume employee in Hume's general store.
As his businesses grew, he added to his fleet of ships, big ones to ship salmon to San Francisco and smaller ones for shallow waters and for towing larger ships in and out of the Rogue mouth. In 1879 he bought the steamer Varuna and the tug Mary Hume and started a shipyard at Ellensburg. In 1880 he added the steam schooner Mary D. Hume, the tug Pelican in 1883, the schooner Berwick in 1887, the steamer Thistle in 1888, and replacement craft in subsequent years. Returning ships brought goods for Hume's general store.
Hume became known as the Salmon King of Oregon and referred to himself as a "pygmy monopolist" in an autobiography published in the Radium between 1904 and 1906.
, a Democrat
, battled business-oriented Republican
factions based in Portland. In 1892, John H. Upton, the Populist candidate for the state legislature from Coos and Curry counties campaigned mainly in opposition to Hume's monopoly on the Rogue. Political threats like the one posed by Upton as well as threats from the Alaska Packers' Association
(APA), which had begun fishing the Rogue, led Hume to write political editorials, file lawsuits, endorse candidates, petition the legislature, and eventually to run for office himself.
In 1894, Hume, hoping for a seat in the state legislature, campaigned in support of Populist demands such as unlimited coinage of silver, more regulation of large corporations (like the APA), and large-scale government spending for internal improvements. Dodds says that this approach "illustrates Hume's view of the purpose of a political campaign: The program advocated should be one that would win, and not necessarily the program that the party or the candidate believed in." After losing this election, Hume went to Salem
, the state capital, in 1895 to lobby for bills that might favor his business interests. In 1896 Hume, switching to the Republican Party, used his newspaper, the Wedderburn Gazette, to support Republican William McKinley
for the U.S. presidency.
In 1900 Hume, running as a Republican, narrowly won election to represent Coos and Curry counties in the state legislature. Shortly after taking office, Hume helped scuttle a bill to repeal a law passed in 1899 that gave the owner of tidelands the exclusive right to fish the waters in front of them. Since Hume owned all the tidelands on the Rogue, the law gave him a monopoly on fishing its lower reaches. On issues unrelated to his business interests, Hume generally voted conservative. He won re-election in 1902, garnering 934 votes—less than half of the total cast—to the Democrat's 807, the Socialist
's 219, and the Prohibition Party
's 142. During his second term, Hume fought to keep the tidelands law intact and continued to support laissez-faire
government and low taxes. Hume attempted but failed to win nomination for a seat in the state Senate
in 1904, a seat in the state House of Representatives
in 1906, and a seat in the state Senate in 1908. Dodds sums up Hume's political career by saying:
Through his newspapers, lawsuits, lobbying, and speeches made while a member of the Oregon Legislature, Hume tried to influence public opinion about artificial fish propagation. In 1893, he published a series of articles, later reprinted as Salmon of the Pacific Coast, that summarized his ideas about ichthyology
. In 1897, Hume persuaded the United States Fish Commission
to run an egg-collecting station at Elk Creek
150 miles (241.4 km) from the mouth of the Rogue. Hume built the station, and the government paid the salaries of the workers who collected the eggs and shipped them to Hume's hatchery in Wedderburn. Although his observations on salmon were well-received in some quarters, they "often conflicted with the opinions of other pioneers in the field", and his attempts to control upriver fishing and dams met with resistance and with arguments that he was overfishing the river at its mouth.
Despite Hume's attempts to preserve the fishery, fish runs, oscillating from year to year for a variety of reasons, trended downward over time. The total reported Rogue River salmon catch in 1877, Hume's first year on the Rogue, was 531000 pounds (240,857.5 kg); the peak catch was 1632000 pounds (740,262.7 kg) in 1890, and the catch in 1908, the year of Hume's death, was 476000 pounds (215,910 kg). As fish runs continued to diminish, the state legislature closed the river to commercial fishing in 1935.
er, George Duncan, who had lost his fortune in the stock market and hoped to make another by canning salmon in the U.S. According to Dodds, Mary led a relatively secluded life, working in her flower garden, writing letters, and talking to friends, and occasionally selecting clothing for Hume's store or acting as his secretary when he was sick. Although business occupied Hume most of the time, he seemed to value his wife's help, Dodds says, and "events indicated their mutual affection".
In October 1908 Hume was traveling on the schooner Osprey, which was towing another ship, Enterprise, when a storm arose. The Enterprise was wrecked, but Osprey rescued its crew and arrived safely in Wedderburn. Hume, who had been exposed to wet and cold, grew ill, rallied briefly, then died on November 17. According to Dodds, "His dying wish was that he be buried at Hunt Rock overlooking his empire on the Rogue." In 1912, after she had sold the Hume holdings in Curry County, Mary Hume had Hume's body moved to San Francisco.
Opinions vary about Hume's fish theories and practices, which influenced state and federal salmon management for many decades after his death. "Hume was ahead of his time", Dodds says, "in his belief in hatcheries, in his practice of retaining fry [immature fish] in feeding ponds, and in his belief in the home-stream theory of salmonology." Another writer says that "Robert Hume's efforts to restock the Rogue with hatchery fish were an early glimmer in the dawning of a new era on the river and in the nation at large" even though "his motives may have been suspect, and the practice a less-than-perfect solution". An environmental historian says that while many Oregonians regarded Hume as a salmon expert, "his reputation often exceeded his results". A late 20th-century fisheries scientist sees Hume as "a keen observer of the salmon's natural history, although he did not always interpret his observations correctly."
Canning
Canning is a method of preserving food in which the food contents are processed and sealed in an airtight container. Canning provides a typical shelf life ranging from one to five years, although under specific circumstances a freeze-dried canned product, such as canned, dried lentils, can last as...
owner, pioneer hatchery
Hatchery
A hatchery is a facility where eggs are hatched under artificial conditions, especially those of fish or poultry. It may be used for ex-situ conservation purposes, i.e. to breed rare or endangered species under controlled conditions; alternatively, it may be for economic reasons A hatchery is a...
operator, politician, author, and self-described "pygmy monopolist" who controlled salmon
Salmon
Salmon is the common name for several species of fish in the family Salmonidae. Several other fish in the same family are called trout; the difference is often said to be that salmon migrate and trout are resident, but this distinction does not strictly hold true...
fishing for 32 years on the lower Rogue River
Rogue River (Oregon)
The Rogue River in southwestern Oregon in the United States flows about in a generally westward direction from the Cascade Range to the Pacific Ocean. Known for its salmon runs, whitewater rafting, and rugged scenery, it was one of the original eight rivers named in the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act...
in U.S. state of Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
. Born in Augusta, Maine
Augusta, Maine
Augusta is the capital of the US state of Maine, county seat of Kennebec County, and center of population for Maine. The city's population was 19,136 at the 2010 census, making it the third-smallest state capital after Montpelier, Vermont and Pierre, South Dakota...
, and reared by foster parents on a farm, Hume moved at age 18 to San Francisco to join a salmon-canning business started by two of his brothers. They later re-located to Astoria
Astoria, Oregon
Astoria is the county seat of Clatsop County, Oregon, United States. Situated near the mouth of the Columbia River, the city was named after the American investor John Jacob Astor. His American Fur Company founded Fort Astoria at the site in 1811...
on the Columbia River
Columbia River
The Columbia River is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. The river rises in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada, flows northwest and then south into the U.S. state of Washington, then turns west to form most of the border between Washington and the state...
, where they prospered. After the death of his first wife and their two young children, Hume moved again and started anew in Gold Beach
Gold Beach, Oregon
Gold Beach is a city in and the county seat of Curry County, Oregon, United States, on the Oregon Coast. The population was 1,897 at the 2000 census.-History:...
, at the mouth of the Rogue.
In 1877 Hume bought rights to a Rogue River fishery
Fishery
Generally, a fishery is an entity engaged in raising or harvesting fish which is determined by some authority to be a fishery. According to the FAO, a fishery is typically defined in terms of the "people involved, species or type of fish, area of water or seabed, method of fishing, class of boats,...
, then built a cannery and many other structures and acquired all of the tidelands
Tidelands
Tidelands are the territory between the high and low water tide line of sea coasts, and lands lying under the sea beyond the low-water limit of the tide, considered within the territorial waters of a nation. The United States Constitution does not specify whether ownership of these lands rests with...
bordering the lower 12 miles (19.3 km) of the river. He re-married, invested in a small fleet of ships and a salmon hatchery and expanded his business interests to include a store, hotel, newspaper, and many other enterprises in Gold Beach and in the nearby community of Wedderburn
Wedderburn, Oregon
Wedderburn is an unincorporated coastal community in Curry County, Oregon, United States. It is located across the mouth of Rogue River from Gold Beach, on U.S. Route 101. The Isaac Lee Patterson Bridge connects Wedderburn with Gold Beach....
, which he founded. Canning, shipping, and selling hundreds of tons of salmon over the years, he became known as the Salmon King of Oregon.
Hume often wrote editorials, engaged in litigation, appealed to legislators, and waged political campaigns to protect his business interests. Running as a Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
, he was twice elected, in 1900 and 1902, to represent Coos
Coos County, Oregon
-National protected areas:*Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge*Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge *Siskiyou National Forest *Siuslaw National Forest - Incorporated cities:- Unincorporated communities and CDPs:-See also:...
and Curry
Curry County, Oregon
Curry County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oregon. In 2010, its population was 22,364. The county is named for George Law Curry, a governor of the Oregon Territory. The seat of the county is Gold Beach.-Economy:...
counties in the Oregon House of Representatives
Oregon House of Representatives
The Oregon House of Representatives is the lower house of the Oregon Legislative Assembly. There are 60 members of the House, representing 60 districts across the state, each with a population of 57,000. The House meets at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem....
. According to his biographer, he voted self-interest first and conservative positions second, resisting Populist ideas in vogue at the time.
Among his publications were a series of articles about fish management, collected and reprinted as Salmon of the Pacific Coast in 1893. Despite his efforts to maintain a steady fish supply through egg-collecting and fish-rearing, salmon catches on the Rogue, rising in some years and falling in others, generally declined over time. Seventeen years after Hume's death in 1908, the state closed the river to commercial fishing.
Early life
Robert Hume, the youngest surviving boy in a family of 12 children, was born in Augusta, Maine, on October 31, 1845. Because his parents, William and Elizabeth Hume, had little money, he was adopted by the Robert Denistons when he was four years old. After growing up on the Deniston farm, he went to San Francisco at the age of 18 to work in a cannery operated by two of his brothers. In 1867, when Hume was 22, he and his brothers, who had moved north to Oregon, opened the first cannery on the Columbia River near Astoria. In 1869 he married Celia Bryant, with whom he had two children. The first, a girl, died while still a baby. The second, a boy, died at age 4 in 1875, and Celia Hume died shortly thereafter. Celia and the two children were buried in Lone Fir CemeteryLone Fir Cemetery
Lone Fir Cemetery in the southeast section of Portland, Oregon, United States is a cemetery owned and maintained by Metro, a regional government entity. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first burial was in 1846 with the cemetery established in 1855...
in Portland.
Although Hume had prospered, buying several Columbia River canneries between 1872 and 1876, when his wife and children died, he sold most of his holdings and returned to San Francisco. There he bought a steamer, the Alexander Duncan, and searching for new purpose in life, traveled north along the Oregon coast. While visiting Ellensburg (later re-named Gold Beach), he decided to buy a salmon fishery near the mouth
River delta
A delta is a landform that is formed at the mouth of a river where that river flows into an ocean, sea, estuary, lake, reservoir, flat arid area, or another river. Deltas are formed from the deposition of the sediment carried by the river as the flow leaves the mouth of the river...
of the Rogue River in Curry County
Curry County, Oregon
Curry County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oregon. In 2010, its population was 22,364. The county is named for George Law Curry, a governor of the Oregon Territory. The seat of the county is Gold Beach.-Economy:...
. There in late 1876, "he took up his career once again in one of the most isolated and desolate sections of the Pacific Coast".
Lower Rogue empire
After building a cannery, warehouse, bunkhouse, mess hallCafeteria
A cafeteria is a type of food service location in which there is little or no waiting staff table service, whether a restaurant or within an institution such as a large office building or school; a school dining location is also referred to as a dining hall or canteen...
, and other buildings and hiring fishermen, Hume opened his salmon business in 1877. He acquired ownership of all the tidelands
Tidelands
Tidelands are the territory between the high and low water tide line of sea coasts, and lands lying under the sea beyond the low-water limit of the tide, considered within the territorial waters of a nation. The United States Constitution does not specify whether ownership of these lands rests with...
along both sides of the lowermost 12 miles (19.3 km) of the river; this gave him virtual control of fish populations migrating between the ocean and spawning bed
Spawning bed
A spawning bed is an underwater solid surface on which fish spawn to reproduce themselves.In fishery management, a spawning bed is an artificial bed constructed by wildlife professionals in order to improve the ability of desired game fish to reproduce...
s upstream. Over the next 32 years, Hume's company caught, processed, and shipped hundreds of tons of salmon from the Rogue. Meanwhile, he remarried and expanded his business interests to include a store, hatchery, hotel, saloon, and sawmill, and other enterprises involving shipping, a newspaper (the Gold Beach Gazette), real estate, and ranching.
After a fire destroyed the hatchery and several other Hume buildings in 1893, he moved many of his holdings to the opposite side of the river, where he founded the city of Wedderburn
Wedderburn, Oregon
Wedderburn is an unincorporated coastal community in Curry County, Oregon, United States. It is located across the mouth of Rogue River from Gold Beach, on U.S. Route 101. The Isaac Lee Patterson Bridge connects Wedderburn with Gold Beach....
in 1895, naming it "in honor of the ancestral castle of the Humes of Scotland". Floating some of his unburned buildings to Wedderburn from Ellensburg, he added a new hatchery, offices, a new home, many other buildings, and a horse-racing
Horse racing
Horse racing is an equestrian sport that has a long history. Archaeological records indicate that horse racing occurred in ancient Babylon, Syria, and Egypt. Both chariot and mounted horse racing were events in the ancient Greek Olympics by 648 BC...
track. He started another newspaper, the Wedderburn Radium, and applied successfully for a post office, which opened in 1898 and was run by a Hume employee in Hume's general store.
As his businesses grew, he added to his fleet of ships, big ones to ship salmon to San Francisco and smaller ones for shallow waters and for towing larger ships in and out of the Rogue mouth. In 1879 he bought the steamer Varuna and the tug Mary Hume and started a shipyard at Ellensburg. In 1880 he added the steam schooner Mary D. Hume, the tug Pelican in 1883, the schooner Berwick in 1887, the steamer Thistle in 1888, and replacement craft in subsequent years. Returning ships brought goods for Hume's general store.
Throughout his career, the store was one of the central components of his business. It was a center of supplies and news for the people of the Rogue, who awaited the arrival of the fall provision ship with anticipation and anxiety, for this vessel was the only source of winter provisions. It provided Hume, the employer of the great majority of the citizens of Gold Beach and Wedderburn, with a means of repossessing the wages of his employees and of profiting on the exchange.
Hume became known as the Salmon King of Oregon and referred to himself as a "pygmy monopolist" in an autobiography published in the Radium between 1904 and 1906.
Politician
According to Hume's biographer, Gordon B. Dodds, Hume "entered politics both as officeholder and as lobbyist to protect his realm from the assaults of anti-monopolists". Between 1890 and 1910 in Oregon, Populist–Progressive coalitions led by W.S. U'Ren and Governor Sylvester PennoyerSylvester Pennoyer
Sylvester Pennoyer was an American educator, attorney, and politician in Oregon. He was born in New York, attended Harvard Law School, and moved to Oregon at age 25. A Democrat, he served two terms as the eighth Governor of Oregon from 1886 to 1895. He joined the Populist cause in the early 1890s...
, a Democrat
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
, battled business-oriented Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
factions based in Portland. In 1892, John H. Upton, the Populist candidate for the state legislature from Coos and Curry counties campaigned mainly in opposition to Hume's monopoly on the Rogue. Political threats like the one posed by Upton as well as threats from the Alaska Packers' Association
Alaska Packers' Association
The Alaska Packers' Association was a San Francisco based manufacturer of Alaska canned salmon founded in 1891 and sold in 1982. As the largest salmon packer in Alaska, the member canneries of APA were active in local affairs, and had considerable political influence...
(APA), which had begun fishing the Rogue, led Hume to write political editorials, file lawsuits, endorse candidates, petition the legislature, and eventually to run for office himself.
In 1894, Hume, hoping for a seat in the state legislature, campaigned in support of Populist demands such as unlimited coinage of silver, more regulation of large corporations (like the APA), and large-scale government spending for internal improvements. Dodds says that this approach "illustrates Hume's view of the purpose of a political campaign: The program advocated should be one that would win, and not necessarily the program that the party or the candidate believed in." After losing this election, Hume went to Salem
Salem, Oregon
Salem is the capital of the U.S. state of Oregon, and the county seat of Marion County. It is located in the center of the Willamette Valley alongside the Willamette River, which runs north through the city. The river forms the boundary between Marion and Polk counties, and the city neighborhood...
, the state capital, in 1895 to lobby for bills that might favor his business interests. In 1896 Hume, switching to the Republican Party, used his newspaper, the Wedderburn Gazette, to support Republican William McKinley
William McKinley
William McKinley, Jr. was the 25th President of the United States . He is best known for winning fiercely fought elections, while supporting the gold standard and high tariffs; he succeeded in forging a Republican coalition that for the most part dominated national politics until the 1930s...
for the U.S. presidency.
In 1900 Hume, running as a Republican, narrowly won election to represent Coos and Curry counties in the state legislature. Shortly after taking office, Hume helped scuttle a bill to repeal a law passed in 1899 that gave the owner of tidelands the exclusive right to fish the waters in front of them. Since Hume owned all the tidelands on the Rogue, the law gave him a monopoly on fishing its lower reaches. On issues unrelated to his business interests, Hume generally voted conservative. He won re-election in 1902, garnering 934 votes—less than half of the total cast—to the Democrat's 807, the Socialist
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
's 219, and the Prohibition Party
Prohibition Party
The Prohibition Party is a political party in the United States best known for its historic opposition to the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages. It is the oldest existing third party in the US. The party was an integral part of the temperance movement...
's 142. During his second term, Hume fought to keep the tidelands law intact and continued to support laissez-faire
Laissez-faire
In economics, laissez-faire describes an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies....
government and low taxes. Hume attempted but failed to win nomination for a seat in the state Senate
Oregon State Senate
The Oregon State Senate is the upper house of the state-wide legislature for the U.S. state of Oregon. Along with the lower chamber Oregon House of Representatives it makes up the Oregon Legislative Assembly. There are 30 members of the State Senate, representing 30 districts across the state,...
in 1904, a seat in the state House of Representatives
Oregon House of Representatives
The Oregon House of Representatives is the lower house of the Oregon Legislative Assembly. There are 60 members of the House, representing 60 districts across the state, each with a population of 57,000. The House meets at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem....
in 1906, and a seat in the state Senate in 1908. Dodds sums up Hume's political career by saying:
His accomplishments as a legislator were slight; only one of his bills ever passed. On the other hand, he spoke and voted against many measures that were defeated and his credo of legislative decision was, first, his own interests and, second, support of a conservative position. In the midst of the Progressive era he remained a "stalwart among the stalwarts", although during the Populist regime he had expediently yielded for a time to free silver.
Hatcheries
Although Hume had shown no early interest in salmon conservation on the Columbia and elsewhere, on the Rogue he tried to protect the fish supply. Disappointed with his company's catch in 1877, he built a hatchery in Ellensburg, and in all but 7 of his 32 years on the river he operated hatcheries along the Rogue.Through his newspapers, lawsuits, lobbying, and speeches made while a member of the Oregon Legislature, Hume tried to influence public opinion about artificial fish propagation. In 1893, he published a series of articles, later reprinted as Salmon of the Pacific Coast, that summarized his ideas about ichthyology
Ichthyology
Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish. This includes skeletal fish , cartilaginous fish , and jawless fish...
. In 1897, Hume persuaded the United States Fish Commission
United States Fish Commission
The United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries was established on February 9, 1871 , as an independent commission with a mandate to investigate the causes for the decrease of commercial fish and aquatic animals in U.S...
to run an egg-collecting station at Elk Creek
Elk Creek (Rogue River)
Elk Creek is an tributary of the Rogue River in the U.S. state of Oregon. Beginning at above sea level in the Cascade Range, it flows generally southwest through the Rogue River – Siskiyou National Forest to Rogue Elk Park in Jackson County. Elk Creek enters the river downstream from Lost Creek...
150 miles (241.4 km) from the mouth of the Rogue. Hume built the station, and the government paid the salaries of the workers who collected the eggs and shipped them to Hume's hatchery in Wedderburn. Although his observations on salmon were well-received in some quarters, they "often conflicted with the opinions of other pioneers in the field", and his attempts to control upriver fishing and dams met with resistance and with arguments that he was overfishing the river at its mouth.
Despite Hume's attempts to preserve the fishery, fish runs, oscillating from year to year for a variety of reasons, trended downward over time. The total reported Rogue River salmon catch in 1877, Hume's first year on the Rogue, was 531000 pounds (240,857.5 kg); the peak catch was 1632000 pounds (740,262.7 kg) in 1890, and the catch in 1908, the year of Hume's death, was 476000 pounds (215,910 kg). As fish runs continued to diminish, the state legislature closed the river to commercial fishing in 1935.
Family life, death, and legacy
In December 1877, the year after his move to Ellensburg, Hume married Mary Duncan, the 19-year-old daughter of a former New ZealandNew Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
er, George Duncan, who had lost his fortune in the stock market and hoped to make another by canning salmon in the U.S. According to Dodds, Mary led a relatively secluded life, working in her flower garden, writing letters, and talking to friends, and occasionally selecting clothing for Hume's store or acting as his secretary when he was sick. Although business occupied Hume most of the time, he seemed to value his wife's help, Dodds says, and "events indicated their mutual affection".
In October 1908 Hume was traveling on the schooner Osprey, which was towing another ship, Enterprise, when a storm arose. The Enterprise was wrecked, but Osprey rescued its crew and arrived safely in Wedderburn. Hume, who had been exposed to wet and cold, grew ill, rallied briefly, then died on November 17. According to Dodds, "His dying wish was that he be buried at Hunt Rock overlooking his empire on the Rogue." In 1912, after she had sold the Hume holdings in Curry County, Mary Hume had Hume's body moved to San Francisco.
Opinions vary about Hume's fish theories and practices, which influenced state and federal salmon management for many decades after his death. "Hume was ahead of his time", Dodds says, "in his belief in hatcheries, in his practice of retaining fry [immature fish] in feeding ponds, and in his belief in the home-stream theory of salmonology." Another writer says that "Robert Hume's efforts to restock the Rogue with hatchery fish were an early glimmer in the dawning of a new era on the river and in the nation at large" even though "his motives may have been suspect, and the practice a less-than-perfect solution". An environmental historian says that while many Oregonians regarded Hume as a salmon expert, "his reputation often exceeded his results". A late 20th-century fisheries scientist sees Hume as "a keen observer of the salmon's natural history, although he did not always interpret his observations correctly."
Works cited
- Dodds, Gordon B. (1959). The Salmon King of Oregon: R.D. Hume and the Pacific Fisheries. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
- Dorband, Roger (2006). The Rogue: Portrait of a River. Portland, Oregon: Raven Studios. ISBN 0-9728609-3-2.
- Hume, R.D. (1961) [published serially between February 1904 and June 1906 in the Wedderburn Radium newspaper]; Gordon B. Dodds, ed. A Pygmy Monopolist: The Life and Doings of R.D. Hume Written by Himself and Dedicated to His Neighbors. Madison, Wisconsin: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin for the Department of History, University of Wisconsin. .
- Lichatowich, James A. (1999). Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. ISBN 1-55963-361-1.
- Taylor, Joseph E. III. (1999). Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-98114-8.
External links
- Robert Deniston Hume (1845–1908), in The Oregon EncyclopediaThe Oregon EncyclopediaThe Oregon Encyclopedia of History and Culture is a collaborative encyclopedia, under development, focused on the history of the U.S. state of Oregon. The encyclopedia is a project of Portland State University's History Department and the Oregon Historical Society...