Love or hate him, Robert Deniston Hume, called "R.D." for short, was a compelling figure in Oregon history.  Born into a family of poor Maine fishers, he watched several older siblings migrate to California in the early 1850s.  By the time he followed in 1863, older brothers William, John, and George had invented the new industry of canning salmon in tins.  R.D. joined them and then, when Sacramento River runs collapsed, helped move the family business to the Columbia in 1866.  The Humes were not only first on the river but key innovators, introducing new machinery, techniques, and marketing strategies.  By the early 1870s they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, each running his own venture, including R.D., who owned several canneries.  Then in quick succession R.D.'s daughters and wife died.  Broken hearted, he sold his interests and fled to Wedderburn, Oregon.

It was at the mouth of the Rogue River where R.D. Hume emerged as a leader in salmon conservation.  In 1877 he built the river's first cannery.  He also reorganized the local fishery to prevent the recurrence of problems witnessed on the Sacramento and Columbia.  To ensure reproduction, he built private salmon hatcheries and funded state and federal operations farther upstream.  He also tried to control harvests by restricting river access through riparian ownership, and he published a pamphlet, sent out with every case of his salmon, promoting his policies on the Rogue.  Hume initially gained wide acclaim, but his idiosyncratic biological theories and sloppy hatchery practices led government officials to reject his ideas after 1900.

Late in life the ambitious Hume mocked himself as a "pygmy monopolist" because his reach so often exceeded his means.  He dominated southwestern Oregon economically and politically, but his ventures extended from Alaska to San Francisco.  He tried to break the Alaska Packers Association's lock on Alaska salmon both on the water and by testifying before Congress, but the APA eventually bought out his Karluk River operation.  He also tried to ram his way into a federally restricted tribal fishery on the Klamath River, but his contrived claim was denied by the courts.  Conversely, his efforts to control the lower Rogue River fishery, which included having the Oregon state legislature sanction his monopoly, were eventually nullified by state courts.  Although largely forgotten, Hume's activities on the lower Rogue remain instructive of the economic and cultural challenges that still hound modern environmental conservation.

Joseph E. Taylor
Joseph E. Taylor, III is aprofessor and Canada Research Chair in history and geography at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fishery Crisis.

Sources

Dodds, Gordon B. “Rogue River Monopoly.� Pacific Historical Review 27 (1958), 263-80.

Dodds, Gordon B. The Salmon King of Oregon: R. D. Hume and the Pacific Fisheries. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press, 1959

Dodds, Gordon B. “The Fight to Close the Rogue.� Oregon Historical Quarterly 60 (December 1959): 461-74

Hume, R. D. Salmon of the Pacific Coast. San Francisco. N.P., 1893.

Hume, Robert Deniston. A Pygmy Monopolist. Ed., Dodds, Gordon B. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.

Smith, Courtland L. Salmon Fishers of the Columbia. Corvallis. Oregon State University Press, 1979.

Taylor, Joseph E., III. “‘Politics Is at the Bottom of the Whole Thing:’ Spatial Relations of Power in Oregon Salmon Management.� in Power and Place in the North American West. Ed., White, Richard and John Findlay. Seattle. University of Washington Press, 1999: 233-63.