PAT NEAL: The First Salmon Festival
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, May 13, 2026
THESE ARE THE days we’ve waited for all winter. When it’s possible to sit outside without frostbite or mosquitoes.
There is the smell of pitch from the forest and the sweet blossoms of the maple trees gathering with a perfume of alder smoke mixed with the burning salmon fat.
All of which means it’s the opening day of barbecue season, so we might as well start it off right with our own version of the First Salmon Ceremony.
These days, we tend to take salmon for granted, but they have not always been here. Native American legends mention “the time before salmon.”
That would have been after the melting of the continental ice sheet, but before salmon colonized our rivers.
The First Salmon Ceremony has been practiced by salmon-fishing people from California to Alaska and east to the continental divide ever since.
The earliest known evidence of a salmon barbecue was dated 11,500 years ago on a tributary of the Tanana River in Central Alaska.
Closer to home, an archaeological dig in the Fraser River canyon revealed people were processing sockeye salmon 9,000 years ago.
The First Salmon Ceremony is one of the oldest expressions of human faith, where the salmon are thanked for returning to the river.
It is believed that, in the beginning, the Creator called all the creatures together and asked for a gift from each of them to help the humans survive.
The first to come forward were the salmon.
Believed to be immortal, the salmon lived in human form at the bottom of the ocean, in separate houses each according to their kind under the rule of a benevolent Chief.
Every year, the Chief would order the salmon people to clothe themselves in salmon robes and go up rivers to reproduce themselves and offer their bodies as a voluntary sacrifice as food for the people, the animals and the forest.
Then, the spirit of the salmon would return to their ocean home.
To thank the salmon, the first salmon caught in the river each year was treated as a special guest.
It might be sprinkled with eagle’s down and ocher. The meat was shared.
The heart and bones were washed and carefully returned to the river.
Lewis and Clark witnessed a First Salmon Ceremony at the Dalles on the Columbia River on April 19, 1806.
William Clark observed:
“The whole village was filled with rejoicing today at having caught a single salmon, which was considered as the harbinger of vast quantities in four or five days. In order to hasten their arrival, the Indians, according to custom, dressed the fish and cut it into small pieces, one of which was given to each child in the village.”
At the time, it was believed that as long as the salmon were treated with respect, the salmon would run forever.
Many salmon fisheries used weirs that stretched across the rivers.
Once enough salmon were caught to process in a day, the weir was opened to allow salmon to pass upstream to the spawning beds, where they laid their eggs.
On some streams, people were not allowed to use poles from their canoes for fear the eggs might be crushed.
Only paddles were allowed.
With the coming of the industrial age, salmon have been disrespected to the point where they are extinct in 40 percent of their historic range in the Pacific Northwest.
Nineteen populations of salmon and steelhead have been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Given our disrespect for the salmon, the question isn’t why are they endangered but why is there even one left?
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
