San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chinese workers overlooked in salmon industry’s history
Deep in the hold of the old museum ship Balclutha, pride of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, is a nearly forgotten story about immigrants who built an industry on the sea.
Alaska salmon were caught by Italian fishermen and processed and canned by mostly Chinese workers. The fishing life is celebrated by books, film and television shows and places like Fisherman’s Wharf. The story of the Chinese laborers was largely ignored.
Though the work they did was mostly in Alaska, it is a San Francisco story. The Alaska Packers’ Association, which dominated the industry, was based in San Francisco. The big, squarerigged ships that took the workers north to Alaska in the spring and back again in the fall sailed out of San Francisco. They were laid up for the winter at the Fortmann Basin in Alameda, now a yacht harbor.
The Italians who did the fishing were recruited in San Francisco, Martinez and Monterey. The bulk of the Chinese cannery workers came from San Francisco with lesser numbers from the Chinatowns of Portland, Ore., and Seattle. Even the labels for the canned fish, some of the classics of advertising art, were printed by the Schmidt Lithography Co. on Second Street.
At one time, the Alaska Packers had the largest fleet of sailing ships in the world. Two survive, the Star of India in San Diego and the Balclutha, which was called the Star of Alaska in its northern days.
The whole operation was based on the inexorable economics of the past century. It was the American immigrant story, but not exactly the American dream.
The Alaska Packers, organized in 1873, used sailing ships to transport their wreckers and carry the cargo because used square riggers were on sale cheap. They employed Chinese immigrants as seasonal workers for the same reason.
The first Chinese laborers went north in the early 1870s, and what they called the China Gang worked every season until the mid1930s in salmon canneries. In later years, Chinese workers were replaced by other laborers, including Filipino, Japanese, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers.
The early operations, financed by San Francisco entrepreneurs, “brought the industrial revolution to Alaska,” said James Chiao, a retired electrical engineer who has studied the industry. “And they used the region’s resources, very much like mining gold.”
Chiao, and his twin brother, Philip, a retired architect, discovered there was a lot of economic history about the salmon industry, but not much about the people who did the work. Most of the early day workers were gone by the time they began their research, so they had to piece together their stories: about the contractors, who supplied the workforce, about the 40day voyages to Alaska and back in a sailing ship, about the cannery camps in the remote north, the food, the working conditions. It was tough and inflexible. “Once there, you couldn’t leave, James Chiao said. “The locations were too remote. There was no transportation. Once there, you were in for the season.”
By 1900 there were about 6,000 Chinese laborers in the salmon canning industry, about 5,000 of them in Alaska. But the number of Chinese workers began to decline because of the effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act. They were gradually replaced in the canneries by workers from Japan and the Philippines. But for years, thousands of Chinese workers labored in those canneries.
The Chiao brothers will tell the story of San Francisco and the Chinese cannery workers in a free lecture livestreamed on the internet on March 25. This program is being hosted by Gina Bardi, reference librarian at the Maritime Research Center of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. The link is https://maritime.org/messlive.
The Chiao brothers learned of cannery work the hard way. Born in Taiwan, they came to the United States for a better education. They were looking for summer jobs after their freshman year at the University of Washington in Seattle and saw an ad for seasonal cannery jobs.
This was in 1970, long after the old days. There were unions, better pay, better conditions.
Still, the cannery was a shock for the college boys. “It was crazy,” James Chiao said. “The fish came on a conveyor belt, fast. We sliced and diced them. It was noisy. It was wet. A dirty job. But the pay was good. When the salmon were running, there was plenty of overtime. Sometimes you worked 18 hours a day, slept for four hours and did it again. We did it for four seasons.” He smiled. “It paid our way through college.” And it made them think about the people who came before them. It was a story, the brothers thought, that needed to be told.