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• STEVESTON Cannery Row: An Illustrated History
• Salmon Canning on the Fraser River in the 1890s
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• SUTEBUSUTON: A Japanese Village on the British Columbia Coast
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STEVESTON Cannery Row: An Illustrated History

Details: Soft cover. 128 pages with 139 photographs, 26 maps, 5 tables and 1 graph. Bibliography and index.

Price: $25.00 CAD / $20.00 USD

Order Form: For Canada / For U.S.

Description: This book describes the development of the southwest coast of Lulu Island from the arrival of the first Caucasian settlers in the 1800s to the present. The Fraser River supported one of the largest runs of sockeye salmon in the world. The first salmon cannery was built on the Fraser River near New Westminster in 1870 and the number of canneries increased exponentially thereafter. Marshal English built the English Cannery on the Steveston waterfront in 1882. The number of operating canneries on this waterfront increased to three by 1890 and fifteen by 1900. A total of twenty-three salmon canneries were built on this one and half mile stretch of waterfront. Their numbers started declining in the 1900s. The last cannery, Imperial, stopped canning salmon in 1992 and terminated all operations the following year.

Salmon was canned in the late 1800s by a large number of workers on a production line of tables, tanks and manually operated machines. The development of powered machines over the years transformed the canning production line into a completely automated system. These included the fish elevator, gang knife, butchering machine, can-making machine and filling machine.

In the initial years of the Fraser River salmon canning industry, large numbers of Chinese men, Native women and a few Caucasian technicians manned the canning lines. The numbers of Chinese workers declined with the mechanization of the canning line, especially the introduction of the butchering and can making machines. Japanese women replaced Native women at the washing tanks and filling tables in the 1910s.

Flat-bottomed boats were used initially in the Fraser River salmon gillnet fishery. The round-bottomed Columbia River boats replaced the Fraser River boats in the 1890s. These Columbia River boats were powered with gasoline engines in the 1910s. With mechanization, the boats increased in length, breadth, depth, and added two-tier cabins. The gillnet drum was introduced into the Fraser River salmon fishery in the mid-1930s and universally adopted by the early 1940s.

Native and Caucasian fishermen crewed the Fraser River boats in the initial years of the Fraser River fishery. Japanese fishermen started entering this fishery in significant numbers in the 1890s and accounted for over half the total number of fishermen by 1900.

Chinese and Japanese men generally lived in cannery bunkhouses in the late 1800s. With the influx of Japanese women in the early 1910s, fishing companies built cannery houses to accommodate Japanese families. The Japanese accounted for over half the population of Steveston during the first decades of the Twentieth Century to 1941.

Review: This is much more than a history of the community of Steveston, now part of the City of Richmond. It is also a lens through which we can see the history of the fishing industry in British Columbia and its related industries, such as fish canneries and boatbuilding. It also provides an insight into the Japanese, who did so much to develop it.

The authors are well qualified to write this fascinating account. Harold Steves is the great-grandson of Manoah and Ida Steves, who were pioneer settlers in the area in 1877. Kathy Steves, married to Harold, has lived in the area for many years and keeps historical records for the Steveston Historical Society. Mitsuo Yesaki was born in the Steveston Japanese Hospital and is a descendent of three generations of Japanese fishermen. The resulting book is the fruit of lifelong identification with Steveston.

The book is very well organized. The decade-by-decade organization suits the subject, and subsections within each chapter have maps and tables. Excellent black-and-white photographs illustrate the text throughout. An extensive bibliography provides a sense of the authors' research and lists places to follow up on aspects that may interest the reader. It is difficult to summarize the content, but this reviewer found it accurate and even-handed, including its handling of difficult episodes such as the removal of the Japanese from Steveston during the Second World War. The last chapter, covering 1975-1997, entitled "Years of Decline" bridges the gap between the early and recent history, which has seen the demise of the fishing industry, and the "new Steveston," which is arising as a tourist and upscale residential area.

In summary, this book offers an excellent documentary history of a unique British Columbia town. It is a good book to read before coming to the British Columbia Historical Federation Conference to be held in Richmond in May, 2001. - Reviewed by Arnold Ranneris, Secretary of the British Columbia Historical Federation, is a Victoria librarian, who grew up in Richmond.

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