Digital Bob Archive

Salteries preceded canneries in the development of Alaska's commercial salmon industry under the American flag. There was sound reason for this. Canning was a very new process in 1867 whereas preserving meats, fish and other food products in salt had been carried on for years and the technique was well understood. Two parts of the canning process - making the cans and cooking the fish - were especially tricky, but no cooking was required for salt salmon, while coopering - the making of casks - was an ancient art.

A cooper was the one skilled workman required at a salmon or herring saltery, and many of the early operators were themselves coopers. Some of them had learned the trade in the old country. With a few simple tools - an axe, a crosscut saw, a froe, a couple of draw knives, a groover - and an abundance of clear Sitka spruce available, they could turn out the needed barrels. Necessary purchases were limited to hoop iron, rivets, and salt.

Salteries proliferated in all parts of Southeastern Alaska after 1867. So far as can now be determined, the first salmon salting on the Taku River took place around 1883 and there were several salteries on the river and inlet during the next 14 years although little information is available about them.

Theodore F. Eggers was a pioneer in mild curing king salmon on Puget Sound and claimed to be the first man to mild cure troll-caught kings. That took place on Seymour Canal where Eggers set up a station in 1900. And according to a statement he made to Pacific Fisherman many years later, the first mild curing in Alaska was done at Taku in 1897 by a crew sent up by the Crescent Creamery Company of Tacoma. The location at \"Taku\" was not stated but a Tacoma man that year built a saltery at Taku Point although he apparently did not put up any fish until 1898. He was Peter Thams Buschmann and in 1896 he had built a cannery at Boca de Quadra, south of present Ketchikan. On his way to Taku Inlet in 1897 he staked a claim to a piece of ground near the northern end of Mitkof Island at a place now known as Petersburg.

Buschmann used the name Quadra Packing Company for the Taku Point saltery and after it was in place in the fall of 1897 he sent his steam tender, the Annie M. Nixon, to fish halibut. The catch of 15,000 pounds was packed in Taku Glacier ice and shipped south from Juneau by commercial steamer. It was not the first such shipment, but it helped to establish the halibut business here.

In 1898 the Taku Point saltery packed 140 barrels of king salmon and in each of the next two seasons, 400 barrels. In addition, 12 barrels of white king salmon bellies were packed in each of the three years.

One of Buschmann's sons stated in later years that his father had contemplated building a cannery somewhere on Taku Inlet but was scared out by the increasing activity of Taku Glacier. Whatever the reason, he organized the Icy Straits Packing Company, built a cannery at present Petersburg, and began operating there in 1900.