Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the United States Fish Commission's role in revamping the fish fauna of the Pacific World. Often motivated by settler-colonial logic and dispossession, the USFC transformed the watersheds of the American West and broader Pacific World through the introduction of new species.

Paper long abstract:

Congress created the United States Fish Commission (USFC) in 1871 to investigate the causes of fish diminution on the Atlantic seaboard, but the USFC’s remit soon expanded from study to intervention. Using the new techniques of “fish culture”—the artificial fecundation of fish—the USFC embarked on a decades-long campaign to remake America’s watersheds by artificially restocking desired species, transplanting favored native species to new waters, and the introduction of foreign fish. The USFC also exported American fish abroad—typically chinook salmon, shad, and whitefish—to nations like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Germany. Yet this massive episode of bioengineering has been largely overlooked.

The USFC’s impact was global, but I focus here on its Pacific World activity and the settler-colonial logic that underpinned it. In settler California, the USFC set up one of its first hatcheries for salmon propagation on the McCloud River, where it dispossessed the local Winnemem Wintu people, a little-known story of colonial violence. The USFC distributed millions of chinook salmon from the McCloud hatchery across America and to foreign nations interested in fish “acclimatization,” the contemporary term for foreign species introductions. New Zealander and Australian acclimatization societies contracted with the USFC to introduce chinook salmon there in hopes of remaking waters to better suit the culinary tastes and angling preferences of European-descended settlers. The USFC also made extensive shipments of salmon and carp to Hawaii and Japan. In all this, I shift focus from Alfred Crosby's famous Atlantic World “Columbian Exchange" toward the heretofore neglected “Pacific Exchange.”