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April 3, 2015 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
NORTHWEST
LABOR
PRESS
(International Standard Serial Number 0894-444X)
Established in 1900 in Portland, Oregon as a voice of the la-
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...Astoria: A look back in time
From Page 1
“slime line” — the several thou-
sand Chinese who chopped,
canned, and cooked the fish.
When canneries sprung up
along Astoria’s waterfront in the
1870s, labor was in short sup-
ply: Native American popula-
tions had been decimated by
disease, and few settlers had yet
arrived. So Chinese labor bro-
kers stepped in to supply con-
tract labor, and brought hun-
dreds of male workers from Though stocks were already in decline by the 1880s, there were still
Guangdong Province, in the plenty of salmon to be had for gill-netters like those above, pictured at
Pearl River Delta. By 1880, the mouth of the Columbia River.
there were 2,317 Chinese in
Clatsop County, a third of the pound salmon in 45 seconds, ters thesis on the Astoria Chi-
population. Nearly all worked in and 1,700 fish in a day.
nese. True, newspapers like the
Astoria’s canneries, which were
But in the 1880s, a wave of Daily Astorian were full of
built on wooden pilings over the anti-Asian feeling spread racist rhetoric about “yellow
water. During salmon season, through the western United men,” and “heathenish celestial
which lasted from April 1 to States. It led in 1882 to the pas- brutes.” But the need to keep
Aug. 1, cannery workers toiled sage of the Chinese Exclusion canneries running prevented As-
11 hours a day, and slept in Act, which barred further immi- toria from following the exam-
crowded wooden bunk houses gration. In 1885, the anti-Chi- ple of towns like Tacoma and
provided by their employers. nese movement culminated in Oregon City, where white mobs
Sanborn Company fire insur- massacres, riots, and forcible attacked Chinese in the dead of
ance maps from that era show a expulsions in towns and mining night and forced them to leave
densely-packed Chinatown, camps all over the West.
town.
right alongside row after row of
Astoria was tolerant com-
At the height of the anti-Chi-
“Female Boarding,” the maps’ pared to other West Coast towns nese movement, the biggest
euphemism for brothels. The at the time, says conference pan- worker organization was not the
Chinese worked extremely elist Regan Watjus, who wrote AFL, but the Knights of Labor.
hard: Some could clean a 40- her University of Oregon mas- Its primary demand was for the
eight-hour work day, and in the
East it sometimes stood for
racial equality. But in the West,
it was an active part of the anti-
Chinese movement.
In Astoria, members of the
Knights of Labor organized anti-
Chinese meetings. In February
1886, they got 18 cannery own-
ers to sign an agreement not to
employ Chinese workers once
that year’s salmon season ended.
The agreement didn’t hold, and
the Knights of Labor went into
rapid decline soon after.
Exclusion and hostility took a
toll on the Astoria Chinese.
Workers returned to China, or
stayed in other cities instead of
returning to Astoria for salmon
season. By 1890, Astoria’s Chi-
nese population was 925, and by
1900, 601.
Columbia River salmon runs
also began to decline as early as
the 1880s, due to pollution and
overfishing. At the industry’s
peak, Astoria had 17 canneries
packing 12 million pounds of
salmon a year. But towns and
lumber mills up and down the
tributary Willamette River were
using the river as an open sewer.
Fish pulled in by gill-netters
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