The history of the fisheries program started in the mid to late-1980’s, probably around ‘87 or ‘88. It started out with about eleven employees. It had an annual budget of about 30,000 to 50,000 dollars. Now we employ during the field season, during the spring or summer, we employ over 200 people and our annual budget is several million.

Nez Perce people were a major fishing tribe. They utilized the Colombia and the Snake River tributaries to where we used to historically have millions of fish that would come into the upper Snake and Clearwater. We are talking between 5 to 8 million fish just up here in the Lewiston area: steelhead, spring, fall, and summer chinook, coho, sockeye. They have now dwindled to where we may get, in some cases, over one hundred thousand chinook to a couple hundred thousand, and in the case of the sockeye salmon we may get one or two fish a year.