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| Tallheo Cannery |
Perched atop weathered, rotting pilings and wrapped in the mist and mood of British Columbia’s wild north coast sits the Tallheo Cannery — a faded red relic standing stubbornly against rain, tide, and time.
It was once a place of steam whistles, clanging machinery, shouted greetings from the docks, and the silver flash of salmon arriving by the boatload from the cold Pacific.
Tallheo rests near the former Nuxalk village of Talyu, at the meeting of the Taleomy and Noerick Rivers where they spill into South Bentinck Arm through Taleomy Narrows.
It is a place we used see enroute to our favourite fishing spots when I was a child. I heard the stories of its history growing up. How it was once a thriving centre of fish production, along with tales of Talyu and which families used to live here.
This is Nuxalk territory — ancient, rich, and deeply storied. The Nuxalk are a distinct people of this coast, with their own language, traditions, and enduring relationship to land and sea.
Names matter. They hold memory. They hold history.
Before European contact, the Nuxalk population was more than 35,000 strong and thriving. Then came disease, violence, and colonial disruption. Smallpox and conflict reduced that number to a devastating few hundred souls. Yet here is the story that matters most: they endured.
Today the population has rebounded to roughly 3,000 and growing — a powerful testament to resilience, kinship, and cultural strength.
In 1905, Tallheo Cannery opened its doors to the hum and thrum of the industrial age. Founded by a Norwegian immigrant, it employed many local residents — Indigenous and settler alike.
Boats came heavy with Chinook, Pink, Chum, Sockeye, and Spring salmon, their holds brimming with the wealth of these northern waters.
Inside, skilled hands cleaned, cut, packed, and sealed the catch into tins bound for markets near and far.
Imagine the delight of some London clerk or prairie farm family cracking open a tin of wild Pacific salmon for the very first time — a taste of the far western edge of Canada.
The canning process itself began in France in the early 1800s, spreading across Europe before arriving in North America. What started as military provisioning became one of the great food revolutions of the modern world. British Columbia embraced it with gusto.
British Columbia welcomed the first canneries in the 1860s. The industry soon became the bread and butter for many local families and allowed those far from the coast and indeed, across the seas, to dine on fresh-caught salmon.
At one time, British Columbia boasted more than 200 such canneries. Now, nearly all are gone.
One notable survivor is St. Jean’s Cannery and Smokehouse, the last commercial cannery of its kind in British Columbia. A family favourite in my own household, they once bought oysters and fish from my Uncle Dick and Uncle Doug — transformed into chowders, smoked delicacies, and tins of salmon that sold for a tidy 25 cents each. Honest food. Coastal gold.
St. Jean's got their start selling smoked oysters or smudgies to locals, then expanded to chowder and finally salmon. They were a family favourite of ours growing up on the coast.
Today, they sell hand-packed wild Pacific salmon, tuna and shellfish in their online store and process fresh-caught salmon from sport fishermen.
Wild, smoked Pink salmon and wild, skinless, boneless Sockeye salmon will run you $5.95 per tin and wild smoked sockeye a few pennies more at $6.50. They also sell candied salmon, a personal favourite of mine, for $7.95-$27.95 in sealed foil pouches.
The expansion in products led to an expansion of the business itself. St. Jean's is now in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, a fitting local as this community is known as the Salmon Capital of the World, and Delta along the Fraser Lowland south of the Fraser River in British Columbia's Lower Mainland.
It would be wonderful to see this industry grow even further to bring back the cannery traditions to British Columbia's wild west coast and the bounty found here.
Today, Tallheo has traded fish barrels for feather duvets. Visitors can stay at the Tallheo Cannery Guest House, a bed and breakfast where one can wander the old cannery grounds, explore the original general store, and soak in the moody grandeur of the north coast.
And perhaps that is fitting.
For places like Tallheo are never truly abandoned. They remain layered with stories — of salmon runs and steam engines, of hard labour and family tables, of loss and endurance, of the Nuxalk people whose roots here run far deeper than any piling driven into the mud.
The tide comes in. The tide goes out. The stories remain and the world evolves.
- References: http://nuxalk.net
- St. Jean's Cannery and Smokehouse: https://stjeans.com
- Tallheo Cannery Guest House: https://www.bellacoolacannery.com
- Alaska Historical Society: https://alaskahistoricalsociety.org/history-in-a-can-2
- The Tyee: https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/08/22/Last-BC-Cannery-Standing/
