SALMON CANNERIES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

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.

Tallheo is the name of a cannery, yes, but it is also the name of a dialect of the Nuxalk language spoken by the Talhyumc people who lived here, and by those at Q'umk'uts' near the Bella Coola River estuary. 

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/

LIONS: THE BUSINESS OF BATTLE

Male lions run a harrowing, years-long gauntlet to reach adulthood. When they finally reach their prime, bloodshed is a foregone conclusion.

Lions were once the most globally widespread mammal species, with distinct populations in Africa, Eurasia, and America. 

The oldest fossil evidence of lions is just under 1.5 million years old. We do know that Panthera spelaea and Panthera leo had an ancestor almost two million years ago. 

This means there are half a million years' worth of lion evolution we have not yet found in the fossil record. And whether fossilized or modern, their lineage shows signs of battle and trial by fire all the way through.

I have seen many a Male lion sporting a lost eye or scratches across its face—souvenirs obtained in the heat of the hunt. 

When your face is the business end of your biological machinery, the focal point of the operation, the hardware responsible for countless annihilations, somewhere along the line it is gonna take a few hits. 

As it stands, male lions already have a much harder come up when compared to their female counterparts, who can stay with the pride they are born with indefinitely. 

Males get kicked out when they are between 12-18-months old, and are left to fend for themselves in the harsh African bushland. If they are lucky, they may be blessed with a brother or two from the same litter and be able to help form a coalition outside of their former pride. 

This provides a slight advantage over the lone male that gets forced out into the great unknown. In both scenarios, the road to adulthood is long and extremely hard. For the handful that do make it, they get to experience a redemption arc that only a seldom few may claim. 

Literally discarded by their former pride, years later they return to wreak havoc on the archetypical old guard. This is done out of necessity, of course, not to sate any retributive lust, but if some part of them was holding on to some vengeful baggage, you really couldn't blame them. 

ISAAC LAKE: BOWRON CIRCUIT

It is day four of our holiday, with two days driving up from Vancouver to Cache Creek, past the Eocene insect and plant site at McAbee, the well-bedded Permian limestone near Marble Canyon and onto Bowron Provincial Park, a geologic gem near the gold rush town of Barkerville.

The initial draw for me, given that collecting in a provincial park is forbidden and all collecting close at hand outside the park appears to amount to a handful of crushed crinoid bits and a few conodonts, was the gorgeous natural scenery and a broad range of species extant. 

It was also the proposition of padding the Bowron Canoe Circuit, a 149,207-hectare geologic wonderland, where a fortuitous combination of plate tectonics and glacial erosion have carved an unusual 116-kilometre near-continuous rectangular circuit of lakes, streams and rivers bound on all sides by snowcapped mountains. From all descriptions, something like heaven.

The east and south sides of the route are bound by the imposing white peaks of the Cariboo Mountains, the northern boundary of the Interior wet belt, rising up across the Rocky Mountain Trench, and the Isaac Formation, the oldest of seven formations that make up the Cariboo Group (Struik, 1988). 

Some 270 million-plus years ago, had one wanted to buy waterfront property in what is now British Columbia, you’d be looking somewhere between Prince George and the Alberta border. The rest of the province had yet to arrive but would be made up of over twenty major terranes from around the Pacific. The rock that would eventually become the Cariboo Mountains and form the lakes and valleys of Bowron was far out in the Pacific Ocean, down near the equator.

With tectonic shifting, these rocks drifted north-eastward, riding their continental plate, until they collided with and joined the Cordillera in what is now British Columbia. Continued pressure and volcanic activity helped create the tremendous slopes of the Cariboo Range we see today with repeated bouts of glaciation during the Pleistocene carving their final shape.

ATURIA: OLYMPIC PENINSULA NAUTILOID

Arturia angustata nautiloid, Clallam Formation, WA

This lovely Lower Miocene nautiloid is Aturia angustata collected on the foreshore near Clallam Bay, Olympic Peninsula, northwestern Washington. Aturia is an extinct genus of Paleocene to Miocene nautilids within Aturiidae, a monotypic family, established by Campman in 1857 for Aturia Bronn, 1838, and is included in the superfamily Nautilaceae in Kümmel 1964.

Aturia is characterized by a smooth, highly involute, discoidal shell with a complex suture and subdorsal siphuncle. The shell of Aturia is rounded ventrally and flattened laterally; the dorsum is deeply impressed. The suture is one of the most complex within Nautiloidea. It has a broad flattened ventral saddle, narrow pointed lateral lobes, broad rounded lateral saddles, broad lobes on the dorso-umbilical slopes, and a broad dorsal saddle divided by a deep, narrow median lobe. The siphuncle is moderate in size and located subdorsally in the adapical dorsal flexure of the septum. Based on the feeding and hunting behaviours of living nautiluses, Aturia most likely preyed upon small fish and crustaceans. 

I've found a few of these specimens along the beaches of Clallam Bay and nearby in a local clay quarry. I've also seen calcified beauties of this species collected from river sites within the Olympic Peninsula range.