The Klamath: Its history, its bounty, its rebirth
Editor’s Note: Last month, we lost an irreplaceable treasure with the passing of Craig Ballenger. Craig was more than a friend and colleague—he was a truly remarkable individual, the kind of person who left a deep impression on everyone fortunate enough to know him. His absence is profoundly felt, and our hearts go out to his family and friends as we all mourn his loss.
Craig was an adventurer, historian, philosopher, and storyteller. His wisdom spanned far beyond fly fishing, encompassing geology, history, and the deeper meaning behind the waters we cherish. He authored Shasta’s Headwaters: An Angler’s Guide to the Upper Sacramento and McCloud Rivers in 1998 and played a pivotal role in the relaunch of California Fly Fisher as our senior editor. For decades, Craig was California Trout’s historian and storyteller, most notably as the beloved caretaker of Trout Camp, a stunning 40-acre property on the Upper Sacramento River. There, he hosted everyone from donors to congressmen and California governors, sharing his passion for conservation and fly fishing with the same wit and charm that made him unforgettable.
The following article on the history of the Klamath is his last published work.
“All [are] obliged to sleep out in the pouring rain without blankets…this life makes a young man sixty in a few years…a convict on Botany Bay is a gentleman at ease compared to my trappers.”
– Peter Skene Ogden, Hudson’s Bay trapping brigade leader, describing life along the Klamath River during 1826
Four rivers on the Pacific Rim slice from North America’s western interior, cutting through ancient geology, finding a way to empty into the Pacific Ocean: The Frazier. The Columbia. The Sacramento. And the Klamath.
For millennia, beginning in Oregon desert marshes and finally eroding past the Klamath Estuary Bar between steep canyon walls flanked by redwood forest before joining the Pacific Ocean in northwest California, the Klamath River has changed little.
While the other rivers have seen commerce, industrialization, and burgeoning cities spread along their banks, only the Klamath has no riverside cities sprouted along its banks. It even ends in the middle of nowhere.
Since time immemorial, Paiute, Klamath, Modoc, Shasta, Karuk, Hoopa, and Yurok have each adapted to the geographic and geologic dissimilarity of the river’s course, driving their roots into territory ranging from high desert to redwood coastal rainforest.
Salmon species, Pacific lamprey, and green and white sturgeon ply its freshwater to the Pacific and back again. Food swam to the tribes, following the clockwork of the seasons. To Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake were added Lost River sucker runs. Near the 42nd Parallel, the border between California and Oregon, vast landscapes of shallow water along the east side of the Cascade Range anchored North America’s Pacific Flyway, one of three north-south migratory flyways in the Western Hemisphere stretching the mind-numbing breadth of landscape from the arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Today, less than 10% of those marshes and lakes remain, drained by the Bureau of Reclamation in 1905 to create agricultural land.

The author releasing an impressive Klamath tributary steelhead. Photo courtesy Craig Ballenger collection.
Just north and west of where the river slides across the border dividing Oregon and California, the (relatively) recent volcanic explosion of Mount Mazama occurred around 7700 years ago, blowing the top off a Cascade volcano and creating Crater Lake, Oregon’s only National Park. Archaeologically, village sites have been excavated along Lower Klamath Lake. Occupied long before these eruptions, they lay desolate for centuries by ash dumped from the Mazama eruptions, only to be re-occupied once again during the past couple thousand years, until contact with Hudson’s Bay European fur-trappers in the early 19th century.
For centuries, the only interruption to the river flow had been the great Mount Mazama eruption, one of earth’s largest volcanic events in the past 12,000 years, but the winds of change began to blow ill for Klamath denizens as the 19th century dawned. Transient trappers began mapping and naming features along the Klamath, such as ‘Shasta’ and the obvious Beaver Creek. Klamath itself seems to be a bit of a transliteration of what some scholars claim was the ‘upper’ Klamath tribal name for the river, ‘Clamat.’ Aside from scattered American trading vessels plying the west coast of North America during the late 18th century, the trappers brought only rudimentary disruption to a way of life centuries old.
However, 1848 will be remembered as the year that permanently changed the Klamath and its tributaries, specifically the middle and lower section of the river that flows through the Klamath Mountain range. These sections were destined to become the ‘world-class’ steelhead fishery throughout much of the 20th century.
THE KLAMATH GOLD RUSH
While the ‘El Dorado’ of the California gold rush was highlighted by rivers such as the American and the Feather, argonauts who earlier were farmers plying the Oregon Trail to the fabled Willamette Valley, left Oregon and hot-footed it down to California to scoop up canning jars of gold just lying around (so they heard) in the bottom of stream beds. Few, if any, knew how to actually find gold or separate it from the surrounding gravel and dirt.
As a result, these farmers, turned aspirant gold miners, trekking south from Oregon, camped one night at (now) aptly named Greenhorn Creek. This creek, just a few miles south of the border and a tributary to the Shasta River, which in turn is a tributary to the Klamath, was where they decided to prospect, believing gold must be everywhere. The Klamath Mountain range, it turned out, harbored gold-bearing strata similar to the Sierra foothills further south.
This discovery, around 1850, was the death knell for Indigenous Klamath River culture and ultimately physically transformed the river itself, including the gold-bearing salmon and steelhead tributaries of the Trinity, Salmon, and Scott Rivers. The name Salmon River itself tells you all you need to know about what the miners found deep within the canyons of the Salmon Mountains. One miner’s account from 1900, apocryphally, claims to have estimated the number of salmon in the river at the mining outpost of Forks at 100,000, and so literally packed side by jowl to nearly squeeze their compatriots out of the water and onto the banks.
Scott Bar, a mining community one Klamath tributary north, named, of course, for a miner named Scott from Oregon who struck it rich, has claimed to have coughed up more gold during the years 1850-1875 than any other stream in the state.
One argonaut from Oregon, while out with two of his party along the Scott River, shot a grizzly bear, breaking one of its hind legs. The bear turned and attacked. The miner dropped his gun, ran for his life, and sang out, “Boys, you kill the bear…!”
They claimed to have put 24 bullets into the beast before it collapsed. The bear weighed over 1000 pounds, and the miners around the camp offered them $1.00 per pound for the meat. A fortune in those days. Yet the men felt they could pan coarse gold and nuggets, valued at $16 per ounce, to equal or surpass the value of the meat, amounting to less work than butchering the monster beast.
Back over the mountains to the south, along the South Fork of the Salmon, another account from one of the original miners who came out from Peoria, Illinois, recalled that by 1855, there were 500 China men on the fork near a mining camp called Petersburg. The Chinese miners wing dammed and sluiced their way up the riverbed with such success that white miners believed that, if left to the Chinese, there would literally be no more gold left in the river. So, of course, they ran every last China man out of the canyon at gunpoint.
As mining operations became more sophisticated, small groups of independent miners gave way to mining corporations with deadly techniques, the effects of which we still can see 180 years later. Steelhead anglers will never know for certain how deep and how numerous the Klamath and tributary pools were because the advent of hydraulic mining melted mountainsides.
This system, using up to 18-foot water cannons at the end of hoses, could generate thousands and cumulatively millions of yards of debris, culminating in the elimination of not only the spawning anadromous fish themselves but also the deep water rearing and holding pools tucked in forested canyons required for their survival.
Ultimately, this destruction led to a landmark case in 1884 called the Sawyer Decision (after Lorenzo Sawyer, the judge presiding over the case) banning the practice of hydraulic mining. In many ways, hydraulic mining was the most destructive aspect of the entire gold rush experience. Unfortunately, the effects of this practice are still visible along the Klamath and its tributaries today, where the filled-in riverbed pools, once estimated to be in some cases 20 feet deep, are today less than half of that.
Gold mining continues along the Klamath to this day, though it is now more of a hobby and recreational endeavor.
“While many wanted to line the Klamath with dams all the way to the coast, urbanization and leisure time created a new cry: use the river as a fish preserve.”
HYDROELECTRIC BOOM
As the calendar flipped to the 20th century, a new threat loomed along the deep canyon walls of the Klamath: the advent of electricity. By 1923, approximately 93% of California households had electricity, and the state led the nation in usage. The Pit River projects, developed by PG&E, were well underway to the east, and lines were now being drawn in the sand based on more progressive world views. While many wanted to line the Klamath with dams all the way to the coast, urbanization and leisure time created a new cry: use the river as a fish preserve. This position was bolstered by steelhead rising in notoriety through the popular writings of Zane Grey, among others.
As a newspaper op-ed writer questioned on one side:
“…do you think that outdoor life is a vital necessity in the development of human life, or are you of a mind to give away forever one of the greatest playground sites in America in order that it may be exploited for private gain? The Klamath River should be set aside as a fish preserve. No other stream in California is just like the Klamath. Yet, it is rich in stored up hydro-electric power and that fact is recognized by scheming monopolists asking for the privilege of placing dams along the course of the stream.”
The opposition, likewise, had a voice:
“Power development and fish protection go hand in hand,” according to Col. W. Kelly, chief engineer of the Federal Power Commission. “Prohibiting power development on the Klamath is unnecessary for protection of fish. I am convinced there will be practically no difficulty in preserving both the industrial and sport fishing on this river after construction of the high dam proposed.” He went on to argue, “The proposed dam sites on the Klamath River are the only places in the United States where cheap power in large quantities is available so close to tidewater.” Kelly further declared steelhead fishing on the upper Klamath River “is better now above the California-Oregon Power Company’s 100-foot dam than it is below.”

STEELHEAD CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
As angling for steelhead grew in popularity throughout the ensuing decades of the 20th century, the Klamath became known as the “Steelhead Capital of the World.”
Once a pastime of wealthy industrialists and investors, the advent of the automobile and the construction of first the Pacific Coast Highway (later to become known as Highway 99 and today Interstate 5) and the Klamath River Highway in the 1930s brought the press to the river, along with lodges, camps, and guides.
Among those who may have influenced saving the Klamath from dams down to tidewater, surprisingly emerged the wealthy mining engineer, Herbert Hoover, America’s 31st President. An avid angler, Hoover was a founding member of a group loosely known as the Wooly Creek Angling Club (Wooly Creek is a tributary to the lower Salmon River, just a few miles above its confluence with the Klamath near Ishi Pishi Falls). As reclusive and crony based as this Stanford group was, Hoover’s love of angling was so well known that websites are devoted to his fishing quotes. Pithy and clever, they are not; what they reflect in quantity, they are not compensated for in quality. However, dear reader, I must drop at least one on you before you hurry on:
“I assure you the increase in crime is due to a lack of the qualities of mind and character which impregnate the soul of every fisherman, except those who get no bites.” -Herbert Hoover
No doubt, I am not alone in considering that such an observation might drive even the most stalwart and patient steelhead angler straight into the arms of all sorts of avaricious crime.


Yet Hoover’s love of the Marble Mountain Wilderness may, indeed, have helped create the Marble Mountain and Idaho Primitive Areas, precursors to their current status under the Federal Wilderness Act. And though lost in the mists of time, those lower Klamath dams were, in fact, never constructed. Herbert Hoover’s influence may exist to this day as a silent legacy to the river before us.
Anglers and celebrities continued to promote the quality of fishing along the Klamath, considered on par with the two most well-known streams, the Rogue and Umpqua. In fact, many considered the Klamath strain, pound for pound, the Lamborghini of West Coast steelhead. As one angler noted in 1959:
“One bluebird day stands out. It was Armistice Day, 1932. With two rangers from Lassen Park, I went to Happy Camp. There were steelhead so plentiful that we released every fish brought to shore that failed to weigh more than five pounds. We gave fish to all that would take them, filled George “Shorty” Russel’s meat market with fish to give all his friends, and brought 20 big fish home with us.” – J.O McKinney, former Siskiyou County Agricultural Commissioner.
END OF AN ERA
With a booming salmon and steelhead economy, the river seemed poised to remain on par with the Rogue and Umpqua further north. But the winds were changing.
When I was a kid, reading my Dad’s Outdoor Life, it and other outdoor periodicals still bristled with enticing accounts of this fabulous fishery. Books, too, were penned about it. Runs and pools named. Annual records were maintained replete with a movable annual trophy for largest steelhead. By the 1950s, drift boats began plying the waters; so effective was the drift boat approach that at least two lodges I’ve read of kept a fleet on hand, and during the so-called ‘height of the season,’ September through November, were sending out 6-7 drift boats per day.
This trajectory continued until the end of the 1980s, when the last of the great Klamath River steelhead books was authored by George Burdick, Klamath River Angling Guide. It is still a great read to this day.
Yet an ill wind again blew off the Pacific Coast; the salmon runs began to dip sharply, and the steelhead followed. The causes have fueled disputes, blame, and accusations ever since–and any particular analysis lies far beyond the scope of this writing. Most commonly, I hear people shrug and claim the old and hackneyed response of “…death by a thousand cuts…”
A RIVER RENEWED
Having spent this past winter touring phases of the removal of PacifiCorp’s four dams along the Klamath last week (as of this writing), astonishment remains not only that this has finally happened after 24 years but that the voices of nay-sayers who rightfully suggested no one knew what would happen are being answered. As the last coffer dam was being deconstructed, I toured Blue Creek and above. In a silty brownish foamy river, my guides and I saw fish rolling all along the banks. Will fish even come into the estuary from the ocean with the silt, opponents asked? But even with very little water breaching the bar between the estuary and the Pacific Ocean, come they did.
It was in 2002 that my girlfriend and I witnessed the horrible fish kill in the estuary as dead salmon, stiff as wooden redwood boards, spun lifelessly along the current.
Today, over two decades later, hope again springs eternal. As a friend of mine once said, “Never forget, Mother Nature always bats last.”