Some of them had begun as fish camps, where the Natives went every summer to catch their year’s supply of salmon, either to eat or to sell it for money to buy fuel.Other villages got their start as remote canneries back in the day, when Bristol Bay salmon went into a can instead of being flash frozen and shrink-wrapped, and when by law you could fish for them only from a sail-powered boat. Some began as mining camps for gold, platinum, or coal, and some as fuel stops and mail and freight dumps for the Alaska Steamship Company. A few were the result of adventurers looking for a place far enough away from the madding crowd to put down a quiet root and prosper on the 160 acres of land provided for in the Homestead Act.Very few were viable in the long term due to a lack of anything remotely approaching a year-round industry. Salmon were being farmed now in Europe, Canada, and South America in quantities and at a price that had severely impacted Alaska’s wild salmon catch, and the nascent ecotourism industry was barely worthy of the name.
