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California has a long tradition of harvesting salmon for food. With the coming of settlers and gold miners to California, commercial gillnetting began as early as 1851 on the Sacramento River. The spawning runs awed those early fishermen; the fish were large and their huge populations seemed inexhaustible. All too soon the runs began to decline as sediment from hydraulic mining washed into the rivers, choking spawning gravels and smothering juvenile salmon.

As California's human population grew, some of the nation's first environmental protection laws were enacted by the State of California to prevent mining debris from damaging the Sacramento and Feather rivers. Just as salmon runs were beginning to recover, irrigated agriculture began to develop, driven by droughts and the need to feed California's growing population. Hundreds of small dams and diversions were built in the Central Valley for hydropower and irrigation; then, beginning in the 1940's, and continuing today, the largest water diversion and delivery systems in the world were constructed. Unfortunately, mitigation for losses of salmon caused by the water projects was all too often an afterthought, insufficient to maintain runs at pre-project levels, or nonexistent.

Below some of the largest dams, salmon hatcheries were constructed to mitigate for the thousands of miles of habitat lost to dam construction. The hatcheries produced fish, but not enough to stem the tide of decline, not even in the rivers where hatcheries were built. In undammed drainages, problems caused by logging, road building, livestock grazing, irrigation, and other land-use practices added tremendously to the overall decline in salmon numbers. In dammed drainages where hatcheries were built, success in restoring salmon numbers has been mixed. In California's Central Valley drainage, where five major production hatcheries attempt to mitigate losses of salmon from dams, fall-run chinook salmon populations appear to have responded well to hatchery culture, while the spring and winter runs have declined dramatically. But throughout the Central Valley, year after year most returning spawners (in recent years usually far more than the escapement goal) spawn in gravel but probably came from hatcheries. Hundreds of diversions remain unscreened in spite of the excellent work by DFG's screen shops, while the Delta pumps that deliver water to the south remain a formidable obstacle for juvenile salmon trying to find the ocean.

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