Salmon was an important food to the Indians who lived along the Snake and Columbia rivers and their tributaries.   This included Indians living in Idaho.  Lewis and Clark's party was starving when they arrived at the Nez Perce camp of Chief Twisted Hair on the Weippe Prairie in northern Idaho.  One of the foods the Nez Perce gave them (and saved their lives) was dried salmon.

Indians living in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon dried salmon to eat during the winter months.  During salmon season, they caught hundreds of tons of salmon with nets and spears.  Before the coming of white people, the Snake and Salmon River systems produced more salmon than any other rivers in the world.  On a good day, one man could catch 100 salmon---a ton of fish!  Salmon were (and still are) important to many Indian traditions and ceremonies.

Today, there are very few salmon in the Snake and Columbia Rivers, and none at all in some of the higher tributaries.  Dams, water pollution, fishing, and natural enemies have reduced the salmon to the point where it is now an endangered species.

Everybody loves salmon---bears, fishermen, and fishermen.  The boat below is a fishing trawler that catches and processes thousands of salmon every time it goes to sea.

Today, eggs (picture below) are collected from spawning adult salmon  and hatched in  giant fish hatcheries such as the one shown above.

The young salmon stay in the streams for several months while they grow large enough to travel downstream to the ocean.  They live in the ocean, growing to full size, for six months to seven years.   Then they swim back up the rivers to the small stream where they were hatched, where they spawn and die.