On the first of April 1864, on the Sacramento River, the Hume brothers and a Maine tinsmith named Andrew Hapgood started putting salmon into cans. It was the first salmon cannery on the Pacific coast, and inside two years it had run out of river. The Sacramento's run, already muddied by the gold diggings upstream, was never going to keep a cannery busy, so the whole operation packed up and went north to the Columbia. That first move turned out to be the shape of everything that followed. Salmon canning spread through the American West the way the West itself filled up: it found a river, took what the river had, and went further north when the river had less.

The Columbia was a different kind of river. At Eagle Cliff, on its Washington bank, the first season in 1866 came to 4,000 cases, forty-eight one-pound cans to the case, from fish brought in by two small boats. By 1877 there were thirty canneries on the lower river, and by 1883 there were thirty-nine, with seventeen hundred boats fishing for them and a pack that year of 629,400 cases, something like thirty million cans out of one river in one season. Most of the work on the line was done by Chinese crews, more than four thousand of them on the Columbia by 1881, and the cans went east and across the ocean to Britain and Australia as cheap, nourishing food for working families. Astoria, at the river mouth, grew up around the canneries, and the packers' association formed there in 1899 is the company known today as Bumble Bee.

The Columbia could not hold that pace forever, and the canners were already looking north before it began to slip. In 1878 the first two canneries in Alaska went up, at Sitka and at Klawock on Prince of Wales Island, and the Klawock cannery was run by a man who had managed the canneries at Eagle Cliff. The ship carrying its equipment north that March also carried eighteen Chinese workers hired to do nothing but make the cans. Alaska packed 36,000 cases in 1883 and 789,347 in 1891, and for decades after that the sailing ships left San Francisco every season with a hundred to three hundred cannery hands aboard, a month or more at sea, to put up the summer's run.

The last stop was also the furthest. In 1883 Carl Rohlffs, a San Francisco businessman, built a cannery at Kanulik, a Yup'ik village on the Nushagak River in Bristol Bay, and the following summer it put up the first salmon ever canned there: 400 cases, maybe six thousand fish. What the Nushagak and its neighboring rivers carried was sockeye, the red salmon, and Bristol Bay turned out to be home to the largest run of wild red salmon in the world.

There was nowhere further north to go, and as it turned out there was no need. The last big cannery on the Columbia, the Bumble Bee plant in Astoria, closed in 1980. Bristol Bay set its all-time record in 2022, and this summer, in a season the fishery called moderate, just over forty-four million sockeye came back into the bay, some fifteen million of them up the Nushagak, the river that gave Carl Rohlffs his six thousand fish. The salmon tin spent twenty years moving north from river to river, and it ended on a run that still comes home by the tens of millions.