An Experimental Ground for a “Sustainable Empire”: Predator Control and Ecosystem Remaking in Interwar Bristol Bay

Abstract

This article examines how U.S. federal authorities turned predator control into a centerpiece of sockeye salmon conservation in Bristol Bay during the interwar years and, in doing so, reconfigured the local ecosystem to sustain white-centered salmon fisheries. Industrial salmon fishing began in Bristol Bay in the 1880s, when Anglo-American businessmen built canneries there. Cannery owners transformed the bay into a resource colony serving metropolitan cities on the West Coast through the enclosure of fishing grounds, racially stratified labor regimes, and the integration of production into export markets. Despite intensive salmon fisheries, conservation remained sporadic until 1919 because annual catches fluctuated but rarely collapsed. The severe crash of 1919 triggered a policy turn. The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries launched “scientific management,” grounded in observation and quantification, to preserve the industry by conserving the fish.

Within this new program, predator control emerged as an ambitious attempt to remake the ecosystem around salmon. Treating declines as the outcome of predation, Bureau officer Dennis Winn and his team conducted a 1920 pilot investigation that reduced ecological complexity to stomach-content analyses and visual observations. From these data they elevated Dolly Varden, lake trout, and terns into principal “enemies” and justified mass removals as a cost-effective alternative to hatchery work. Military metaphors—“offensive campaigns” against “marauders”—gave the program moral authority, while estimated fry saved supplied scientific and economic rationales. Annual campaigns expanded in the early 1920s, widened the list of target species, and normalized techniques such as netting fish and shooting terns.

By the late 1920s, the program had been institutionalized through a bounty scheme that reconfigured administration, finance, and labor. To overcome the logistical and budgetary limits of federal crews, the Bureau worked with West Coast canners and the Alaska territorial government. It paid cash bounties for tails that trading posts treated as scrip, thus turning tails into an alternative currency. Indigenous residents became central to this system. For many communities, predator control provided dog food, trap bait, and winter cash; it also exemplified “counter-colonial” practices—the strategic appropriation of colonial instruments to advance Indigenous interests even as participation furthered the federal conservation agenda.

The system’s contradictions soon became evident. As removals intensified, accusations of abuse multiplied—importing fish from outside Bristol Bay and cutting tails from rainbow trout and even young salmon for bounty credit. In 1939 the ichthyologist Carl L. Hubbs documented these practices and challenged the scientific premises that had reduced ecosystem dynamics to a simple predator–prey calculus. On his recommendation, Territorial Governor Ernest Gruening ended bounty funding in 1941, and the program was terminated.

The Bristol Bay case reframes interwar conservation as a project of colonial maintenance: after 1919, federal science did not merely regulate extraction; it actively reorganized environments to keep extraction going. Predator control shows how quantification, metaphors of war, and payment infrastructures translated ecological theory into routine practice, how Indigenous labor was incorporated and constrained, and how a landscape later imagined as pristine was, in fact, historically constructed through administrative, scientific, and economic interventions.