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The Chitina Dipnetters Asociation

Historical Photos of Dipnetting and related activities

If you have any old time photos that you would like to see on this page send to Stan bloom, 303 Bentley Drive, Fairbanks, Alaska 99701 or e-mail to sbloom@polarnet.com send in JEPG format. For prompt return send SASE with photos.

The following two photos were sent in by Adina Knutson from Chitina, Alaska She aquired them from the OA Nelson collection when he died in Chitina. They show dipnetting and spearing salmon in the 1950s-sbloom

Photo from Fish and Game subsistence breifing paper. Notice Native woman's dress-indicating white mans influence on style. Maybe she traded dipnet knowledge for the granny hubbard dress?

This is from the book Handbook of the American Indian.

Submitted by LClarke in Anchorage showing dipnetting in 1949

"Collis fish story, Copper Center 1898"
Photo and caption from Barry Wulff Collection

[The Copper River Natives when they are fishing] first make a basket of tin spruce roots, about Twenty inches in diameter at the top and tapering down to Six inches at the bottom and about Thirty inches deep. The roots are interwoven very openly leaving a large mesh.... Then a light pole Nine feet long is tied across the mouth of the basket for a handle thus... The basket being finished they next build a skeleton platform out into the stream with one end resting on shore and reaching out about Ten feet and probably a foot above the water, on the downstream side of this and close up to it, a sort of picket fence is built with the sticks too close for a fish to go through. So a fish, coming up along shore and meeting this fence, must turn out and around it to continue on its course. Here the fisherman stands over the outer end of this fence and throwing his basket up stream runs it with the stream by the end of the fence mouth forward and if a fish should at that moment be rounding the corner it is caught, but if not, the fisherman continues the operation till one is caught.

The white man is following the same method and doing well. The night time seems to be the best as Tony and I tried it in the day time and caught but a few while the rest of the boys went the following night and caught Eighty five whapping big ones.

We brought with us into this country a salmon spear, but it is of no use on any of these streams that run from glaciers aS the water is muddy and it is this water we have to drink.

Up at the lake where clear water streams run in, the men encamped there fasten a large hook to the end of a pole and pull the fish in by that means. In this way they catch form One to Two hundred in a half day.

Joseph A Bourke

A diary caption to an old photo of dipnetting in 1898 as seen in the Valdez Museum and historical Archive

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