The Lakes District has always been an angler’s paradise. The region’s lakes and rivers fed indigenous people for millennia, and white settlers who arrived at the turn of the 20th century soon learned to supplement their garden produce with fresh fish.
Trout and whitefish were so abundant here in the early days that the area sported a commercial fishery. For more than a decade, two local families made their livings fishing the area’s larger lakes.
George B. Stanton and his family arrived at Francois Lake in May 1919 from Manitoba. They originally planned to farm, but became fishermen instead.
Stanton, who had worked for Department of Indian Affairs back east, settled 12 miles from the ferry landing. He started Francois Lake Fisheries, and used a large boat and scow to fish Francois Lake for 21 years.
“He fished Uncha Bay pretty steady,” recalled his son Corney in 1987. “That’s about all he did was fish Uncha Bay. He fished with three-hundred-foot nets, three hundred feet long and eight feet deep. In the spring, he would let those nets down up to three hundred feet, and then later on in the summer, the fish moved in and he’d move them in, too.”
George’s catch consisted primarily of whitefish and lake trout (also known as char). He shipped most of them to June’s Fish Market in Edmonton, though some went to Calgary and a few were sold locally.
The largest fish George caught was a fifty-six pound char. It wasn’t the biggest ever landed here, though; Knute Nysven, who came to the Southside in 1920, caught one that allegedly weighed sixty-two pounds.
George’s competitors in the fish business were another family that hailed from Manitoba. John and Ole Johnson (sometimes spelled ‘Jonnson’) arrived here in the mid-1920s. Allegedly of Icelandic descent, they were experienced commercial fishermen who got their start on Lake Manitoba in late 1870s. Their company, J.H. Fisheries, built a large cold storage warehouse near the present site of the Tom Forsyth Arena, packed it with ice from the nearby lake, and started angling in earnest.
J.H. Fisheries operated on all the area’s major lakes and some of the smaller ones. Its boats caught char and whitefish by the thousands in nets that some locals claim were a half-mile long. The company also purchased fish from settlers intent on making a few extra dollars.
Despite their earlier success in Manitoba, the Johnsons found it difficult to capture market share once they relocated to the Lakes District. According to John, eastern fish buyers were prejudiced against fish caught in British Columbia.
The Johnsons did their best to break down consumer resistance. According to The Observer, Burns Lake’s weekly newspaper, their company sent a number of free trial shipments to fish houses in Winnipeg, Chicago, Edmonton, and Calgary “at considerable expense.”
The marketing plan worked. Customers declared “Omineca” whitefish and char superior to that caught in eastern Canada. In January 1930, the company shipped its first boxcar load to Winnipeg, and two years later, the Vancouver Province reported the arrival of “Northern BC Inland Fish.”
“Fish caught near Burns Lake and iced for transport to the Vancouver market are being offered here today,” declared The Province on Oct. 24, 1932. “They came via Prince Rupert and arrived in excellent condition, sold here within a week of the time they were caught. The variety is called ‘white fish’ but of a much finer and tastier quality than the Manitoba fish of that description – and without the multitude of small bones.”
Commercial fishing was seen as a growth industry in the Lakes District. By November 1929, J.H. Fisheries had invested $12,000 in equipment, a cold storage plant, and buildings. It was directly employing twenty people, and buying fish from approximately thirty settlers.
The Burns Lake Board of Trade overcame its initial hesitation and lobbied government on behalf of the companies, seeking a longer fishing season and more relaxed regulations. It even went to bat for two Uncha Lake men, Kjarten Eyolfson and John Johanneson, convicted of fisheries offenses and fined $114.
“Whereas we are suffering from extreme depression and much unemployment … and the fine imposed is more than the amount these men have earned all the season over a bare living,” stated the board in an official motion, “… we petition the Minister of Fisheries for restoration of the fines and forfeitures under these sentences.”
Sidney Godwin’s newspaper, The Observer, declared in November 1929 that “the new industry (which) means much to the district… should be fostered.”
Not everyone shared Godwin’s opinion. At a meeting of the board of trade held the same month, Rev. W.R. (Ray) Ashford of the United Church quoted a Tchesinkut Lake resident who claimed commercial fishermen had netted at least a ton of Tchesinkut Lake char before the fish could spawn. Barent Hougen, a resident of Bickle (now known as Tatalrose) said he felt commercial fishing was “detrimental to the settler who wanted to catch a fish now and again for his own use.”
Industry supporters scoffed at the idea that commercial angling would harm local fish stocks. John Johnson told members of the board of trade that existing fisheries regulations were adequate to protect all piscine species. George Stanton suggested that if fish stocks were declining in Francois, it was due to pollution from tin cans and tree bark trimmed from hand-hewn railway ties. Even federal fisheries officials initially expressed the opinion that commercial fishing presented no threat to trout and whitefish populations.
They were wrong. By the early 1930s, after years of intensive commercial harvesting, fish stocks were in steep decline. Settlers who relied on local lakes for food were catching fewer and smaller fish.
Tchesinkut Lake was particularly hard hit. The Smithers Interior News reported as early as 1931 that “local settlers are indignant in regard to commercial fishing being licensed on their beautiful lake … Since fishing for the market has been allowed, local fishermen claim it is almost impossible to get a lake trout on a troll, and the small nets of the bona fide settlers are picking up empty.”
Settlers like Nysven, Del Cassidy, and Charles Hunter lobbied for closure of the commercial fishery. They were joined by guide-outfitters and others who suggested the region could generate more economic value from sports fishing.
Faced with mounting public pressure, federal fisheries officials eventually closed all interior lakes to commercial fishing. The licenses held by J.H. Fisheries and Francois Lake Fisheries were either canceled or not renewed.
According to newspaper reports, it took years for the lakes to recover. As late as the 1940s, when companies were again seeking commercial fishing licenses, the Interior News reported that “that these lakes (Francois and Uncha) are only now regaining some of their lost appeal to fishermen” after years of over-fishing.
The ice houses and commercial fish boats that once dominated local lakes are gone. Yet today, thanks to the efforts of local residents, sports fishing remains one of the region’s economic generators.
© Michael Riis-Christianson and the Lakes District Museum Society