The Salmon Capital of Michigan: The Rise and Fall of a Great Lakes Fishery

Biologist Prichard debuts with an immersive microhistory of the late 20th-century boom and bust of northern Michigan’s salmon fisheries. He tracks how the region’s transformation into the country’s top angling destination turned Rogers City, a town on Lake Huron, into a lucrative center of tourism. This fishing mecca first emerged as a by-product of an ecological intervention, Prichard explains; in the 1960s, the alewife, a non-native herring species with little commercial value, was fouling Lake Huron’s beaches during its post-winter die-off as “piles of... rotting bodies” washed ashore. The alewife’s Pacific predator, Chinook salmon, was introduced by the state, and by the 1980s thousands of anglers flocked every year to the rivers north of Rogers City when the salmon made their annual run. In the 2000s, the decline of the alewife population led to a collapse of the salmon fishery, damaging the local economy. In an account packed with extensive oral histories, Prichard uses locals’ own words to uncover what it was like for their community to develop such an important yet relatively short-lived relationship with a new species. It’s an illuminating investigation into the complex bond between a small town and the natural world. (Apr.)