Talk:Stikine River

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Alaska, an effort to create, expand, organize, and improve Alaska-related articles to a feature-quality standard.

This article is part of WikiProject Rivers, a WikiProject to systematically present information on rivers. If you would like to participate, you can choose to edit the article attached to this page (see Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ for more information)

The name Stikine doesn't have anything to do with the Tlingit "great river" which would be Héen Tléin. Instead the name comes from Shtax' Héen which has two supposed meanings. The first, and more commonly accepted, is "river cloudy with the spawn of salmon". The second is "very silty river". The former is probably closer to the truth, the latter more likely a misinterpretation of the metaphor given in the former name. Unfortunately places like the National Parks Service and other disseminators of tourist information have perpetuated myths about the name that developed back in the 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than checking with Tlingit speakers who actually live in the area. This is typical.

Perhaps something should be added about the perennial proposals for bridges that would be built from the mainland south of the mouth of the river across the channel to Wrangell. This would include a discussion of the proposed cutoff from the highway that would travel down the river to the mouth.

Also, something should be said about the massive depredation of salmon stocks by fish trap operators in territorial days. The current escapement data from the DF&G would need to be referenced for recovery figures.

— James Crippen 11:37, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Speaking of the fishery, isn't the Stikine fishery covered by the International Joint Commission treaties, i.e. that a share of its fishery (in fact theoretically the largest part of it) belongs to BC? In practicality I think this winds up being a trade-off vs. Alaskan shares in the Fraser/Puget Sound fishery, but in international salmon law fish belong to the country they spawn in. And only a few miles of the Stikine are in Alaska; and even then (as noted now in the article when the boundary was drawn, the boundary was at what was then the mouth of the river, which has since silted in; ditto with the Canadian right-of-navigation on the river, which dates back to the days of Russian America and was affirmed in the 1903 Hayes-Herbert Treaty; hard to imagine the days of heavy steamboat traffic up the Stikine and Iskut, but "was a time...".Skookum1 06:13, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

It is covered under the treaty I believe, but note that salmon can’t travel upstream of the Grand Canyon, so there’s quite a bit of the river that is salmonless. As far as I know, there is basically no commercial fishery on the Stikine other than at its mouth. The only community along the river is Telegraph, and that village is mostly Tahltan indians who subsistence fish but don’t commercial fish. The Stikine king fishery was opened last year after around 50 years of being closed, this because the ADF&G decided that escapement had finally reached levels that could support a sustainable fishery. It’s not much of a commercial river nowadays, however, because the fish traps ruined it in the post-goldrush era. — Jéioosh 07:09, 20 August 2006 (UTC)