The National Marine Historical Society published an article by Richard King about the Columbia River sturgeon:

For five wet, cold, lonely years in the early 1800s, a young Irishman named Ross Cox traded for furs among the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In his account of the experience, titled Adventures on the Columbia River (1832), he wrote often of eating “excellent sturgeon.” It was a favorite catch of the native people of the region.

Cox described this royal fish at the mouth of the Columbia: “The months of August and September furnish a plentiful supply of prime sturgeon. This fish attains a great size. Some of those we took were eleven feet in length; and, with the entrails out, weighed from three to four hundred pounds.” 

Seriously? Yep. And those weren’t even close to the biggest ones ever recorded. Cox was describing a species known today as the white sturgeon, the largest of about eight species of sturgeon that live throughout the rivers, lakes, and coastal waters of North America. Biologists once measured a white sturgeon caught in the Fraser River, British Columbia, to be nearly 14 feet long, weighing over 1,500 pounds! Other sources claim white sturgeon as long as twenty feet, weighing nearly a ton. Scientists believe that giant white sturgeon can live for more than 80 years.

As a family, sturgeon are among the most ancient animals in today’s oceans and rivers. Ross Cox’s white sturgeon looked nearly identical to the fish that prowled river bottoms over 100 million years ago. That’s the Early Cretaceous period. With their shark-like cartilaginous skeletons, scale-less skin, and boney diamond-shaped plates, sturgeon swam around for millions of years—even before the evolution of the T-Rex.

When in the 1880s businessmen brought icing technology to the Columbia, along with a demand for sturgeon, the fishermen of the region began to capture the species so aggressively that within two decades they nearly rendered white sturgeon extinct along the river. Sturgeon grow slowly and take a long time to reproduce and mature. It was easy to disturb their life cycle by disturbing their habitat and fishing out big breeding females for caviar.

The overfishing of White Sturgeon in all the Pacific Rivers, unfortunately, continued for another hundred years causing wild populations to approach unsustainable levels.  In the 1980s, fisheries scientists and biologists at the University of California at Davis were successful in domesticating White Sturgeon raised from broodstock captured in the Sacramento River. This critical breakthrough allowed scientists to reintroduce fish back into the Sacramento and Columbia Rivers, and opened the door for raising White Sturgeon commercially to reduce the pressure on natural stocks.