The case of the missing hooligans: a Cowlitz River mystery

Thousands of Northwesterners were disappointed when they failed to meet up with some hooligans in March.

These hooligans don’t make much trouble, except when they don’t show up.

They’re a species of fish with many names, including hooligan, oolichan, eulachon, savior fish, salvation fish, candlefish, Columbia River smelt, and Thaleichthys pacificus.

By any name, the fatty fish and its vitamin-rich oil have been prized for millennia.

Like Pacific salmon, these cigar-sized swimmers spend most of their lives in the ocean before returning to freshwater to spawn and die.

Smelt are not as big, common, or iconic as salmon. But for some Northwest tribes, they’re just as important.

“This little fish, we call qʷáləstiʔ, and it’s always been very important in our culture,” said Bill Iyall, chairman of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe in southwest Washington state. “Certainly the qʷáləstiʔ is one of the more important foods for our people.”

Indigenous groups from Northern California to the Bering Sea would welcome the return of the salvation fish at winter’s end, just when their stores of food were running low.

“The time that it arrives is when it's most needed, when the people need food, and it’s after a long winter,” Iyall said.

Today, the Cowlitz River is one of the few rivers south of Alaska that still produces enough of this once-common, now-threatened species to support a fishery.

The Cowlitz carries meltwater from three glacier-capped volcanos toward the Columbia River and the Washington-Oregon border at Longview, Washington.

“We're ground zero for the smelt,” Iyall said. “I get requests from tribal leaders across the Northwest looking for some Cowlitz River smoked smelt.”

“They are so fat they require no additional sauce, and I think them superior to any fish I ever tasted, even more delicate and lussious than the white fish of the [Great?] lakes,” explorer Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal in 1806 after tasting eulachon sold by a Clatsop Tribe chief.

Some historians say Oregon got its name from this little fish that once returned by the millions to the Oregon Territory’s biggest rivers, now known as the Fraser and the Columbia. Both rivers were called the River Ourigan at times by early colonizers, a possible mutation of the Chinook trade language term ooligan/eulachon as word spread continent-wide of the rivers’ buttery bounty.

The flesh of this coveted fish is exceptionally rich, with up to 25% fat content. Indigenous people burned the dried fish as candles. Overland trade routes in British Columbia and Southeast Alaska were known as “grease trails,” with butter-like hooligan grease a hot commodity for communities that were not graced by eulachon runs.

All that fat makes the eulachon ideal prey for other animals as well.

“It's really fabulous when these fish are coming upriver, just to be out there on a boat and seeing how many different things are feeding on them and how important they are to the overall ecosystem,” Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Laura Heironimus said.

Like salmon, eulachon enrich the inland ecosystems they return to with their bodies after they spawn.

“In some drainages, deposits of eulachon carcasses can be hundreds of yards long and more than a foot deep,” according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

For centuries, the popular method for catching eulachon has remained virtually unchanged: Stand on a riverbank or in the shallows as winter turns to spring. Dip a long-handled net beneath the surface.

“You don't need a lot of experience and expensive equipment to catch smelt,” Heironimus said. “You can actually just stand on shore with a dip net, which is just a net on a long pole, and you can reach out into the water and scoop them up.”

For best results, sweep the net downriver, slightly faster than the current, to snare smelts as they head upriver to spawn.

On a handful of days in February or March, crowds of up to 15,000 gather along the Cowlitz’s banks, sometimes shoulder to shoulder, to dip their nets for smelt.

For most of the 20th century, commercial fleets hauled in millions of the fish annually from the Columbia River.

In the 1990s, eulachon populations collapsed up and down the Northwest coast. Researchers put most of the blame on a warming ocean reducing the species’ favored plankton foods. Shrimp-trawl boats also caught large numbers of the smelt unintentionally.

The Cowlitz Tribe kept holding its annual ceremony welcoming the smelt home.

“We performed the ceremony in the absence of the qʷáləstiʔ,” Iyall said. “And then, after years and years of doing that, we finally started to see a return.”

The tribe only gained federal recognition in 2000. To this day, they lack the treaty rights that most Washington tribes have to catch half the fish in their area.

“I want to have something here for the future generations when we get our rights back,” Iyall said.

In 2007, the Cowlitz Tribe petitioned the federal government to protect the eulachon south of Alaska as a threatened species, a status granted the fish in 2010. Conservation efforts followed, on rivers and at sea. Oregon and Washington required shrimp trawlers to use LED lights on their nets in 2018, a technique that dropped eulachon bycatch by 90%.

Smelt populations bounced back enough to support some fishing again.

“In recent years, we've had some of the largest runs we've documented since that crash, with runs [approaching] 20 million pounds of fish,” or nearly 200 million smelts, Heironimus said.

Fast-forward to 2025.

Wildlife officials announced two mornings in March for the popular Cowlitz River fishery after learning that large numbers of smelt had entered the lower Columbia River, apparently headed for the Cowlitz.

Thousands of dipnetters were expected to take part.

At 8 a.m. on March 12, they lined the banks of the Cowlitz to pull in their 10-pound daily limit. But the smelt weren’t there, nor did they show up on March 15.

“Unfortunately, the smelt haven't really cooperated for this fishery this year,” Heironimus said.

The state added two more smelt-fishing mornings a week later. Still, no smelt arrived.

When I interviewed Bill Iyall, the fishery had begun, but the smelt were still missing in action.

“I was just out there. I was looking on the river," Iyall said. "I think they're still at the mouth of the Cowlitz.”

The Cowlitz tribe postponed its smelt-welcoming ceremony twice, then decided to hold it on March 29, after the fishery closed, without actually dipping any nets into the Cowlitz River.

Heironimus said the unseen eulachon appeared to be hanging out in the un-dippable depths of the lower Columbia for some reason, instead of continuing up into the Cowlitz River.

“The why is the hard part,” she said. “We don't really fully understand some of the migratory cues for smelt.”

On social media, upset fishermen pointed to a prime suspect for the missing hooligans: increasing numbers of sea lions. One video shows many hundreds of the large marine mammals hauled out on an island where the Cowlitz River enters the Columbia.

Hundreds of California sea lions gather where the Cowlitz River enters the Columbia River in Longview, Washington, on Mar. 14, 2025.

Seventy-five miles upriver of the Cowlitz at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia, wildlife managers have trapped and killed 182 sea lions since 2020. The marine mammals prey on threatened salmon about to swim up the dam’s fish ladders.

Some fishermen and Republican state Sen. Jeff Wilson of Longview want that effort to expand downriver to protect threatened smelt as well as salmon.

Wilson called the growing population of sea lions in the lower Columbia an “environmental emergency” in a newsletter to his constituents.

Wildlife advocates say the sea lions are scapegoats for habitat loss and pollution.

Wilson is proposing the state spend $3.5 million on sea lion control efforts in the lower Columbia basin, including purchasing equipment that can work in the shallow Cowlitz and Lewis rivers.

“Too many people have the impression that sea lions are cute, cuddly creatures, and not the full-time eating machines they are. Nor is there anything natural about the rapid growth of the predator population,” Wilson said in his newsletter.

Sea lions were not seen in significant numbers in the Columbia River until the 1980s. Since then, their in-river numbers have risen to about 3,500, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Heironimus says there’s little doubt that a colony of sea lions could deter hooligans from their usual spawning grounds.

“These fish are food to the sea lions and many other things, but they are going to try to avoid getting eaten, if they can,” she said.

Still, Heironimus says, big gatherings of sea lions haven’t stopped the smelt from swimming up the Cowlitz in recent years.

“Pretty much every year, the sea lions show up,” she said.

After the Cowlitz River fishery had closed, reports came in of smelts moving farther up the Columbia River, having bypassed the mouth of the Cowlitz.

Smelt and salmon both return from years at sea to the streams they were spawned in, but smelt are more likely to wander off to a different stream sometimes.

This year’s smelts appear to have continued up the Columbia, perhaps to spawn in the big river itself or in other tributaries, like the Sandy River in Oregon or the Kalama and Lewis rivers in Washington, where smelt fishing is not allowed.

“When I say they are unpredictable, they are very unpredictable,” Heironimus said. “Smelts are going to do what smelts are going to do, and they don't care what we write in our reports, it turns out.”

Even if smelts were to appear in the Cowlitz, fishery managers won’t allow fishing there: A state hatchery farther up the Cowlitz was set to release young salmon, which could be unintentionally scooped up along with any eulachon, in late March.

The hooligan is much less understood than its more widespread and lucrative relatives, the Pacific salmon.

Heironimus says she hopes one day researchers will have funding to study why these smelt migrate when and where they do, so catching and conserving these little hooligans might get a little easier.