Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site

This guide to the Gulf of Georgia Cannery follows the multilingual crews, Chinese, Japanese and Indigenous workers, who once processed salmon here using hand signals because no common language crossed the packing floor. It traces the arrival in 1906 of a machine patented by Seattle inventor Edmund Smith that could gut and clean a fish in seconds, work that once took a skilled crew of thirty men wielding knives all day. A single Chinese butcher on this floor could once dress about two thousand fish in a ten-hour shift.