Pacific Northwest waters from Alaska to Oregon lie between the Arctic whaling grounds and the home whaling ports of San Francisco and Honolulu. While the Pacific Northwest was not a whaling destination, whales in these rich grounds were pursued for many years as whale ships moved between the whalers' summer whaling grounds and southern home ports. After 1900, whaling in the north Pacific changed from sailing ships to modern, steam-powered iron ships and harpoon cannons. Land stations were built along southern Alaska, Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and Washington State. The new "killer"...

Yankee whaling, shore whaling, and modern whaling were sometimes occurring simultaneously. Each type of whaling went through periods of discovery, stability, and then a gradual decrease as the products lost their markets or the number of whales began to wane as some species moved toward commercial if not actual extinction due to over-fishing. Small whaling operations from California, called shore whaling, continued from the 1850s until Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans (1969-1972) whistled down the industry in 1971.

In 1850, commercial whaling ships entered the Bering Sea for the first time. There, they found the summer grounds of bowhead whales, as well as local Inuit people who had been whaling the Alaskan coast for 2,000 years. Within a few years, almost the entire Pacific fleet came north each June to find a path through the melting ice, and the Inuit way of whaling--in fact, their entire livelihood--would be forever changed. Baleen was worth nearly $5 a pound. But the new trading posts brought guns, alcohol, and disease. In 1905, a new type of whaling using modern steel whale-catchers and harpoon...