Of Contracts, Canned Fish, and High Hopes

In the early 1900’s, a ruling came down in Alaska Packers Association vs. Domenico, a case which one studies in contracts class in law school. As I understand it (and I’m not a lawyer so you don't want to have too much hang on this analysis), the principle of the ruling is that if one person agrees to do something and then later on decides he doesn’t want to do it unless he receives some further consideration, the additional consideration, if agreed to, has no legal status. In this particular case, the crew members agreed to man a ship to Alaska and there to fish for salmon. They were to be paid $50 for the ship work and two cents per fish for every salmon they caught. But once in Alaska, they argued that the equipment for doing the fishing was inadequate and thus they refused to fish, since those two-cent-apiece fish had been their main financial gain in this project. They were, however, willing to pursue the fishing if the original price of $50 for being seamen was increased to $100. A member of the Packers’ Association accepted this deal. Of course, the men were in some remote part of Alaska and there were no alternative seamen to hire to take the company’s ship back or indeed to catch the company some fish.

And this all became a major principle of contract law. You agree to something and if it seems a bad idea after awhile, you are stuck with what you agreed to. Surely it would be very good if someone intervened to elevate your situation, but there is no moral or legal obligation to do so. A case of ‘contractor beware,’ I would think.

And why are we talking about this? Well, largely because I live two blocks from APA Road, and a mile or so from the grounds of the Alaska Packers Association (APA) cannery. Point Roberts: a part of legal history. Another case involving the Alaska Packers Association dealt with whether local Indian tribes, under claims of treaty rights, could prohibit the APA from fishing in the waters of Point Roberts. That decision, rendered in the 1880’s, concluded that the Indians couldn’t do anything about the APA fishing. Why are we not surprised by this decision?

The cannery has its own local history, of which I know only a little. It was a big cannery (I’ve seen pictures of it) and lots of fish were packed here. And I probably ate salmon from those cans because fresh salmon was not an item in our household in Idaho in the 1940’s, but canned salmon surely was. You put crackers and egg and canned salmon together with some onion, fried it, and that was a salmon cake. There must have been a sizable number of jobs in Point Roberts at that point. Chinese laborers were brought in to do some of the work in the canneries, and at least one such Chinese laborer, Ah Fat, lived in Point Roberts for several decades. The cannery caught fire in the 1960’s, and now there are scant ruins including, according to a friend ‘the rusted hull of a pressure canning machine left lying [on the beach].’

Except that The Cannery is still with us. At some point after the APA cannery burned down, someone constructed a new cannery building that included a restaurant and a dance floor. This was in the days before British Columbia allowed liquor sales on Sunday, and what sounds like all of Vancouver came to the Point for Sunday Drinking. A friend recalls going to The Cannery once when Woody Herman was playing right here in Point Roberts. (Herman and his band toured almost until Herman’s death when he was in his 80’s because the IRS was after him for back taxes. )

Then The Cannery was remodeled in the 80’s and it was set to become a fantastic resort kind of place. (There is a remodeled actual APA cannery over the real border to the U.S. in Blaine that is a successful resort, I am told.) The outside of our Point Roberts remodeled buildings were painted bright yellow and it is still the most cheerful looking place on the Point. But it has long been empty, another abandoned house or at least buildings. And the point of all this story? Virtually every new person to Point Roberts begins to think about how The Cannery could be revived, made the center of Point life, made an economic engine. A neighbor of mine, I hear, has been working for the past three years to turn it into a fabulous resort restaurant, and only a few days ago, I heard somebody proposing that it be used to provide free living space for young artists from Seattle who would come up here and produce fantastic work and show us….well, show us something.

My own hope is that the return of The Cannery might lure the salmon back. But it’s possible that the salmons’ contract can’t be renegotiated without really offering them something quite a bit better than they were offered before (whick was to end up in a can). Although, like the Indians and the APA workers, they might lose the case if they tried to have an improved offer enforced.