Klawock is a community on the estuary of the Klawock River on the west coast of Prince of Wales Island in the Alexander Archipelago, about 58 miles (93 km) northwest of Ketchikan and six miles (10 km) northeast of Craig, Alaska. The river runs about one mile from the outlet of Klawock Lake to tidewater in a lagoon above Klawock Harbor. The river’s watershed covers about 29,000 acres (11,736 ha), with many small streams feeding the 2,800-acre (1133-ha) lake. The island is part of the Alexander terrane, a region of Paleozoic sedimentary and volcanic rock intruded by Paleozoic and Mesozoic plutons. The bedrock near the village is the Klawak Formation, a sequence of orange-weathering calcareous sandstone and siltstone with minor limestone and chert-pebble conglomerate, roughly 500 to 1,000 feet (150-300 m) thick. It was deposited during the Pennsylvanian period of the late Paleozoic, between about 323 and 299 million years ago. he formation consists of calcareous sandstone and siltstone partially metamorphosed into limestone and chert-pebble conglomerate containing abundant fossils of brachiopods, corals, and bryozoans.

Many Klawock residents trace their ancestry to the Tlingit village of Tuxekan and to clan sites across Prince of Wales Island. The river and lake made Klawock a summer fish camp with abundant sockeye salmon, and Tlingit households managed the fishery under their own rules. In 1779, the Spanish naval officer Ignacio de Arteaga sailed to Bucareli Bay on the island’s west coast, territory the Klawack Tlingit traditionally used. In the late 1860s, George Hamilton established a trading post and salmon saltery at Klawock. He sold it in late 1876 to the San Francisco firm of Sisson, Wallace and Company. The North Pacific Trading and Packing Company, formed in late 1877, ran the site and opened a cannery there in 1878. That cannery is generally regarded as the first in Alaska, though a Sitka cannery also opened that year. Contracted Chinese laborers supplied much of the workforce in the first season, and many early workers were Alaska Natives. By the late 1800s, salmon runs in the region were under strain from obstructions and heavy fishing using fish traps. Congress passed the Alaska Salmon Fisheries Act in 1889, prohibiting dams and other obstructions in salmon streams, and amended it in 1896 to protect spawning grounds and strengthen penalties. A hatchery at Klawock was operating for sockeye as early as 1897.

The state built a salmon hatchery beside the Klawock River in 1977. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game ran it from 1978 until 1993. The Prince of Wales Hatchery Association took over in 1996, and the Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association assumed operations in 2016. The association now runs the facility under a state permit, with a maximum production capacity of 5 million coho and 1 million sockeye eggs, according to the 2016 management plan. The river still matters to local life. It supports seven salmon and trout species across 132 miles (212 km) of streambed, and salmon harvests there traditionally exceeded 30,000 fish a year. Harvest in the customary and traditional use area of the estuary and lake is capped at 20 coho a day and 40 a year. The Klawock Watershed Council commissioned a restoration master plan from Keta Engineering in 2003 and updated it in 2008. The plan recommends road closures, culvert upgrades and removals, and riparian thinning, mainly in the Threemile Creek and Hatchery Creek basins. A 2019 review by The Nature Conservancy and partners assessed the effectiveness of several of these projects and recommended replacing the Klawock-Hollis Highway culverts with a bridge to improve fish passage. Read more here and here. Explore more of Klawock and Prince of Wales Island here: