Despite their primitive aspect, the immigrant fisheries of nineteenth-century California faced the same problems of depletion, “externality,” and ecological instability that troubled the larger-scale and technically more advanced industries of a century later. The motley collection of sail-powered fisheries that lined the coast had another modern aspect to it, as well: The immigrant fishers brought together within a single political and ecological system a jumble of different technologies, marketing strategies, and cost-price structures, in a way the rest of the world would not become familiar with until after 1945. Just as many different nations competed for the living resources of the high seas after World War II, so did New England salmon canners, Chinese shrimpers, and Italian market fishers share the Sacramento-San Joaquin drainage in nineteenth-century California. The economic Babel that resulted complicated an already difficult set of problems for those in government who wished to manage the fisheries in the interest of all.

The law as it stood in the first few score years of California's statehood was not of much help, conditioned as it was by nearly a century of headlong economic expansion across an unclaimed and apparently boundless frontier.