Gavin Newsom made the announcement with ceremony. A historic partnership with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, a plan to reintroduce winter-run Chinook salmon to the cold, spring-fed waters of the McCloud River upstream of Lake Shasta. For a fish that federal scientists call “one of the most at-risk endangered species,” it was the kind of bold gesture that Sacramento press conferences are built for.

Two years later, tribe officials say the state is walking away. The money is gone, the jobs are disappearing, and the salmon restoration work on the McCloud River is at risk of collapsing before it ever fully took root.

“It makes me feel betrayed. It makes the tribe feel betrayed,” said Gary Mulcahy, government liaison for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. “It’s like they just gave up.”

State officials say there is no abandonment, only a funding structure that ran its course. The money came from drought emergency reserves, not a recurring budget line. “The pilot was designed to take urgent action during severe drought conditions while testing key tools and approaches needed for potential long-term reintroduction,” California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Stephen Gonzalez said in an email.

That explanation does little to soften the situation on the ground for the tribe.

The winter-run Chinook’s predicament is the product of decades of water infrastructure decisions. Shasta Dam and Keswick Dam cut the fish off from their historic spawning grounds at higher elevations, forcing them to reproduce in the Sacramento River below. The Sacramento runs warm. Warm water kills salmon eggs. Keeping the river cold enough to give the eggs a chance requires federal water managers to hold back releases from Lake Shasta, which in turn limits irrigation deliveries to Central Valley farmers who depend on that supply.

Carson Jeffres, a senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, put the problem plainly. “We are forcing the fish to be in places where they never were historically,” he said. “When we have all those eggs in one basket, you are one really warm event from losing that cohort of fish.”

The drought years of the early 2020s nearly made that worst case real. Warm conditions decimated salmon eggs in the Sacramento, triggering emergency response before Newsom’s formal announcement. “It was our wake-up call,” Jeffres said.

In 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife joined with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe and federal fisheries agencies to move endangered salmon eggs from a hatchery below Lake Shasta to the McCloud River above it. The McCloud is cold and spring-fed, the kind of water winter-run Chinook evolved in. For the first time in more than 80 years, the fish were back in a river where they had once been abundant.

State and federal agencies then formalized the partnership, naming the Winnemem Wintu Tribe as a “co-equal decision-maker” in the agreement. That language meant something. The tribe had spent generations watching outsiders manage, and mismanage, resources tied to their ancestral territory. A formal seat at the table was not a small thing.

Now that table is being packed up.

The loss of funding translates directly into job losses for tribal members who had been employed in the restoration work. Beyond the economic hit, there is the cultural dimension that does not translate well into budget spreadsheets. The winter-run Chinook is not simply a fishery resource for the Winnemem Wintu. The fish is woven into the tribe’s identity, ceremony, and continuity. The prospect of seeing the restoration effort stall before the salmon can sustain themselves in the McCloud carries a weight that state press officials cannot address in an email response.

The broader stakes extend past the McCloud River and past the tribe. Winter-run Chinook are a keystone piece of a Sacramento River system that California’s water managers, farmers, and fishing communities are all tangled up in. Every acre-foot of cold water held in Shasta Reservoir to protect salmon is water that does not flow to a farm in Fresno County. Every failed spawn in the Sacramento is a data point that makes the federal agencies managing the river more conservative. The fish sit at the center of one of the most contested water allocation conflicts in the American West.

The McCloud reintroduction was, at minimum, an attempt to ease that tension by giving the fish somewhere other than the Sacramento to reproduce. Cold, protected water above the dam. Historic habitat. The kind of solution that, if it worked at scale, could eventually change the calculus on how much cold water federal managers need to hold in reserve.

Whether California will find a way to continue funding that work is now an open question. Mulcahy and the Winnemem Wintu Tribe are not waiting for Sacramento to sort it out on its own. They are pushing for a path forward, even as they process what they describe as a sudden and demoralizing withdrawal.

The nonprofit newsroom CalMatters covered this story.

The salmon came back to the McCloud River. Whether they stay depends on what happens next in a budget cycle, not in the river itself.