from Nisqually
This word originated in United States
Although the fish that goes by this name is the most abundant of all salmon species, a haddo is hard to find. That's because it generally doesn't go by this name. More often the haddo is called a humpback salmon or pink salmon because of the hump on the back of the adult male and the pink color of its meat, the pink contrasting with the red of the more esteemed sockeye.
Like the sockeye, the haddo attains a length of about twenty-four inches when mature, and like the sockeye, most of the haddo are anadromous. (For an explanation of anadromous, see sockeye.)
The name haddo is recorded as early as 1882 in a U.S. government publication. It apparently comes from Nisqually, one of the dialects of Southern Puget Sound Salish, which is a Central Salish language. Nowadays there are about a hundred elderly speakers of Southern Puget Sound Salish. No other words of the language have been noted in English.
Haddo occasionally have also been called lost salmon, holia, and dog salmon. The term lost salmon was used for haddo that were occasionally found in the Sacramento River of California, far south of their usual habitat in the Northwest. Holia is unexplained. But the designation dog salmon, applied to any species deemed fit only for feeding to the dogs, indicates the disrespect in which haddo were originally held by commercial and sport fishermen. Early in the twentieth century, however, the increased demand for salmon and the dwindling supply of other salmon species changed people's minds; haddo were now "human salmon." The abundance of names reflects the abundance of the species.
