 While some worked in the area's not insubstantial timber industry, most of the Finns in Astoria caught steelhead and salmon on the Columbia, working independently as small proprietors on their own boats.The needs of the Finnish fishermen were for cooperation, coordination, and collective social activity and they were generally not pitted against ruthless capitalist enterprise as were their countrymen engaged in mining and timber work in the Upper Midwest.Consequently, the political views of Astoria's Finnish Socialists tended to be moderate and electoral rather than built around the notions of class struggle and revolution.