The
Maison Brander owned a large sheep ranch on Easter Island for exporting wool. The ranch was managed by the power-hungry convicted murderer
Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier, who had acquired additional land and appointed his
Rapanui wife "Queen". This was the low point in the island's history; by 1872 its resident population had been reduced to 111. In 1871 Alexander Jr had picked up rudimentary
Rapanui from his hundreds of
indentured Easter Island labourers at the
Mahina coconut plantation on Tahiti. In 1877 Queen Pōmare IV died, and Alexander's sister became regent. John Brander also died that year, and Dutrou-Bornier was assassinated. Alexander set off for Easter Island to manage the sheep station in around October 1878 with twenty Tahitian workers and an unknown number of Rapanui whose indentures had expired and ran the island for a decade. He introduced the
coconut, the first sizeable tree on the island since its deforestation two centuries earlier, apart from some fruit trees at the
SSCC Catholic mission and Dutrou-Bornier's estate. Salmon returned to Tahiti in 1883–1884 for business. Upon his return to Easter Island he bought up all remaining land apart from the SSCC mission at
Hanga Roa. As owner of nearly all the island and sole source of employment, Salmon was
de facto ruler. As he was not a religious man, and a Jew, the priests did not like him, especially
Hippolyte Roussel, who had been forced to leave the island in 1871 due to conflict with Dutrou-Bornier but who visited again in 1879. Bishop
Jaussen in Tahiti appointed a Rapanui,
Atamu te Kena, "king" to protect church interests from the
Maison Brander, but Salmon ignored him and he never had any influence. However, Salmon was an honest man and sincerely interested in the welfare of the people, and the population started to recover. This was the era of the strong Tahitian influence on the Rapanui language and culture. In addition to wool exports, Salmon developed a tourist industry. He encouraged the manufacture of Rapanui artworks, including imitation
rongorongo inscriptions, and helped sell them to passing ships for good prices as cultural artefacts, though he never claimed they were genuine. The artisans knew currency exchange rates and could deal with Europeans and Americans on their own terms. Salmon served as the principal informant for the British and
German archaeological expeditions to the island in 1882 and for the Americans in 1886, as guide, translator, and hotelier. Cooke, surgeon of the
USS Mohican, which dropped anchor in December 1886, said, The information Salmon provided, despite its often poor quality, is still among the most important of Easter Island's early historical period. He also sent three genuine
rongorongo tablets to his niece's husband, Heinrich August Schlubach, the German consul of
Valparaíso, which are now kept in Vienna and Berlin. in 1907 Salmon sold the Brander Easter Island holdings to the Chilean government on 2 January 1888 and signed as a witness to the cession of the island. He returned to Tahiti in December of that year. He left for the remote
Tuamotu Islands after being arrested and put in prison for assault and battery. He collected the oral histories of the people of the Tuamotus. He moved to San Francisco in later life and was involved in a scheme to marry ex-Queen
Liliuokalani of Hawaii, who he claimed he had been engaged to from birth. The plot was merely a heist to take Liliuokalani's money to pay his debt. He died in 1914. == Ancestry ==