Early‐life mortality in salmon is influenced by both extrinsic (i.e., environmental) and intrinsic (i.e., parental) factors; however, the intrinsic factors have rarely been studied in the wild and relatively little is known about how egg mass and parental effects mediate in situ survival. Thus, we addressed four research objectives related to intrinsic factors and the early‐life survival of Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha: (1) assess the effect of egg mass and parental effects on in situ hatching success, (2) assess the effect of redd gravel composition and its interaction with egg mass on in situ hatching success, (3) determine whether in situ egg mass–survival relationships have population‐level consequences, and (4) determine whether results from hatchery studies translate to the wild. Embryos from three Chinook Salmon populations located in the Laurentian Great Lakes were reared from fertilization to 15 d posthatch, both in the hatchery and in the wild. We found that egg mass influenced in situ hatching success in the Credit (concave down) and Sydenham rivers (positive‐linear), whereas there was no relationship between the two variables in the Pine River. Maternal identity explained a significant amount of the variation in hatching success for the Pine (20%) and Sydenham (12%) rivers. Within populations, no interaction was found between egg mass and gravel composition; however, hatching success was negatively related to the sand content of a redd when the data were pooled among the populations. Importantly, egg mass and quantitative genetic parameter estimates were different between samples from the hatchery and those from the wild, indicating that hatchery‐based observations cannot be transferred to the wild. Finally, we used both the in situ survival data and previously published data in a simulation analysis, which showed that both linear and nonlinear egg mass–survival relationships can greatly influence the number of alevins produced by a population, depending on where the population egg mass distribution falls along an egg mass selection gradient.