The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  Restored to publication toward the end of the Revolution, the Pennsylvania Gazette, even in its shorter notices, was resonant with a couple of new terms, as on May 24, 1780:

  WAS stolen from the fishery, near the mouth of Tyhukan Creek, on the Delaware, in the night of the 13th instant May, seven barrels salt SHAD, the property of the United States; the barrels are made of Black Oak Staves. Any person giving information … shall receive FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS reward.

  In 1782, a few months after the British surrender at Yorktown, the old fishing-and-hunting club called the Colony in Schuylkill changed its name to the State in Schuylkill and went on fishing and hunting. Colloquially, it would become known as the Fish House. Only two people among the twenty-seven were loyal to the king, and several signed the Declaration of Independence. The new State firmly retained the Colony’s order of April 23, 1760, “that they may drink out of the Government Bowl of Punch as often as they like, and fill it again as often as they drink it out.” Samuel Morris Jr., their Governor from 1766 to 1812, is credited with the invention of Fish House Punch (lemon juice, sugar, rum, and brandy), a drink as American as Betsy Ross. The guiding agendum of their assemblies to this day, it is ladled from an elegant Government Bowl.

  In 1789, Peter Cortelyou caught nearly sixteen thousand shad in the Narrows off New Utrecht—the present-day Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He used fyke nets, balloonlike, held open with hoops. In the same place in the six seasons 1790-95, he caught about a hundred thousand shad. By the eighteen-twenties, according to his ledgers, his catch was down ninety-six per cent, the result of overfishing. By 1838, New York was buying shad from other rivers. On January 17, 1807, the New York Commercial Advertiser reported: “A shad weighing five pounds was caught this morning at the Narrows, and sold in our market for one dollar and twelve sents!” The exclamation point may have had something to do with the price but more with the date. It was even earlier than Philadelphia’s harbinger shad of 1793, pulled out of the Delaware on January 20th, pronounced a “fine shad” by the Pennsylvania Gazette, and served that evening in the White Horse Tavern, on Market Street.

  A fisherman in South Hadley, Massachusetts, “sold thousands of shad after the Revolution for three coppers each,” according to Sylvester Judd, and found it “much more difficult to sell salmon than shad.” The fish came from below the Connecticut River falls, where Holyoke Dam would before long be. Judd’s writing fills in the scene as if it were a Flemish populated canvas.

  Shad seasons brought to the falls, on both sides of the river, multitudes of people … All came on horses with bags to carry shad, except a very few who had carts … For some years there were only two licensed inn-keepers at the falls—Daniel Lamb and widow Mary Pomeroy, but every house on both sides of the river was full … A great number of the men brought victuals with them; many cooked shad, and others bought food at the houses … Where there were so many men, and rum was plenty, there was of course much noise, bustle and confusion. The greater part were industrious farmers, and after leaving the falls, they wound over the hills and plains with bags of shad, in every direction. They were plainly dressed, according to their business. There was another class at these gatherings, composed of the idle, the intemperate and the dissipated. They came to drink and frolic, and some to buy shad if their money held out.

  Under the impression that the Wyoming Valley of the Susquehanna River was a chartered part of Connecticut, people from Connecticut began settling there in the seventeen-sixties. This resulted in the two Yankee-Pennamite Wars (1769-71, 1784) between Pennsylvania and Connecticut, not to mention the British-allied Mohawk attacks that included a massacre of Connecticut forces in 1778. The Connecticut settlers raised flax, spun it, made twine, and knit seines. They fished in the Susquehanna for shad. To a significant extent, they came to depend on shad after crops and livestock were destroyed in the hostilities. As much or more than anywhere in America, the spring migration in the Susquehanna became, and remained, a major event in the subsistence year. In 1798, when “uncounted thousands” of shad were caught at Nanticoke alone, the Wilkesbarre Gazette lost control of its metaphorical perspective. “Bonaparte and all his army was captured!” the newspaper reported, in acclaim of the fishermen’s triumph. Napoleon had recently overrun northern Italy.

  Gilbert Fowler, born in 1792 in Briar Creek Township, on the right bank of the river, recalled as an old man the spring migrations of his childhood. His words appear in a group of memoirs collected by the Wyoming Historical and Genealogical Society in 1881. “The Susquehanna shad constituted the principal food for all the inhabitants,” Fowler said. “No farmer or man with a family was without his barrel or barrels of shad the whole year round. Besides furnishing food for the immediate inhabitants, people from Mahantango, Blue Mountains, and, in fact, for fifty miles around, would bring salt in tight barrels and trade it for shad. They would clean and salt the shad on the river shore, put them in barrels, and return home.” Mary Coates: “The people had shad from spring to spring.” Jameson Harvey: “We used to have shad until shad came again.” C. Dorrance: “It was my business as a lad every evening, after school, to be with horse and wagon to receive our share of shad.” In the lunch baskets that children carried to school were corn bread and shad.

  Here Fowler describes the fishery of Samuel Webb, about four miles upstream of Bloomsburg:

  This was an immense shad fishery. From the banks of the river at this fishery could be seen great schools of shad coming up the river when they were a quarter of a mile distant. They came in such immense numbers and so compact as to cause or produce a wave or rising of the water in the middle of the river, extending from shore to shore.

  Near the Old Red Tavern, in Hanover, fishermen reported nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine shad taken in one haul. In the annals of prevarication, this may be the most modest extant example of fishermen’s well-known tendency to exaggerate. A Mr. Duane was among those hauling the net. Duane admitted in later years that the count was actually nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven, but he and the other fishermen added two so the digits would all be nines.

  In Simsbury, Connecticut, in 1995, I happened into a book on my in-laws’ shelves that was three and a half inches thick and weighed almost four pounds. It looked like dimension stone. Attracted by its arresting title—“United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Part IX, Report of the Commissioner for 1881”—I looked through its twelve hundred pages, and with an expanding sense of discovery found these memoirs about shad on the Susquehanna, to which nothing compared—that I knew of—from any other river. I felt as if I had found in my own attic the lost letters of Georges D’Anthes. Since then, I have come upon the Susquehanna stories from the 1881 report in at least a dozen books, in numerous articles in historical quarterlies and general magazines, and in the newspaper pieces that appear routinely with the spring migration. So much for Scoopnose the Scholar.

  A shad fishery on the Susquehanna would typically include about ten men—the number it took to haul the net. Shareholders each owned “so many yards of the net, and each one receiving his share of fish according to the number of yards owned.” The fish usually weighed from three to nine pounds. Major John Fassett said he saw the weighing of a twelve-pound shad. Jennison Harvey said, “I saw one weighed, on a wager, which turned the scales at thirteen pounds!” There were several dozen shad fisheries in the Wyoming Valley, and at the end of the eighteenth century they were each averaging from ten to twenty thousand shad in a season. Circa 1790—no one seemed to recall the exact year—ten thousand were caught in one haul at the Stewart fishery, midway between Wilkes-Barre and Plymouth. They were caught on the first Sunday of the shad season. After the 1778 massacre, there were so many widows and orphans in the valley that a custom developed of giving one haul per fishery per season to them, always on that first Sunday. It was known as the “Widows’ Haul.” At roughly thirty cents apiece, the ten thousand shad from the Stewart fishery were worth about three thousand dollars.
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br />   The fishermen did their fishing after dark. They drank “old rye.” Customers bartered with them, paying whiskey for shad. They were also paid with leather, iron, cider, maple sugar (“one good shad was worth a pound of sugar”), and cider royal (cider + whiskey). A bushel of salt bought a hundred shad. Walter Green, of Black Walnut Bottom, “gave twenty barrels of shad for a good Durham cow.”

  By the eighteen-twenties, several shad floats appeared annually near the mouth of the Susquehanna—great rafts, river-borne factories, as much as a hundred feet wide and three hundred feet long. On each raft was a bunkhouse, a mess hall, an office.

  Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, was born in Shadwell in 1743. His grandfather had settled there. The young Jefferson hauled seine for shad. Shadwell is about four miles east of Monticello, on the Rivanna, a tributary of the James. Jefferson was always mindful of the spring migration, mentioning it in letters and in his Garden Books and Memorandum Books. In 1798, he wrote from Philadelphia to Marie Jefferson Eppes: “Mar. 16. the 1st. shad here. 28. the weeping willow begins to shew green leaves.” March 17, 1800: “First shad at market.” April 9, 1801: “Paid $1.25 for three shad.” May 8, 1809: “Paid $1.75 for six shad.” In July, 1809, he wrote to Gordon, Trokes & Co., in Richmond, placing an order for, among other things, “Cod’s tongues and sounds. 1 keg” and “salted white shads. 1. barrel of best quality.” According to the historian Helen D. Bullock, “Jefferson retained his fondness for such native staples as sweet potatoes, corn, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, shad, Virginia ham, venison, wild swan, crab, scuppernong wine and grapes, throughout his life.” A 1993 news release from Virginia’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries informed the public that “Jefferson once noted that shad in the Rivanna near his Monticello home were thick enough to walk across”—a remembrance unknown to Jefferson scholars. Shad-roe soufflé has been associated with his table, apparently in error. Jefferson liked his fresh shad laid open, broiled, and addressed with pepper, salt, and butter, and is not known to have eaten shad cooked another way. In 1812, he made a fish pond at Monticello, intent to fill it with carp. He sent a boatman down the Rivanna with a letter to his friend John Ashlin.

  I shall be obliged to you if you can aid him in getting them at as reasonable a price as you can. I presume they will not be higher than what is paid for shad, as they are by no means as good a fish. If through your interest he can be admitted to join in hauling the seyne & come in for a share of shad so as to bring us some, I will thank you, as well as for any other aid you may give him towards his object …

  Thomas Mifflin, of Pennsylvania, had a mansion at the Falls of Schuylkill where he gave shad dinners for his founding friends. Mifflin was Quartermaster General of the Continental army, President of the Continental Congress (1783-84), delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention, and Governor of Pennsylvania throughout the seventeen-nineties, when the national capital was Philadelphia. Mifflin might be governor of Pennsylvania but not of the State in Schuylkill, in which he was just a citizen, as the members have been called since 1782. He knew better than to depend on club fellow-citizens for fish, so he bought his shad from Godfrey Shronk. The Schuylkill’s pre-dam shad fisheries were numerous, and involved such people as Woolery Meng, Melchior Meng, Conrad Krickbaum, and Titus Yerkes. Titus Yerkes owned the General Wayne tavern at Mary Walters Ford. When going for bass, perch, and bullheads, the fishing citizens of the State in Schuylkill used trot lines. They called them layout lines. On March 27, 1789, Citizen Benjamin Scull, godson of Benjamin Franklin, caught a fifteen-inch trout on his layout line.

  In 1809, you could get three acres of riverfront land in Lower Merion for three hundred dollars, yet a timberless and agriculturally barren three-acre island in the Schuylkill River was worth twice as much, because of its fisheries. In 1811, inmates of the poorhouse of Montgomery County, in which Lower Merion is a township, complained of being fed too much salt shad. Among the populace at large, though, shad had risen a long way in their level of acceptance. In that same decade, Pennsylvania Germans were stuffing shad with oysters, baking them in parchment, and drenching them in rich walnut sauce. In Philadelphia in the eighteen-twenties, Joseph Head’s Mansion House Hotel was looked upon as the most elegant restaurant in town, where you ate stuffed baked shad under a caper sauce, grilled shad with sorrel, and, for breakfast, shad roe with oranges.

  Samuel Lane owned the Bull Tavern, near Phoenixville. According to Samuel Pennypacker’s history of the town, Lane “had an arrangement with the fishermen at the mouth of the Pickering, that he was to furnish them each morning with a quart of whiskey, and they were to give him in return a shad weighing eight pounds.” Pickering Creek flows into the Schuylkill a few miles above Valley Forge. The fishermen filled their side of the contract for a time, but the aggregate pressure of the fisheries was such that the size of shad declined. The stomach of Sam Lane’s last shad was stuffed with pebbles.

  The dams started coming in 1822, and the State in Schuylkill moved downriver to Rambo’s Rock, a left-bank site in South Philadelphia, and on May 5th, in the spring migration, betokened its arrival with a dinner of planked shad. Three years later, M.J.PY.R.G. du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, spent a day as a “stranger” at the club. He had been twenty years old when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1777. Martha Washington referred to him as “the French boy.” Now he was sixty-seven and touring the nation he had helped create. His son George Washington Motier was with him, and successfully fished in the river. The marquis helped with the cooking. Of his visit he remarked, “It completes my tour of all the States in the Union.”

  In a dusty old cellar under the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, at 1300 Locust Street, are ten metal caskets numbered with gold paint. Inside the caskets are the suede-bound ledgers of the Colony in Schuylkill and the State in Schuylkill. Robert Peck, a citizen of the State who spends the rest of his time as a naturalist at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, is the one person in Pennsylvania or anywhere else who has a key that unshelves those caskets. In his generosity, Peck has opened the caskets, and stayed there with me in the more than amply heated basement, hunting through the ledgers. I am as indebted to him as to the State in Schuylkill’s two official histories.

  In the eighteen-thirties, this first angling club in America acquired its own worm digger, Martin Lush. In 1832, on its hundredth anniversary, a hundred people (members and guests) sat down to a dinner that featured eleven pounds of food for each eater, and included, overall, forty-nine pounds of shad. They ate a hundred and seven pounds of beef, four pigs, thirty pounds of tongue, forty pounds of oysters, and twelve lobsters averaging 3.3 pounds. Filling it again as often as they drank it out, they drank on average of alcoholic drink some thirty-four ounces each—that is, was, seventeen gallons of rum and brandy, some of it mixed, and eleven gallons of wine, nearly all of it fortified.

  Attracted to the table in 1849 were the “strangers” George Gordon Meade, of the West Point class of ‘35, and John Clifford Pemberton, West Point ’37. On July 3, 1863, Meade defeated Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. On the following day, Pemberton surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg.

  On October 31, 1920, when Prohibition was one year old, General of the Armies John J. Pershing wore an apron, peeled potatoes, and ladled Fish House Punch at the State in Schuylkill. Later, he recalled the visit, saying, “I don’t know what particular State it was, but I was in a dreadful state when they got through with me. Still, the amusing part of it was that I didn’t realize until the next day what a good time I had had.” During his good time, the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War—recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Honor, the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Marizio e Lazzaro, the Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold, the Grand Cross of Commander of the Order of the White Lion, the Order of the Star of Karageorge with Swords of the First Class, the Order of Mihai Bravul, the
Polonia Restituta, and the Order of the Rising Sun—was made an honorary citizen of the State in Schuylkill, and he wrote in a club ledger: “No honor has ever quite equaled this.”

  NINE

  THE PORTABLE ROCK

  In the Delaware basin today, sixty-five thousand people fish for American shad. I have no idea how the state surveys arrived at this officially concocted figure, but I find it hard to believe. While personally spending nine hundred and twenty-two hours on or in the river in many different places fishing for shad, I have developed a distinct impression that at least a hundred thousand people have crowded ahead of me into positions superior to mine. In 1965, I interviewed a citrus king in Florida, whose route to success he outlined in this manner: “When I was a small boy playing marbles, I learned that the most important thing is position. If you get in the right position, you can clear up some marbles out of the ring.”

  Starting out as a shad fisherman, I relied on the instincts of George Hackl, which was the first of many mistakes. As a consultant, Hackl has received stupefying fees. His expertise in the international licensing of pharmaceuticals would obviously qualify him as an authority on the whereabouts of shad. On our first day as shad fishermen, we went to a sporting-goods store, bought shad darts and two shad nets with their long handles and oversized hoops, drove to Roebling, New Jersey, and addressed ourselves in chest waders to the Delaware’s tidal flats. The rationale was simple in every sense, but we would be slow to give it up: If half a million shad were in the river, half a million shad would pass Roebling—or any place in the lower regions of the river. Roebling is fifteen miles below the fall line at Trenton. We waded out from shore a good distance, and, in water to our waists, began to cast darts. You would not need an aerial photograph to sense the futility of this scene. A thousand feet beyond our casting range, oceangoing ships were passing by. They were in the river channel. We might as well have been fishing for ships. The shad were out there in the channel, too. For three hours, we flailed the barren flats.