822 THE POPULAR SCIENCPJ MONTHLY. 



artificially hatched and placed in the river, and thus, by constant 

 reparative effort, a scant measure of plenty is at present with diffi- 

 culty maintained. 



In the golden days of their former abundance no shad were 

 so highly prized as those captured in the upper reaches of the 

 Susquehanna, whose clear, running waters only the better condi- 

 tioned could attain, and which in their long journey against a 

 fresh and swiftly flowing stream were presumed to acquire a 

 flavor and excellence peculiarly their own. When the first set- 

 tlers of the Wyoming Valley found their abiding place in the 

 glades of its forested river that beneath the budding leafage of 

 the spring rippled cheerily to the far-distant sea, they were 

 amazed and confounded at the sudden revelation of its wondrous 

 treasure of fish. The dreary winter of seclusion and solitude, of 

 cold and privation, of coarse and scanty food had passed and gone, 

 and the gladdening rays of the returning sun had quickened the 

 face of Nature into joyous life. In their long deprivation the 

 isolated community hungered for the coming fruits of the earth 

 of fresh food there was little or none and toil and hardship, 

 unsustained by proper nutrition, told heavily upon the weaker 

 members of the lone and distant settlement. Then it was, in the 

 time of their stress and suffering, that the ocean's bounteous har- 

 vest was borne against the fierce current of the swollen river, to 

 diffuse joy and gladness in remote and difficult wilds. It was the 

 assured possession of its fluvial crop that peopled the valley, for 

 not only did this manna of the wilderness tide over the waiting 

 interval between seed time and harvest, but, salted or smoked, 

 afforded a winter supply of nourishing food that during the fell- 

 ing of the forest and the clearing of the land sustained the 

 strength of the industrious pioneer. It, moreover, formed the 

 subject of commerce, or rather, in those rude days, of barter, for 

 the salted product was teamed through the primeval forest to the 

 settlements upon the upper Mohawk and to the infant colonies 

 that struggled for existence where are now the flourishing com- 

 munities of Syracuse, Oneida, and others of that populous and 

 prosperous section. It has been maintained that the first com- 

 mercial routes established by mankind were probably those for 

 the acquisition of salt ; and the early existence of the ill-defined 

 and perilous way that led to the Onondaga salt springs and to 

 other sources of saline supply instances the assertion. A hun- 

 dred shad, not unlikely over a quarter of a ton in weight, was the 

 exchangeable value of a bushel of salt, weighing perhaps one fifth 

 as much. Every farmer had an ample store of barreled shad, 

 running from thirty to forty to the pork barrel, a measure that 

 would probably require twice the number of the comparatively 

 immature catch of to-day. 



