124 BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 



43 ROCKFIMII lis NOUTn CAROI..IIVA. 



By FKANK BURWS. 



[From a letter to Prof. S. F. Baird.] 



When I used to fish in the Sautee River twenty years ago, old fish- 

 ermen spoke of rockfish as having been caught there a long time be- 

 fore, but not within the last thirty-five or forty years, except at the 

 junction of the clear water of Eutaw Creek with the muddy water of the 

 San tee. There, it was said, they could be seen at all times of the year 

 in the deep, clear water near tlie bottom, and were sometimes captured 

 by gigs or spears on long jioles. This information agreed with what I 

 had heard of them in the Ohoopee, a small, clear tributary of the Alta- 

 inaha River in Georgia. 



As you are aware, most of our large Southern rivers are now muddy 

 and filthy all the year, and scarcely any fish except catfish and eels can 

 live in them. It was not always so, for they teemed with fish in my 

 early boyhood. There is a class of rivers in the South that rise and run 

 entirely in the cretaceous and tertiary sands, and the water is always 

 comparatively clear, but is sometimes stained a dark color with vege- 

 tation. A local name for such streams is Black River, Black Creek, &c. 



These streams abound with fifeh, being famous for shad and all the 

 common fresh-water fish. 1 will mention a few of them in Soath Caro- 

 lina and Georgia: Little Pedee, Waccamaw, Lynch's Creek, Black 

 Creek, Catfish Creek, Black River, the Edisto (with its tributaries, 

 Ashley, Cooper, Combahee, Salkehatchie, &c.) in South Carolina; the 

 Ogeechec, Ohoopee, and Satilla (with its numerous tributaries) in 

 Georgia. These are all clear-water streams, as contradistinguished 

 from the Santee, Pedee, Savannah, and Altamaha Rivers, which are all 

 large, long, muddy rivers rising in the Blue Ridge countrj^ and flowing 

 over the clay slates of the metamorphic region. 



Now I am informed that the rockfish, or striped bass, is found in all 

 the clear-Avater streams enumerated, except the Satilla; 1 never heard 

 of any in that stream, but in some cases they have to go up these large 

 streams in order to get to the smaller clear streams, where they spawn. 

 The spawning season seems to be in April and May, but the fish stay 

 all summer and bite ravenously in October. They are caught in a few 

 favored localities all the summer, sometimes rising to the fly or bob in 

 the tributaries of the Pedee. They weigh sometimes as much as 40 

 ])ounds, one having been taken recently weighing 28 pounds. 



It seems tliat the; best point to get fish for spawning purposes is at 

 the mouth of the Little Pedee River, where it empties into the Great 

 Pedee above Georgetown, S. C. A Fish Conunission steamer could prob- 



