PREHISTORIC STRUCTURES CONNECTED WITH FISHING. 203 



serve some important j^urpose is evident from the great labor involved in its 

 construction. To a nomadic people, accustomed to depend almost entirely on the 

 uncertainties of the chase for support, the question of food for use in their war- 

 like expeditions was of the first consequence. 



" Now, the plan pursued b}^ the Iroquois in hunting deer and other wild 

 animals, as described by a Jesuit missionary, Father Brule, who lived among 

 them in the seventeenth century, was as follows : — 



'On the borders of a neighboring river twenty-five of the Indians had been 

 busied ten days in preparing for their annual deer-hunt. They planted posts 

 interlaced with boughs in two straight, converging lines, each extending more 

 than half a mile through forests and swamps. At the angle where they met 

 was made a strong enclosure, like a pound. At dawn of day the hunters spread 

 themselves through the Avoods, and advanced with shouts and clattering of 

 sticks, driving the deer before them into the enclosure, where others lay in wait 

 to dispatch them Avith arrows and spears.' 



" Our belief, therefore, is that the same plan was followed by the builders 

 of the work in the taking of fish, and that this enclosure was designed simply 

 as an immense trap in which to catch large quantities of that game, to be after- 

 ward smoked and laid aside for the year's food. It is a well-known fact that in 

 colonial times, before the mills and dams were erected at Schuylerville by Gen- 

 eral Philip Schuyler in 1760, herring and shad in enormous shoals were in the 

 habit of running in the spring up the Hudson into Fish Creek (hence the name), 

 and thence through Saratoga Lake and the Kayaderosseras Creek even to Rock 

 City Falls.* At this season of the year the swamp along the sides of the creek 

 is overflowed to the depth of several feet. Is it then not possible, pi'obable 

 even, that the Indians at this time of the year, in their canoes, beat the creek, 

 until, approaching nearer and nearer, large quantities of herring and shad would 

 be driven through the gap in the wall into the enclosure ? And this appears the 

 more reasonable when it is remembered that fish, season after season, have their 

 'run-ways' as well as deer. Observation had shown the Indians that the fish, 

 at this part of the creek, came across from the north to the south bank ; and 

 hence the opening left directly opposite this angle of the stream — thus affording 

 the more easy driving of the fish into the enclosure. Then having driven the 

 fish into this immense 'eel-pot' and closed the gap with brush, they could at 

 their convenience either scoop them up, or, awaiting the subsidence of the water, 

 capture the fish, thus left high and dry, an easy prize. 



* Mr. Henry Wagman, of Old Saratoga, informs me that when his grandmother (one of the very earliest 

 settlers) first came into the country, she and her neighbors were in the habit of scooping up in their aprons out of 

 Fish Creek quantities of those fish. 



