A PLAN FOR PROMOTING THE WHITEFISH PRODUCTION 
OF THE GREAT LAKES. 
& 
By FRANK N. CLARK, 
Superintendent United States Fisheries Station, Northville, Mich. 
a 
In preparing the following discussion I considered it desirable to eliminate 
as far as possible the complicated and tiresome statistical details which, in 
almost every paper of this nature, go to make up a great portion of its subject- 
matter. I believe that the interest of those who may be called upon later on to 
devise some effective means of increasing the supply of this greatest of all Amer- 
ican food fishes will be more easily aroused by demonstrating a simple and 
practicable solution of the problem. Some figures are necessary, of course, 
but in most instances I have made bold assertions of facts which I know to be 
true, and which I am going to take the liberty of asking my audience to accept 
for the truth. 
CONDITIONS OF THE FISHERY AND THEIR CAUSES, 
It is a universally conceded fact that in an early day when the forests of 
the states and provinces bordering upon the Great Lakes were for the most 
part still in their primitive splendor, when the rivers and streams emptying into 
these waters ran clear as crystal and when civilized man had not yet turned so 
extensively to the waters for his livelihood, whitefish were in very great abun- 
dance and were distributed in a wide range throughout the entire water system 
known as the Great Lakes. Even as late as from 1864 to 1870, as may be noted 
by reference to Mr. J. W. Milner’s report in the Bulletin of the United States 
Fish Commission for the year 1872, whitefish were present in such large numbers 
that during a single season it was not unusual for a fishing ground to yield from 
200 to 700 half barrels for each pound net in operation. In a long and very 
interesting conversation which I had a few years ago with a Mr. Woodward, 
who was then a very old man, I learned that sometime during the early fifties, 
while he was acting as a government surveyor and maintaining a camp at the 
mouth of the Thunder Bay River, his party caught more whitefish than it could 
use and took them all from the river itself. At the present time no whitefish 
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