THE FISHES OF THE LAKE OF THE WOODS AND 



CONNECTING WATERS. 



By Barton Warren Evermann and Homer Barker Latimer, 



Of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, Washington, D. C. 



The fish fauna of the Lake of the Woods and its tributary waters 

 is but little known. Very little faunal work has been done on those 

 waters. In 1894 Prof. Albert J. Woolman, then of Duluth, Minnesota, 

 now of Urbana, Illinois, and Prof. Ulysses O. Cox, then of the State 

 Normal School at Mankato, Minnesota, now of the Indiana State Nor- 

 mal School at Terre Haute, Indiana, spent several days on Lake of 

 the Woods, where they made the only considerable collections of fishes 

 that have ever been obtained in that region. These collections were 

 made under the direction of the Rathbun-Wakeham Joint Commis- 

 sion relative to the Preservation of the Fisheries in waters contiguous 

 to Canada and the United States. No formal report of the work 

 done by Woolman and Cox has been published. No list of the fishes 

 occurring in the Lake of the Woods has ever been printed. 



In August, 1908, and again in 1909, the International Fisheries 

 Commission visited Ramy Lake and Lake of the Woods and obtained 

 specimens of some of the food fishes as well as much valuable data 

 concerning the fisheries of those waters. 



In October, 1908, Dr. S. E. Meek, of the Field Museum of Natural 

 History, Chicago, visited Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake in 

 connection with the work of the International Fisheries Commission. 

 He collected a considerable number of specimens of the food fishes 

 and some information concerning the fisheries of those waters. These 

 collections and notes have been examined by the present writers, 

 who have also studied the Woolman and Cox collections (now in the 

 U. S. National Museum) and all other available material from that 



region. 



Our grateful thanks are due to Mr. Paul Marschalk, of Warroad, 

 and Capt. Arthur Jolmson, of Kenora, for valuable data regarding 

 the commercial fisheries of the Lake of the Woods. To their courtesy 

 we are indebted for most of the statistics of the fisheries, given in 

 this paper. 



Proceedings U. S. National Museum, Vol. 39— No. 1778. 



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