NATIONAL FISHERY CONGRESS. 249 



and Wood creeks, as well as other streams. A law enacted in 1801 provided that no 

 dams should be erected on streams flowing into Lakes Ontario, Erie, or Champlain to 

 prevent salmon from following their usual course up said streams, and when dams 

 were erected they should be provided with what are now called fishways, to enable the 

 fish to pass over the obstruction. There is every indication that the lawmakers of the 

 last of the last century and the first of this understood fully the value of the fish in 

 the waters of the State as food and threw every possible safeguard around them, but 

 there is no record of a law protecting salmon in the Hudson until 1771, when it was 

 enacted : 



Whereas it is thought that [if] the fish called salmon, which are very plenty in some of the 

 rivers and lakes in this and the neighboring colonies, were brought into Hudson's River, they would, 

 by spawning there, soon become numerous, to the great advantage of the public. 



And whereas a number of persons in the county of Albany propose to make the experiment and 

 defray the expense attending the same: In order that the good design may be more effectually 

 carried into execution, it is conceived necessary that a law should be passed for prohibiting the 

 taking and destroying the fish for a term of years. 



This act was signed by John, Earl of Duninore, and in less than a mouth after, 

 viz, April 2, 1771, the common council of Albany passed the following resolution: 

 " Resolved by this board, that a letter be sent to William Penturp for to come down 

 and agree with the corporation, if he can undertake to bring live salmons into Hudson's 

 River." There is no record, however, that anything was actually done under this 

 resolution to stock the Hudson with salmon. 



Samuel Latham Mitchill, professor of natural history in Columbia College, New 

 York, wrote in the Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New 

 York, in 1815: "There is no steady migration of salmon to this river. Though pains 

 have been taken to cherish the breed, salmon has never frequented the Hudson in any 

 other manner than as a stray." 



In 1857 Robert L. Pell, of Pelham, Ulster County, petitioned the legislature to 

 construct fishways in the Hudson, and offered to stock the river with salmon without 

 expense to the State. There is no evidence that the State accepted the proposal of 

 Mr. Pell, and certainly the fishways were not built. 



I believe it unnecessary to quote further from old records and laws to prove that 

 the Hudson River was not originally a natural salmon stream. The evidence is chiefly 

 of a negative character, but I am of the opinion that it is conclusive. 



What has been done to make the Hudson a salmon stream has been done within 

 the past twenty-five years, and I will rehearse the operations of the national and 

 State fish commissions to this end as briefly as possible. Beginning with 1873, and 

 continuing for three years after, the Fish Commission of New York planted in the 

 tributaries of the Hudson a quantity of fry of the Pacific salmon, hatched from eggs 

 furnished by the United States Fish Commission. Several hundred thousand fry 

 were planted, but so far as known, after going to sea as smolts, not a single fish 

 returned to the river, and this is true also of other plantings of this species of salmon 

 in other Atlantic coast rivers. 



In 1891 the late Col. Marshall McDonald, then United States Commissioner of 

 Fisheries, requested me to make an examination of some tributaries of the Upper 

 Hudson with a view to making a plant of yearling quinnat salmon. He was 

 thoroughly convinced that the attempt to stock the Atlantic rivers with the fry of 

 this fish was an abject failure, but at the Wytheville station of the Commission in 



