646 HISTOEY AND METHODS OF THE FISHERIES. 



committee of the Wyoming Historical aiul Geological Society, of which Mr. Harrison Wright was 

 chairman, has prepared and submitted the following very interesting report on the early shad- 

 fisheries of the North Branch of the Susquehanna Eiver. 



REPORT OF A COMMITTEE OP THE WYOMING HISTORICAL AND GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY ON TUT. 

 EARLY SHAD-FISHERIES OF THE NORTH BRANCH OF THE SUSQUEHANNA RIVER. 



Prof. SPENCER F. BAIRD, 



United States Commissioner of Fisheries : 



SIR: The committee of the Wyoming Historical and Geological Society, to whom your in- 

 quiries touching the old shad-fisheries on the North Branch of the Susquehanna were referred for 

 investigation, would respectfully report that they have interviewed, by letter or in person, a large 

 number of the old settlers, who either now live or formerly did live near the banks of the river, 

 and were calculated to be able to give the requisite information, and who were pleased to report. 

 These persons have, in nearly every instance, most cheerfully and at no little trouble furnished us 

 with the information asked. We make this acknowledgment for the reason that the parties to 

 whom application was made are necessarily far advanced in age, all with but one or two excep- 

 tions having seen their " three score years and ten," and to them it was no little labor to write out 

 their reminiscences of the early shad-fisheries. 



Besides these interviews, the records of the county, files of old newspapers, the numerous 

 printed histories of this section of country, have been consulted, and from these various sources 

 the data upon which this report is based have been gleaned. With these preliminary remarks let 

 us proceed to our report. 



HISTORY. There can be no doubt but that the Indians, for years before the white people 

 thought of settling at Wyoming, caught their shad there in large quantities ; their net-sinkers, 

 though they have for years been collected by archaeologists, are still very plenty, and can be found 

 anywhere on the flats along the river in quantities, and the fragments of pottery show unmistak- 

 able markings with the vertebrae of the shad ; these, together with the fact that the early settlers 

 saw the Indians catching shad in a seine made of bushes (called a bush-net), point to the fact that 

 shad on the North Branch were taken in quantities by the Indians. 



The Connecticut people who settled here over a hundred years ago had, in the very start, their 

 seines, and took the shad in numbers ; as near as we can learn they were the first white people 

 who seined the shad in the North Branch. 



During the thirty years' war which the Connecticut settlers had with the Pennsylvania Gov- 

 ernment for the possession of this valley of Wyoming, the shad supply was a great element of sub- 

 sistence ; for this, unlike the fields, barns, and granaries, could not be burned by the Peunamites. 

 An old settler says : " When we came back to the valley we found everything destroyed, and the 

 only thing we could find to eat were two dead shad picked up on the river shore ; these we cooked, 

 and a more delicious meal was never partaken of by either of us." One of the most bitter complaints 

 made against the Penukmites, in 1784, was that they had destroyed the seines. 



After the Revolutionary war had ended, and the troubles between the Pennsylvania claimants 

 and the Connecticut settlers had been quieted, the shad fisheries increased in numbers and value 

 yearly, until about the year 1830, when the dams and canal were finished and an end put to the 

 shad fisheries. 



RUN. It would appear, from the papers hereto attached, that the male fish preceded the 

 female fish by some eight to ten days in their ascent of the river, and between the ascent of the 

 former and that of the latter there was generally a perceptible rise in the river, and immediately 

 following it came the large roe-weighted females in great schools. 



