86 SHAD FlfiHEUT COMMISSIOX 



and scoop tliem up. Very few are takeu by spear, they are so quick in movement. 

 Twenty years ago an officer taking some salmon fry north stopped and put them in a 

 brook below the village. I got some of the fish when grown. I saw the difference, 

 they were a bigger salmon. He put them in here to save them, they were weak and 

 dying. We get seventeen and eighteen pound fish, but they are exceptional, the gen- 

 eral run being nine and ten iwunds. I notice the he-fish with a hook -bill, coarser, 

 bigger and slimmer than the she-fish. They stay all the winter and go down in April, 

 black in colour and poor. They are black like the water, and unfit to eat. yet men will 

 catch and eat them. In June, the boy here got a salmon and got 25 cents for it. 

 Others sell for 50 cents and 75 cents. 



A. E. KiLLAM, iloNCTON Said, 40 years ago near Sandy Eace, below the old mill 

 salmon were got. I knew of twenty-four salmon got, one weighing 23 pounds. They 

 were all speared in a hole 10 feet deep and 25 feet across. It was a kind of a pot 

 washed oiit by the freshets. 



Officer J. A. Stee\'es added to his evidence the statement that in Petitcodiac 

 River, in the vicinity of Turtle Creek, four or five miles from the main river below 

 the dam there were numbers of little salmon not more than six or seven inches long. 



Twenty-sixth Sitting. 



EivERSiDE, X. B., October 7, 190S. 



At the sitting for taking evidence at Riverside, Professor Prince, Mr. S. F. ilor- 

 rison and Mr. SimoTi Melansou, commissioners, were present. The evidence given 

 was as follows : — 



Peter Carxwortii said that great quantities of shad were take.n at one time at 

 Alma and Waterside in weirs. Cod and salmon were taken when the weirs were set 

 early in the season in May. Shad were taken this year, 1908, in July and August, 

 and sold for 45 cents each to Mr. Robinson. There is a lake seven or eight miles up 

 the river here, viz., German lake, the water backs up there from the sea. Hence 

 muddy water goes into it at times. Whitefish were planted in it but they never 

 amounted to anything so far as can be seen. Sea trout ascend there. Salmon went 

 went tip the lake and up the streams emptying into the lake, but shad never went 

 there to spawn. Shad were formerly caught here and cod ; 1 ut the cod were not taken 

 care of, they were carted on to the land when I was a boy, 30 or 40 years ago. Only 

 one man fishes a weir at Alma for salmon. In 1907 there was a big catch of salmon, 

 but this year the catch was poor down at the cape. A man with a boat here tried for 

 shad, &c., but he got a few sea trout and gaspereau but no shad. 



W. Fletcher said that 37 years ago he remembered that plenty oi shad were taken 

 then. We could buy shad whenever we wanted them up to September. They were of 

 all sizes, none were very large and most were salted. There was one weir and the fol- 

 owing arrangement was carried out: — There were 100 owners and everybody had a 

 tide or two tides. I had one man with me and we all went out and built the weir, or 

 rather 25 or 30 men built it, but we all joined in a contract. Some of the partners 

 lived four or five miles away. The fish were hauled to Goshen. Elgin and traded there 

 for buckwheat. The price was $8 a barrel or 4 to 5 cents each. There were really 

 only 14 shares and each share had two tides, but it was divided and subdivided.. I 

 never saw spawn in the shad here in the weirs because the weirs were never put in 



