40 Fish, Fishing and Fisheries of Pennsylvania. 



expected to fiud this opening' through which they would endeavor to 

 pass up. If they failed in the first few trials they would naturally seek 

 the eddies in the recesses at the sides of the sluices where they would 

 gather strength for a new trial. 



It was soon recognized that this fishway was a failure and abandoned, 

 the weak point being that the fish met the greatest resistance at the 

 top where they were expected to enter the dam, when they were in their 

 most exhausted condition. 



Notwithstanding this laudable effort on the part of the state to 

 improve the fishing, residents on the Susquehanna, especially in the 

 neighborhood of the Columbia dam, did all they could to make the 

 work abortive by using every device, however unfair, which came in 

 their way to catch shad. The legislature then passed a law, in 1868, 

 making it unlawful .to fish with any seine or by any other system of 

 entrapping- in numbers within two hundred yards of any sluice or other 

 device erected for the passage of fish as described in the act, or upon or 

 about any dam in or upon which such sluice shall have been erected. 



"Yet," says Mr. Worrall in his report of 1870, "regularly as the 

 spring comes round, there are dip nets worked by sweeps, like well 

 sweeps, at every few rods, kept in operation perpetually during- the 

 whole twenty-four hours in front of the Columbia dam, rising out of 

 and falling into the reacting water of the dam as it falls over its face. 

 These dip nets are used for catching mullets, their very operation pre- 

 cluding the possibility of catching shad in them, for their intermittent 

 motion has a tendency, nay is absolutely certain to scare away those 

 timid fish from the face of the dam. 



"Ten or a dozen such machines working night and day, in a row, in 

 front of the dam and in its reaction water, at distances not more than 

 six or eight rods apart, effectually stop the approach of the fish to the 

 dam to seek a means of passing through it. It is well known that the 

 shad upon reaching the dam rose along in front of it, in the reaction, 

 seeking some opposing current against which it is their instinct to 

 propel themselves. But interrupted as they are by this constant rising- 

 and falling of these great dip nets, ten or twelve feet square, the timid 

 fish are baffled and driven away." 



Nothwithstanding that this first effort to restore the Susquehanna 

 fisheries was esteemed a failure, there were enoug-h elements of success 

 to afford encouragement to persevere. An act was therefore passed and 

 signed, April 29, 1873, providing for the establishment of a fish com- 

 mission of three persons, in order that the work of restoration might be 

 the more systematically carried out. They were given extensive pow- 

 ers, and an appropriation. The three commissioners chosen under this 

 act were Howard I. Reeder, Benjamin L. Hewit and James Duffy. They 

 made a very careful study of the situation as it then existed and came 

 to the conclusion that the deterioration was due principally to the fol- 



