44 Fish^ Fishing and Fisheries of Pennsylvania. 



CHAPTER VII. 



WOKK OF EesTOEING THE ShAD FiSHEKIES. 



The condition of affairs in 1878 in the Susquehanna river was as fol- 

 lows: There were no new breaks in the Columbia dam by which shad 

 could pass up the river. There were, however, first, the state fishway, 

 about fifty feet wide, with a current through it about seven and three- 

 quarter miles per hour, second, the old company fishway, forty feet 

 wide at its mouth and twenty at its head, with a current about eight 

 and one-half miles an hour, and third, the navigation chute, forty feet 

 wide, with a current of from five to seven miles an hour through it, but 

 much longer than either of the others. Besides these there were two 

 old breaks, one within three hundred feet of the York county shore, and 

 one within about one thousand feet of the same shore; the first was 

 thirty-five feet wide, the other twenty feet across, and both extended to 

 the bottom of the river. Through these openings numbers of shad 

 passed, but not in satisfactory quantity, though doubtless more would 

 have done so had it not been for the persistence with which the avari- 

 cious fishermen defied the law and cast their nets continuously before 

 the lower opening, frightening the timid fish away. But as the com- 

 missioners at the time put it, "the average fisherman thinks that his 

 right is one of the original inalienable rights of the Declaration of In- 

 dependence, the greatest indeed of them all, and he respects no statute 

 that impedes his operations." 



Thus while the commissioners were doing their best to restore the 

 shad fisheries, a largo per centage of the people who lived along the 

 streams were actively practicing that peculiar policy, the fiindamental 

 principle of which is that to secure the greatest number of eggs in the 

 shortest space of time, kill the hens. No wonder there was a discour- 

 aging ring in the report of the commissioners of fisheries in the early 

 days of their work, and that their cry year after year to the legislature, 

 " abolish fishing within half a mile of the Columbia dam ; increase the 

 openings of the fish-ways ; abolish the fish-baskets and punish the own- 

 ers," was pathetic. 



In 1879 the fish commission was enlarged by the addition of three 

 members, John Hiunmell, of Selinsgrove ; Eobert Dalzel, of Pittsburg, 

 and G. M. Miller, of Wilkes-Barre. The legislature at the same time 

 authorized the commission to extend the experiment of fish-ways in the 

 Columbia dam. Plans and proposals were therefore invited by adver- 

 tisements in the Harrisburg papers and several were submitted on 

 June 28, the day named, and models were ordered to be put in trial on 



