646 HISTORY AND METHODS OF THE FISHERIES. 
committee of the Wyoming Historical and 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 River. j 
REPORT OF A COMMITTEE OF THE WYOMING HISTORIOAL AND GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY ON THE 
EARLY SHAD-FISHERIES OF THE NORTH BRANOH OF THE SUSQUEHANNA RIVER. 
Prof. SPENCER F. BAIRD, 
United States Commissioner of Fisheries : 
Str: 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 archzologists, 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 vertebra 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. 4 
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 Pennamites. 
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 Pennamites, 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. 
