1B4 
has no interest in protecting riparian fishing from which 
it derives no revenue. In order to restore their fishing 
the club would have to protect the whole river above 
tideway, and this would cost more than it could afford 
and more than their sport is worth. Netting must be re- 
duced or the salmon is doomed to extinction. There was 
a fine run of salmon in the Miramichi this season, but you 
will see by the inclosed letter that none get up to the 
angling pools. I have had no report from the Restigouche 
anglers, and do not know what they are doing. The 
Nepisiquit Club do not fish their river this season. They 
have farmed out their waters to whoever will pay their 
price, and I understand the demand is brisk. Some of 
my friends could not get access to the river until August, 
when the cream of the fishing will have been skimmed.” 
Fish and Fishing. 
The Genesis of the Ouananiche. 
I MET a very intelligent party of American anglers the 
other day, who wanted to know from me all about the 
landlocking of the ouananiche in Lake St. John. The 
guides had assured them that the fish were actually land- 
locked salmon, but that was all that they could tell them 
about their origin, and the fishermen naturally wanted 
to know how they could possibly be landlocked in water 
that communicated as closely with the ocean as the ma- 
jority of our inland salmon rivers do. In the course of 
our talk on the subject the promise was exacted from me 
that I would refer to this matter in an early number of 
Forest and Stream. I do so the more readily that I am 
constantly finding fresh evidences of widespread error 
concerning the origin of the fish. 
There is a pretty fiction of poetic fancy that the fight- 
ing ouananiche is the begotten of the salmon of the sea — 
the progeny of a superior and more highly developed 
form of organic life, and that for the mere love of a 
purer and sweeter home, it has renounced the fleshpots 
of the briny deep upon which its forefathers thrived and 
fattened from generation to generation, content itself 
to suffer physical deterioration and a deprivation of ease 
and comfort, for a life of constant struggle and heroic 
endeavor amid the sterner surroundings of a constant 
fresh water habitat. 
Another conception of the life history of this doughty 
warrior robs it of the glory of a voluntary exile from the 
salt water home and feeding grounds of its supposed pro- 
genitors, and attributes the continuity of its life in fresh 
water to causes entirely beyond its control. Hence, the 
theory of landlocking, promulgated by hasty and careless 
observers, and the contention that this fish has been shut 
out from the sea by some mighty upheaval of nature, 
until it has completely lost the habit of anadromy. 
These romantic suppositions of the genesis of the ouan- 
aniche, which traverse the actual facts and mistake for a 
comparatively modern development of Salmo scdar, that 
which is really its ancestral stock, are disproved alike 
by the revelations of paleontology and of modern geo- 
graphical research. 
It is exceedingly difificult to conceive how the serious 
investigator can really arrive at any other conclusion than 
that the ouananiche is the progenitor of the lordly salmon, 
and not, as is so often contended, its wayward child. 
Its age is uncertain, though it is doubtless older, by 
an eon or two, than the salmon of the sea, by which it 
is so often and so erroneously supposed to have been 
begotten. 
The lower or purely marine genera of the salmones 
were ushered into existence, together with other cycloids, 
in the cretaceous period contemporary with the deposit 
of organic remains in chalk formations ; existing fossils 
of these forms settling their geologic time beyond any 
question of doubt. These first salmonoids made their 
appearance myriads of ages before the time of the had- 
dock and the cod, and of even the earliest varieties of 
the Gadidse — the food fishes which now throng the At- 
lantic coast of North America. The fresh water salmon- 
idae, on the other hand, which, as hereafter shown, neces- 
sarily includes our Salmo salar, could neither have been 
created nor evolved very long before the appearance of 
man upon the earth, since none of their remains have 
been found in any of the fossils, not even among those 
of the post-tertiary or most recently formed rocks. They 
came into existence subsequently to the great glacial or 
pleistocene period of the world’s history, for a cold salt 
sea, similar to that which to-day washes the base of 
Greenland’s icy mountains, covered, at that time, all but 
the most elevated portions of the country now drained 
by the St. Lawrence, and it is a well known fact that in 
fresh water only are the salmon, the ouananiche, and 
the other more aristocratic of the salmones inhabiting the 
Atlantic slope of the North American temperate zone, 
capable of reproducing their kind. 
Finny Atistocrats. 
These salmonoids — which had not attained their culmi- 
nating point until the human period — -represent the high- 
est development of fish life. As corporeal man among 
the mammals, so are they among the fishes — the most 
strenuous of strugglers and most ambitious of rivals, 
whether in love or in war; keen of perception and fertile 
of resource — dexterous and cunning, animated by an un- 
daunted determination to overcome every obstacle in the 
battle of life, and constituting the highest types, each in' 
his own sphere, of physical perfection and beauty. 
The Salmo solar was originally a purely fresh water 
fish, whose anadromy is a comparatively modern acquisi- 
tion, is in harmony with the best modern ichthyological 
research. Mr. J. W. Willis Bund, chairman of the Severn 
Fishery Board, discredits the belief that the salmon is a 
sea fish, and that it only resorts to the fresh water to 
spawn, and points out in support of his theory that other 
migratory fish which live in the sea and ascend to the 
fresh water to breed are totally different in their habits 
from the salmon, in that they run up the rivers, breed at 
once and then return to the salt water. The most notable 
of these are the shad and the lamprey, which only re- 
main for a period of three weeks or a month in fresh 
water before spawning and returning to the sea. 
Prof. G. Brown Goode also inclined to the view that 
the natural habitat of the salmon is in the fresh water, 
and in support of it referred to the well known case of 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
the Stormontfield Ponds in Scotland, where salmon have 
thrived for years in the lakes in which they have been 
confined. _ The salmon of Lake Ontario, which were quite 
plentiful in the big inland sea and in most of its tribu- 
taries in the first half of the last century, doubtless re- 
mained there all the year round, as the ouananiche does 
in Lake St. John, and there is nothing to indicate that 
any of its progenitors had ever known a salt water habi- 
tat, or that after enjoying such a luxury, as the increased 
food supply of the sea would have there afforded them, 
they would later have contented themselves with a self- 
imposed exile in fresh water. 
Prof. Samuel Garman, of the Museum of Comparative 
Zoology_ at Cambridge, Mass., sees nothing by which to 
distinguish the ouananiche from the salmon of the sea, 
and takes Jhe fresh water individuals to be the better 
representatives of the species Salmo salar, thus grouping 
himself with those who regard the Atlantic salmon as 
originally but a fresh water fish, that has acquired the 
habit of wandering from the crystal Eden in which it was 
created, into the salt wilderness of the sea, for the pur- 
pose of indulging its voracious appetite upon the more 
abundant food supply there awaiting it. 
Those specimens of the original type which have re- 
mained in their early fresh water homes are the ouan- 
aniche or so-called landlocks. Their habitat is by no 
means so limited as was originally supposed. They are 
not only found in Lake St. John and its tributary waters 
and in several of the lakes of Maine, but also in New- 
foundland, in Norway and Sweden and in several of the 
rivers and lakes of the Labrador coast. In very few 
of these waters are they absolutely landlocked. 
The Swedish Landlocks. 
Lake Werner, in Sweden, affords one of the exceptions 
to the rule. The river by which its surplus waters find 
their way to the ocean has a waterfall quite impassable 
for any salmon from the sea. Mr. Samuel Wihnot, who 
saw some of the landlocks from this lake at the Inter- 
national Fisheries Exhibition in London in 1883, de- 
scribed them as “beautiful, bright, symmetrically formed 
salmon, ranging from 8 to 16 pounds, and identical in 
every particular with the Lake Ontario salmon of former 
years, with which,” he continues, “I have been familiar 
during the last sixty years, and great numbers of which 
I have taken with net and spear from a stream running 
through my own property, up which they ; came from 
Lake Ontario_ in the autumn months for the purpose of 
spawning; this Ontario salmon being the winniniche of 
Lake St. John, Province of Quebec, and of the Schoodic 
lakes in Maine.” 
The contention of some writers that the progenitors of 
Lake St. John’s ouananiche were imprisoned above an im- 
passable barrier at Chicoutimi by some upheaval of na- 
ture which prevented their return to salt water and 
transformed them from salmon of the sea into ouanan- 
iche, is now virtually abandoned. The most casual ex- 
amination of the waterway from Lake St. John to the 
sea proves the utter absurdity of such a proposition. 
Equally ridiculous is the assertion that the original 
ouananiche were enterprising emigrants from a former 
salt water environment, and voluntary settlers amid new 
surroundings — in other words, a colony of salmon from 
the sea, which, having ascended to fresh water and be- 
come satisfied with its depth and with the abundance of 
its food supply, concluded to secede from its oceanic do- 
main, and remaining in its new and congenial environ- 
rnent, founded there a kingdom of its own. The refuta- 
tion of this theory is furnished by the discovery of the 
ouananiche, both in Newfoundland and in Labrador, in 
fresh waters to which it could not possibly have ascended 
from the sea. As already shown, it had not yet sprung 
into existence when the geographical distribution of many 
other species of fish was so largely facilitated by the 
existence of the cold salt sea which overspread the 
greater part of the Atlantic' slope of what is now the 
Dominion of Canada, and in any case it could not have 
reproduced its kind under the then existing conditions, 
since its spawui does not survive exposure to salt water. 
There is therefore no other manner of accounting for 
the presence of the ouananiche in so many wild waters 
to which it could never have ascended from the ocean, 
than to accept the explanation to which all modem scien- 
tific investigation of the matter points, namely that the 
specimens found above the great falls of the Hamilton 
River and in other fresh water lakes and rivers of con- 
siderable elevation above the level of the sea, are not im- 
migrants or settlers from the salt water, but the natural 
inhabitants of the home of their earliest ancestors; while 
the emigrant is the salmon of the sea, who, when in salt 
water, is but a stranger and a sojourner as all his fathers 
were while there. 
A Large Maskiaonge. 
One of the largest maskinonge caught in Lake 
Deschenes, near Ottawa, in many a day, was recently 
killed by George Loveday. The fish measured four feet 
four and a half inches long and weighed 25 pounds. 
E. T. D. Chambers. 
Japanese Fisheries, 
In a note regarding the promotion of fishery trade be- 
tween the United States and Japan, Hugh M. Smith, 
Deputy Fish Commissioner, writes ; 
“The consumption of water products in Japan is enor- 
mous. Fish is not only the staple animal food in all 
parts of the empire, but is the only animal food that en- 
ters into the dietary of a very large proportion of the 
population. In no other country are so many persons 
engaged in fishing. In a total population of 50,000,000, 
3.000. 000 people are engaged in this industry, and fully 
10.000. 000 men, women and children are directly depen- 
dent on it. A large part of the catch is sold fresh, but' 
considerable quantities of certain species are smoked, 
dried, salted, canned or otherwise prepared. No> ice is 
employed in the preservation of fish. This, however, is 
not serious,, as the prosecution of fishing on all parts of 
the coast, the long- coast line, the shape of the islands' 
and the transportation facilities permit nearly the entire 
population to receive daily supplies of fresh fish in good 
condition.” 
[Aug. 19, 1905. 
Striped Bass at Octoraro. 
About ten years ago it became suddenly noised through- 
out New York and Pennsylvania that there was superb 
striped bass fishing at Octoraro, Md., and anglers rushed 
thither to find the most enthusiastic reports more than 
fulfilled. Curiously enough, a few anglers had known of 
the striped bass fishing at this point for many years and 
made no secret of the locality, one of them, the late 
Andrew M. Spangler, going so far as to publish the place 
in his little book entitled “Nearby Angling.” It remained 
for a New York sporting goods dealer to visit Octoraro 
and give it notoriety, and at the same time afford him 
an opportunity of advertising his really excellent blood 
worms. Lmtil Mr. Dirckes first trolled his blood worms 
through the great swifts in the Susquehanna, the ap- 
proved methods of catching striped bass were eel tail or 
shedder crabs, but eel tail, while it caught the largest fish, 
is not satisfying to. the man who fishes for numbers, or, 
indeed, tO’ the man who rows the boat for the fisherman, 
because he has to- row with just double the speed, and 
shedder crabs caught neither numbers nor large fish cer- 
tainly. Within two months after the anglers of New 
York city, Philadelphia and Baltimore discovered what 
a paradise for striped bass fishing there was at Octoraro, 
the place was ^crowded daily, and on Saturdays some- 
times_ as many as twelve and fourteen boats would be 
working one of the three great pools at the same time, 
pools which would only comfortably hold four or five 
boats and in which one, a few months previously, was 
rare. 
On the right bank of the river in Harford county, a 
comfortable little frame farm house nestles among great 
maple trees. It is occupied by a Mrs. Caldwell, and she, 
noting the influx of anglers, took some of them in. As 
her house is not very large, to the joy of the high class 
angler, at the outset, she refused to accept guests unless 
they were recommended by some of her patrons, or could 
successfully pass the ordeal of an examination at the 
hands of one of her brothers. But the guest once taken 
in, finds nothing to regret. _ There is a bountiful store of 
perfectly fresh food, exquisitely cooked, there are nice 
rooms, clean sheets, no mosquitoes, and what is j ust as 
important as anything else, Ella, a negro waiting maid 
whoni Mrs. Caldwell has brought up from childhood, as 
a waitress. To insure accommodations, it is always neces- 
sary to write to Mrs. Caldwell to her address, Shure’s 
Landing, Harford County, Md., at least one week before 
going._ On the other side of the river, in Cecil county, 
there is a house for the accommodation of anglers, kept 
by a skilled fisherman named Fred Irwin. The surround- 
ing country may be described as a miniature Switzerland. 
There are gorges, tumbling streams, winding roads, quaint 
little houses on the hillsides, and a general air of grand- 
ness and picturesqueness. 
The three great fishing pools are known variously as 
the Stop Locks, the Dutchman’s Pool and Mark Rock. 
There, wdaen the rvater is not too high or too muddy and 
in the right season, are to be found thousands upon thou- 
sands of striped bass weighing from 1^2 to- more than 
20 pounds each. The average fish which are caught run 
from 2^ to 5 pounds, although if it be a lucky day, nearly 
every boat will have at least one 12 or is-pounder to 
show. As far as I know, the heaviest fish caught at 
Octoraro weighed 271.4 pounds. 
Mark Rock pool begins at the foot of one of the many 
dangerous Susquehanna falls and is the largest of the 
group. The water runs through the middle of the pool at 
the rate of six or seven miles an hour, and is said to be 
from ten to fifteen feet deep. The second or Dutchman’s 
Pool is practically a continuation of Mark Rock Pool, be- 
ing separated from it only by a short shoal of less than 
200 feet. It is the deepest of the three pools and is only 
fishable when the waters in Mark Rock and Stop Lock are 
too low, and when, by excessive fishing in the upper and 
lower, the striped bass have been driven to the Dutch- 
man’s. It is directly opposite Mrs. Caldwell’s house and 
received its name in the following manner. About two 
weeks after the New York sporting goods dealer an- 
nounced the place, a foreign gentleman residing in Dela- 
ware went thither fishing, carrying with him a rod strong 
enough and stout enough to lift a porpoise, and a line 
which would have held a man-eating shark. Fishing was 
poor in both Stop Lock and Mark Rock on that day, and 
everyone said the pool opposite Mrs. Caldwell’s was no 
good for fish at any time. It happened in the afternoon 
on rowing in to the house that the foreign gentleman, who 
publicly avoAved himself to be a Dutchman, caught a 314- 
pound striped bass. The next morning, on coining in to 
breakfast he repeated the performance, and at noon he did 
the same thing. 'Whereupon, despite laughter on the pan 
of all the anglers and the boatmen and the protest of his 
own guide, he declared his intention of fishing the pool 
after dinner. He did, all the other fishermen going else- 
where. 'Within a couple of hours the half-sleepy anglers 
in the other pools heard a terrific shout, and seeking the 
cause, they found the foreign gentleman struggling with 
a huge striped bass. He was winding the reel with all 
his strength and the rod, stiff as it was, was bent nearly 
double. He shouted to the anglers who crowded up, “I 
cannot turn the reel !” In fact, the fish was pulling one 
way and he the other. Something' had to give way, and 
as the line and the man were the stronger, the fish sud- 
denly came out of the water with a leap and was promptly 
netted in the foreign gentleman’s boat. The fish weighed 
18 pounds. Everyone went fishing in the pool that after- 
noon and everyone caught large numbers of fish, and the 
pool, which afterward became a favorite, was thereafter 
known as the Dutchman’s Pool. 
The method employed for catching striped bass in the 
Susquehanna River at Octoraro is by means of trolling. 
A short rod, just stiff enough not to bend too much with 
the weight of _the_ long line and sinkers, etc., is the best, 
a rod, say, weighing from seven to nine ounces. Under 
no' circumstances take a sea-casting rod. as the angler 
AAull be de;prived of one-half his sport. The reel should 
be a multiplier and should contain at least 100 yards of 
line. While not necessary,- a three- foot double-gut leader 
is desirable, and the line should be of some dark color, 
green or brown. A rvhite line should never be used. To ’ 
the end of the line is attached one or two- trolling spoons 
from which the three-pronged hooks have been removed, 
and to the lower one, if two spoons are used, should be 
attached one or two single hooks, any size from 4-0 to 
