NATIONAL FISHERY CONGRESS. 
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and Wood creeks, as well as other streams. A law enacted in 1801 provided that no 
dams should be erected on streams flowing into Lakes Ontario, Erie, or Champlain to 
prevent salmon from following their usual course up said streams, and when dams 
were erected they should be provided with what are now called flshways, to enable the 
fish to pass over the obstruction. There is every indication that the lawmakers of the 
last of the last century and the first of this understood fully the value of the fish in 
the waters of the State as food and threw every possible safeguard around them, but 
there is no record of a law protecting salmon in the Hudson until 1771, when it was 
enacted : 
Whereas it is thought that [if] the fish called salmon, which are very plenty in some of the 
rivers and lakes in this and the neighboring colonies, were brought into Hudson’s River, they would, 
by spawning there, soon become numerous, to the great advantage of the public. 
And whereas a number of persons in the county of Albany propose to make the experiment and 
defray the expense attending the same : In order that the good design may be more effectually 
carried into execution, it is conceived necessary that a law should be passed for prohibiting the 
taking and destroying the fish for a term of years. 
This act was signed by John, Earl of Dunmore, and in less than a month after, 
viz, April 2, 1771, the common council of Albany passed the following resolution : 
“Resolved by this board, that a letter be sent to William Peiiturp for to come down 
and agree with the corporation, if he can undertake to bring live salmons into Hudson’s 
River.” There is no record, however, that anything was actually done under this 
resolution to stock the Hudson with salmon. 
Samuel Latham Mitchill, professor of natural history in Columbia College, New 
York, wrote in the Transactions of the Literary and Philosophical Society of New 
York, in 1815: “There is no steady migration of salmon to this river. Though pains 
have been taken to cherish the breed, salmon has never frequented the Hudson in any 
other manner than as a stray.” 
In 1857 Robert L. Pell, of Pelham, Ulster County, petitioned the legislature to 
construct flshways in the Hudson, and offered .to stock the river with salmon without 
expense to the State. There is no evidence that the State accepted the proposal of 
Mr. Pell, and certainly the fishways were not built. 
I believe it unnecessary to quote further from old records and laws to prove that 
the Hudson River was not originally a natural salmon stream. The evidence is chiefly 
of a negative character, but I am of the opinion that it is conclusive. 
What lias been done to make the Hudson a salmon stream has been done within 
the past twenty-five years, and I will rehearse the operations of the national and 
State fish commissions to this end as briefly as possible. Beginning with 1873, and 
continuing for three years after, the Fish Commission of New York planted in the 
tributaries of the Hudson a quantity of fry of the Pacific salmon, hatched from eggs 
furnished by the United States Fish Commission. Several hundred thousand fry 
were planted, but so far as known, after going to sea as smolts, not a single fish 
returned to the river, and this is true also of other plantings of this species of salmon 
in other Atlantic coast rivers. 
In 1891 the late Col. Marshall McDonald, then United States Commissioner of 
Fisheries, requested me to make an examination of some tributaries of the Upper 
Hudson with a view to making a plant of yearling quinnat salmon. He was 
thoroughly convinced that the attempt to stock the Atlantic rivers with the fry of 
this fish was an abject failure, but at the Wytheville station of the Commission in 
