1232 
FOREST AND STREAM 
FUTURE OF SUNAPEE TROUT 
SAD RECORD OF AMERICA’S MOST BEAUTIFUL 
FISH OUTLINED BY A DISTINGUISHED AUTHORITY 
By John D. 
T HE writer has been asked so often during 
the past few summers why angling, once 
prodigal of results at his favorite Lake 
Sunapee, has become little more than a mere 
wetting of lines in a tenantless waste of waters, 
that he is minded to give a fearless answer once 
and for all through the columns of Forest and 
Stream. 
There is connected with the Lake Sunapee 
Protective Corporation, a committee on Fisher¬ 
ies, of which Dr. Kober of Washington is chair¬ 
man, and the undersigned is a member. The 
duty of this committee, according to the resolu¬ 
tion by which it was created, is to promote the 
interests of good angling at the lake, by planting 
game fishes, by securing the help of the govern¬ 
ment in the way of contributions of eggs and 
fry, and it has been empowered by the New 
Hampshire legislature to conduct operations at 
the hatchery on Pike Brook, which has a capacity 
for 1,000,000 eggs. 
But the work of this committee was rendered 
supererogatory by the founding about nine years 
ago of the Lake Sunapee Fishing Association 
and through the passage of fishery operations 
into government hands. The liliputian catches 
brought to basket during the past few seasons, 
especially this last summer, conspicuously attest 
the unenlightened efforts of these two factors. 
The question is constantly asked—Why is the 
fishing so poor at Sunapee? Formerly the query 
was—Why is it so good? The answer points 
with the stretched forefinger of a century to 
Man, the insensate disturber of natural condi¬ 
tions—the selfish, irrational, time-serving de¬ 
stroyer of our ferae naturae, and at this lake 
the equally ignorant and irrational promoter of 
the restoration of our fish fauna. 
The reasons why fishing has degenerated so 
noticeably at the lake are manifold. Let us be¬ 
gin with the salmon and trout. In 1883, the 
writer indorsed and financed an effort to re¬ 
stock this lake with brook trout, and to add land¬ 
locked salmon fishing to its attractions for the 
angler. Under the able management of Colonel 
Elliot B. Hodge, the New Hampshire commis¬ 
sioner, advised by Dr. Tarleton H. Bean, Charles 
Hallock, quondam editor of Forest and Stream, 
and A. Nelson Cheney, acknowledged as an 
authority the world over, fish culture became a 
pronounced success, and in six or seven years’ 
operations, during the course of which the 
white trout was discovered in the lake and ac¬ 
cepted as an autochthon, the waters of Sunapee 
became abundantly stocked with game fishes^ 
and angling was a celestial pastime. I 
I have seen fall to a single rod in one day 
forty-five pounds of ouananiche and trout, the 
largest being a land-locked salmon of eight 
pounds and the smallest a three-pound aureolus. 
In the late eighties and early nineties, the veriest 
tyro could capture his big salmonid. No one 
who devoted himself persistently to the sport 
went unrewarded. At the hatchery camp in Sep¬ 
tember I have helped remove from the state nets 
six- and 8-pound land-locked salmon that gilled 
so fast we had to take in the seines from the 
sheer inability to care for the captives. 
Why was this abundance? Because the streams, 
the natural breeding and growing habitats of the 
young fry and fingerlings, were cared for by a 
man whom all outlaws justly feared, who was 
never known to fish the brooks he closed, nor 
eat a fish that died in the nets or was illegally 
Quackenbos. 
taken. All honor to him. I have watched him 
sit up all night to bathe in a salt solution and 
hold in an upright position a sick or injured 
salmon. But with the passing of Colonel Hodge, 
there arose a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, 
and by Joseph I mean metaphorically, skill and 
sincerity in the prosecution of fish culture opera¬ 
tions. 
Under the new dynasty, things changed. In¬ 
competents were employed to take and strip the 
fish. Politics prevailed over principle. Servitors 
the worse for liquor, ignorant of the fact that 
they were dealing with shotten fish, sought to 
Dr. John D. Quackenbos. 
strip salmon that had cast their eggs in the 
state tanks, and using such violence that death 
to each female was unescapable. 
The late A. N. Cheney, fish culturist of the 
state of New York, and other attaches of the 
fish commission of the Empire State, who wit¬ 
nessed this bungling, took me aside and in right¬ 
eous protest insisted that every male and female 
fish handled by these brutal accoucheurs had to 
die—there was no alternative, no possible es¬ 
cape. Besides the violence to ovarian sac and 
weakened pelvic organs, the natural protecting 
slime, by ruthless handling, was removed from 
the body of the fish and the corroding fungus 
known as saprolegnia ferox, at once attacked 
the denuded spots, eating out the life. 
For twenty years, at least 500 spawning fish, 
varying in size from one to nineteen pounds 
(figures from records) and representing three 
varieties of salmonidae, were annually destroyed 
in this manner. I have seen numerous brook 
trout weighing over six pounds, and one seven 
and a half pounds, thus doomed to a useless and 
ignominious death. Furthermore, it was a prac¬ 
tice of these devil-may-cares to mingle the dif¬ 
ferent varieties of milt and spawn, thereby filling 
the waters with infertile hybrids, beautiful to 
look at, but cursed with the sterility of the mule, 
and set at liberty to interbreed with the pure 
stock of white trout, and so spread everywhere 
the taint of barrenness. The devil himself could 
not have devised a surer method of extermina¬ 
tion. 
And we are wondering why the land-locked 
salmon is extinct, and why there are so few 
large white trout left, when at least 10,000 adult 
breeding fish of this rare species are known to 
have been brutally murdered on their bridal beds 
or thrown, leprosy-rid and helpless, into the 
sluggish estuary to leave their bones to blanch 
upon the shores of the receding pool—this Prince 
of all our Charrs 1 
I once loved to epithalamize, but I can no 
longer sing their nuptial songs, for the glistening 
hordes that inspired them belong to other days. 
For fifty years before I saw the lake, the big 
square-tails were clubbed to death on my sand 
beach by the natives, or pitchforked in the brook 
to fill their salt barrels—ignoble ending of lives 
we love so well, of lives united in the glows of 
love and heedless of the instinct of self-protec¬ 
tion. I have records of brook trout taken from 
Lake Sunapee that weighed ten pounds, of a 
double on hook and line of seven and eight 
pounds respectively, and fi*om the lips of Mr. 
Stickney of George’s Mills, a veteran of the war 
of 1812, I learned of one he had weighed, that 
tipped the scale at twelve pounds! 
Sunapee is thus capable of raising brook trout 
* up to the record limit, but man has intervened. 
He wanted them all at once, as he wanted the 
wild pigeon by the train load, and the buffalo by 
the thousand, and the wild turkey, and every¬ 
thing else that runs, or flies or swims—as he 
wanted the forests that determine our water 
supply, the life of our trout streams, and our 
very climate. I heard one monster whose boat 
bottom was strewn with dried bass six inches 
long, when expostulated with, proclaim his 
policy: “I calculate to kill everything that bites.” 
It would be impossible for me to lift such a 
being to the level of my contempt. 
Stop a moment and consider why Lake Suna¬ 
pee is what we see it to-day. The black bass is 
responsible for its development into one of the 
most popular resorts in the country. This fish, 
which Dr. Henshall said, inch for inch and pound 
for pound, is the gamest fish that swims, was 
introduced from Lake Champlain in 1868. It 
found appropriate conditions, multiplied rapidly, 
destroyed the two great enemies of the white 
trout—the 1 ' yellow perch and the miller’s thumb— 
and so saved this grand fish from practical exter¬ 
mination. Its fame brought to this lake men of 
means and culture; and if you look about the 
shores, you will see their monument in a hun¬ 
dred palatial summer homes. 
Now, what return has been made to this sa¬ 
viour of Sunapee the Old and Creator of Suna¬ 
pee the New—this ender of the law of infe¬ 
cundity and the beginner of the gospel of ang¬ 
ling here? For a quarter century it was lawful 
to take it on the spawning beds, and untold mul¬ 
titudes of gravid fish or parents guarding their 
young have been inhumanly slaughtered. There 
is not one bass in the lake to-day where there 
were one hundred when I first came there to 
live the summer through in 1878; and the sum¬ 
mer residents who pay taxes on a million 
dollars’ worth of property pre-eminently enjoy 
catching this fish for the sport it affords and for 
its table qualities. It is absolutely innocent of 
(Continued on page 1263) 
