Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783–1933

5. A. Booth and Company Bids for Great Lakes Dominance

5 A. Booth and Company Bids for Great Lakes Dominance There Were No Wealthy Fishermen Among the Great Lakes wholesale fish dealers in the United States and Canada, the entrepreneur with the grandest vision of how the industry should be organized was Alfred Booth, an English-born Chicago merchant . The labors of his lifetime culminated in 1898 with the organization of "The New Fishery Trust" as the New York Times called it, formally A. Booth and Company, a $5.5 million "consolidation of the principal fisheries of the great lakes." 1 An examination of this leading business among the Great Lakes wholesale fish dealers provides valuable insights into the workings of the commercial-fishing industry, particularly the ways in which the dealers functioned, related to the fish resource, wielded their influence to control fishermen and policy makers, and applied their organizing skills to maximize profits in a highly competitive industry. Beyond these perspectives, the Booth company's business history suggests how its operations affected the fish resources of the Great Lakes and how its large presence in Canadian waters exasperated and troubled many Canadians and the Canadian government. Such information is hard 59 PART I. COMMERCIAL FISHING, r800-r893 to come by, for few nineteenth-century dealers' records remain. The Booth company's records, too, apparently have been destroyed. Yet enough bits and pieces from American and Canadian documents, court records, newspapers, a smattering of company publications, and a variety of nineteenth-century Chicago business directories, social registers, histories , and biographical albums remain to provide a small but significant body of knowledge about the company's operations on the Great Lakes. In addition, the wealthy and influential Booth served on innumerable committees and commissions, and, as a result, the press quoted him from time to time. At the request of the American Field, he wrote a series of articles for its November 1885 issues, stating his ideas about the resource, the fishermen, and fishery policy. EARLY YEARS IN CHICAGO Born in Glastonbury, England, Alfred Booth migrated to the United States in 1848, at the age oftwenty. After living briefly near Kenosha, Wisconsin , he moved to Chicago. In 1850, on the eve of the city's great commercial expansion, he opened a small store and traded in fish and vegetables. Before the Panic of 1857, the business had moved to more up-scale quarters , a twenty- by forty-foot three-story brick building at the corner of Dearborn and Madison Streets. If, as legend has it, he began by buying fish from Lake Michigan fishermen and distributing them through the streets of Chicago on a cart, then seven years wrought a wonderful change in his business fortunes. A picture taken on opening day in front of the new store shows him in a high hat, surveying the new quarters and four small, horse-drawn delivery wagons parked in front. His first two decades in business paralleled the early period of notable growth in the Great Lakes commercial-fishing industry. Without question, Booth had embarked in the food supply business in Chicago at a very auspicious time. Following the city's commercial growth in the 1850s came the economic stimulus of the Civil War. Ambitious, successful, hard driving, and considered by some "a clever fine fellow," Booth thought big about the future of the wholesale food industry. Commercial ratings show his business with a capital of $8,000 to $10,000 in 1862. By 1871, it had moved into the $100,000 to $250,000 rating category. By 1883, A. Booth and Sonsas the firm became known when Booth's sons, Alfred B. and William, acquired partnership interests in 1880-had risen into the next bracket: $300,000 to $500,000. The company showed a consistently good credit rating from 1859 to 1897.2 Before 1871, Booth had acquired several operating locations in Chicago . His investments grew to include a salmon-canning operation on the 60 A. Booth and Company Bids for Dominance Sacramento River in California and the properties of an East Coast oyster merchant, D. D. Mallory. Whatever the precise sequence of growth, in 1885 A. Booth and Sons could portray the company empire in an elaborate letterhead showing the oyster-packing house in Baltimore; the salmon canneries in Astoria, Oregon; and the impressive four-story headquarters at Lake and State Streets in Chicago, and could list no fewer than twelve major locations of company activity, including St...