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

2. Lake Ontario Salmon in an Early Agricultural-Commercial Economy

2 Lake Ontario Salmon in an Early Agricultural-Commercial Economy The Murder on the Spawning Grounds The salmon of Lake Ontario (Salmo salar), a landlocked Atlantic salmon, are unique in the annals of Great Lakes commercial fishing. Prized as food and environmentally very sensitive, they survived settlement and development for only a short time, becoming the first of the large commercial species to be decimated (figure 2.1). Legislators in Canada and the United States made them the first target for regulation in the early nineteenth century. Contemporaries left for posterity a larger store of recorded information about Salmo salar and their relationship to humans than about any other species in the Great Lakes. In the process, they delineated the ways in which both Indians and Euro-Americans living around Lake Ontario made the transition from subsistence to commercial fishing, a change that is extremely difficult to document. Finally, the early destruction of the Atlantic salmon is the most dramatic and devastating example of the impact of environmental change and commercial fishing on Great Lakes species during the nineteenth century, containing most of the elements of the general scenario of decline that followed. Long an important food for the Indians of the Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence drainage basin, salmon nurtured the French in the seventeenth cen19 PART I. COMMERCIAL FISHING, 1800-1893 Figure 2.1. Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar). (From Ontario, Sessional Papers, 1892, no. 79, pI. 19) tury and subsequent Europeans in the wilderness. During the wilderness and pioneering era, by all accounts, salmon abounded in the lower St. Lawrence and its tributaries. Above the tide line at Trois Rivieres, Quebec , they frequented the St. Francis River and via the Richelieu made their way into Lake Champlain. Caught at Cape Vincent, Chaumont, and Kingston at the juncture of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, they ascended the rivers flowing into the Bay of Quinte, including the Salmon. To the west along the northern shore of Lake Ontario every fall at spawning time, they jostled and crowded into the Don, Humber, Rouge, and Credit Rivers until their waters were literally alive. They sought the clear, cool gravel-bottomed shallows of lesser streams and creeks as well. Fishers found large numbers of salmon in Toronto and Burlington Bays. Artist Paul Kane watched fishermen take them by torchlight and spear in Toronto Bay during his youth in the early nineteenth century. Along the southern shore of Lake Ontario, the Salmon, Oswego, and Genesee were major salmon rivers. As on the northern shore, minor streams tributary to the lake furnished spawning beds. The Niagara River lacked such places, and the falls deterred the fish from moving into Lake Erie.1 What manner of fish population was this: the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) or a close relative? How extensive was its population? What were the lake salmon's physical characteristics, life-cycle patterns, and habitat needs? Relying on the writings of those who knew the salmon of Lake Ontario, from the Jesuits of the seventeenth century to the settlerdevelopers of the nineteenth, a reasonably accurate image can be created. For want of an actual count of Lake Ontario's salmon population, consider the clues left by a number of early-nineteenth-century travelers and residents. They recounted that, on both the northern and southern shores of Lake Ontario, spawners swarmed up rivers and creeks in such numbers that settlers could catch them without fishing gear. The Superintendent of Fisheries for Upper Canada stated in a report written in 1859: 20 Lake Ontario Salmon "I have seen them from 1812 to 1815, swarming the rivers so thickly, that they were thrown out with a shovel, and even with the hand." A fish dealer in Pulaski, New York, on the Salmon River, whose fishing experience there spanned the years 1825 to 1880, told of two fishermen having caught 230 salmon in four hours one night in October 1836, while two others pulled in 200: "Twelve skiffs in one night have taken an average of three hundred Salmon each." During his fishing experience, he noted, "we have had fifteen hundred fresh Salmon in the fish-house at one time."2 Silas Davis, a settler in Mexico Township, Oswego County, New York, recalled how every autumn his family would catch fifteen to twenty barrels of salmon. B. E. Ingersoll of Oswego, New York, told investigating commissioners of the Canadian and United States governments that his father...