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6 Fishers ofthe Great Lakes 1850-1893 They Doubly Earn Every Dollar Key to understanding how human activity affected the Great Lakes fish population are the fishermen and their families, those people in closest daily contact with the resource and dependent on it for a livelihood. The fishermen were legendary for their love of independence and their hard labor on the water, whatever the weather. They engaged the forces of nature in a struggle to make a living from the lakes' bountiful supply of fish, which was free for the taking if the will, daring, sense of adventure, discipline, ingenuity, and endurance to face physical hardships and uncertain results year in and year out were theirs. These qualities were the stuff of the fishermen's self-image, revealed in reminiscences and stories of their routine work and not-so-routine times of peril on the Great Lakes.' Nineteenth-century fishers told many tales of harrowing escapes from death on stormy waters, from drowning when the ice broke up, and from nearly freezing to death in sudden late-autumn cold. One good example appeared in the Ashland [Wisconsin] Press on November 30, 1872, involving the Boutins, a prominent fishing family in Bayfield, Wisconsin, and formerly of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan. Benjamin Boutin told the editor about a harrowing trip from Duluth to Bayfield in a Mackinaw boat loaded with "gill nets, camp equipment, and his family ." All was well when they set sail, but near Bark Pointe Bay, "the wind 74 Fishers of the Great Lakes shifted to northeast, creating a heavy sea, compelling him to throw a portion of his load overboard, to keep the boat from swamping." Unable to ride the heavy swells, he made a run for the beach and landed the boat safely, but "full of water and everything in it wet through, the weather cold and ice making fast and his children nearly frozen." Thus began five miserable days on a windswept island in the midst of a blizzard with only a few pounds of sugar to sustain them. Finally, when the family was nearly starved, the storm ceased and they sailed home in a few hours. Concluded the editor of the Ashland Press, "Such is a fisherman's life. They doubly earn every dollar received for their labor."2 Bravery, daring, great physical strength, resourcefulness, and skill were the personal qualities the fishermen projected in accounts of life on the inland seas. To many, it was a way of life they loved as well as a livelihood. It had no equal. While fishermen's accounts of their adventures on the Great Lakes glorified and enriched their lives, for most the bottom line remained: fishing to make a living. Nineteenth-century fishermen left relatively few personal records relating to their work, yet a variety of contemporary materials help reveal who they were, why and how they fished, and what they earned for their efforts. They also help explain their attitudes toward the resource and the way a changing economic structure of the industry and an unregulated, unprotected market affected fish and fishers. Most fishers working the boats and nets on Great Lakes waters in the historic period down to the present have been men, yet the tasks involved in harvesting the fish and preserving them for consumption or readying them for market sometimes were a team effort, involving men, women, and children. While women and children's work cannot be quantified, vignettes of their labors emerge from diaries and government documents, contemporary writings, and the work of archaeologists and anthropologists . Indian women from the early pre-contact era on cleaned; smoked, dried, or otherwise preserved; and cooked the fish that the men harvested from the lakes, and the women's work included gathering the firewood needed for preserving and cooking. During the nineteenth century, when many full-time fishers lived around the lakes in family households, fishing was a family enterprise. The more close knit the family, the more its energies focused on fishing. For example, in the French settlement at Two Rivers, on Washington Island , Wisconsin, and in the community on Jones Island in Milwaukee, boys at an early age helped on the water while learning to fish. Mothers and daughters from diverse cultural backgrounds made nets and helped with the catch as needed as well as cared for a home and reared a new generation of fishers. In the many families who combined fishing and farming, women assisted with the fishery as...

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