Sam said, “That color is like Coca-Cola.”
I said, “That color is like Pepsi-Cola.”
Sam said, “Don't mention Pepsi-Cola. This is a pretty spot.”
On a canoe trip in Canada, he once told his children and mine that if you were to pour Pepsi-Cola on the roots of a spruce it would kill it to the ground. His children's great-great-grandfather was the Atlanta pharmacist who developed the Coca-Cola Company.
In settings much like this cutbank under the high grasses on the St. Johns, Sam and I had been in the company of alligators. They had swum under us fast as torpedoes, fizzing like ginger ale. Once, in a skiff on a tidal creek at low water, Sam, standing up, was about to cast a shrimp net when the grasses parted above us. We were right up close to the bank, and its slick mud wall rose five, six feet above our heads, the tide was so low. An extremely large alligator suddenly appeared there, almost directly overhead. It came down the bank fast, went into the water beside the boat and swam off. This cutbank looked so much like the cutbank in the tidal creek that I was waiting for the grass to part. Alligators were there. They were all over the savannahs in the places we fished, Fred Cross later told me on the telephone. But they were not evident, in part because of the mid-winter coolness, and in part because Florida some ten years earlier had opened an alligator-hunting
season, allowing people with spears and gigs to kill them. He said, “The alligators have become a lot less aggressive. When they see a boat, they go into the grass and hide.”
More oranges were floating by, roughly at the rate of one orange per shad. You might have thought you were fishing in the Indian River. It occurred to me that someone reading this might think we were indeed on the Indian River, the two bodies of water being so nearly parallel and close. Deservedly celebrated for the high-sugar oranges that grow near it and eventually bear its name on their skins, the Indian River reaches a hundred and twenty miles from Turnbull Hummock above Cape Canaveral to St. Lucie Inlet near Palm Beach, and is in no sense a river. It is a tidal lagoonâa saltwater bay behind a barrier beach. Sam was outwitting another leaping buck. By now, we were down in the prime of Shad Alley, its principal thoroughfareâa mile and more with a very gentle bend, populated by half a dozen shad fishermen, who were all trolling in long oval loops, counterclockwise. We had caught the rhythm, and had joined them, catching fish. It was like group skating in a rink. The Alley was six or seven feet deep, with holes eight or ten. The shad were just downstream from sandbars. Now and again we cast, but mostly settled into the trolling modeâboth ways getting bumps, hits, and shad galore, losing many as well. Going round and roundâupriver, downâwe became familiar with the people in the other boats. They were of many ages, all male. One called out, in the universal jargon of piscine lust, “Are you killin' 'em?”
My fly rod and fly line were particularly effective as trolling devices, a setup Sam regarded as funny until he noticed that the fly rod more often was bent over than straight. The shad were surely hitting in the brightest light, which would not be the case in the north. I remembered reading a piece by Robert Elman in
Fly Fishing Quarterly
and have since looked it up. He said, “Slightly turbid water is ideal; very clear or muddy will curtail strikes. An
odd fact, which I can't explain, is that shad in Southern rivers hit well in bright sunlight, yet their Northern relatives hit best on overcast days, in light rain, early in the morning, or just before sunset.” With their extreme sensitivity to light, shad in Canada relish the turbidity of the Bay of Fundy. In Florida, evidently, they are protected and contented by the dark-hued water, as any shad would be in a river of Coca-Cola.
In scientific papers Fred Cross had given us, I had read that anglers on the St. Johns in the previous season spent four thousand seven hundred and sixty-four hours catching five thousand four hundred and thirty-four shad. Two-thirds came from the Shad Alley. The anglers released eighty-nine per cent, and kept about six hundred shad. One season in the nineteen-fifties, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initiated a creel census on the St. Johns, they discovered that sport fishermen caught sixty-five thousand two hundred and forty-six shad. There had once been a large commercial harvest. In Palatka, in 1875, a single gill net caught eleven thousand shad. The peak period was 1888 to 1908. The peak year was 1908, with two million eight hundred and thirty-three thousand netted shad. They were not sold locally. Most were shipped to New York's Fulton Fish Market. Gill nets were eventually banned, but not until the nineteen-nineties.
In all, we hooked up with three dozen shad in Shad Alley. We also fished in what Fred Cross had called the Puzzle Lake stretch, fifteen miles upstream from Shad Alley, where flats skiffs were not available. We unstrapped Sam's old Grumman canoe, started off from a boat launch beside a bridge, and paddled south into a scene as broad, spare, and open as the Shad Alley had been lush and confined. This was savannah on a far-reaching scale, widefloodplain river in Florida's expression of the termâa view, even from canoe level, two miles in one direction across panic grasses and bullwhips to cattle under hardwoods on enlofted ground, and in the other direction a mile to the nearest tree. The river was all
but lost in its own channels, islands, meanders, and braids. In all that open space, we had to hunt to find itâto choose channel over dead water, mainstream over slough, sometimes guessing the difference. Exactly like the migrating shad, we were trying above all to sense current, which in places was easy to do but in others was baffling, and we lacked their neural equipment. The speed of the current was less than a mile an hour. Eel grass helped, bent along the bottom, pointing. This vast, serene world just enveloped the canoe and sent us into a separate existence. We came to a fence line that Fred Cross had pencilled in on our map, and to the “real popular area” opposite, where the current curled against a strip of hard ground. Lacking an anchor, we tied up to some cattails at its downstream end.
Sam lost a somersaulting buck. Failing to land hooked shad may be a norm of shad fishing but Sam and I seemed to be particularly good at it. I netted two, but lost two more. I caught a largemouth bass, a crappie, and a blueback herringâall on small shad darts. I used the fly rod more than the spinning rod. I lost another shad right at the boat.
Losing a few fish was hardly in a league with what we lost now. The weekend had come, and, with it, squadrons of jet skis. They came up the river in echelonsâfour, now five, now sixâand bore down on us like Hornets, like F-18s strafing. We paddled hard for cover. They were harmless, of course, just “personal watercraft” flashing metallic colors, flown by sitting wetsuits. Materially, they changed nothing but the water in a temporary way, but in their sustained burst of decibels they deleted all serenity.
Then airboats came and outdecibeled the jet skis. Even from a mile away, off in the dead-water sloughs, the airboatsâwith their five-hundred-horsepower automotive engines, their fenced-in propellers whirling at supersonic speedsâmade a blitzkrieg of the whole savannah, the spoken word inaudible from bow to stern in a canoe. From the Everglades northward, the airboat is the Florida
state amphibian, its little brother the jet ski. It is said that when rain is plentiful, and water high, airboats coming down from Jacksonville could cross the north-south divide between St. Johns Marsh and Lake Kissimmee, and then continue to Key West. The peninsula emerged in the Pleistocene, when so much water was locked up as ice on the continents that sea level dropped a hundred fathoms. The sea has come back up a good way, but the glaciation in no small quantity remains on Greenland and Antarctica. When that melts, Florida is going back where it came from. On this eruptive day in the floodplain savannah, there was something to be said for global warming.
Later on, we moved downstream a mile or so to some firm ground close to the current. We beached the canoe. In knee-high boots, we walked along, casting from the bank. Jet skis in front of us, airboats behind us, we would make these casts and call it a day. A roe shad responded. She was no shadeen. She weighed about three and a half pounds.
Toward the end of afternoon, paddling north, we were passed by returning jet skiers, and, overhead, by crows on their way to roostâa ribbon galaxy of crows, three miles long. At the boat launch, the crowd was considerable. Up from the river we carried the canoe through a jam of pickups, SUVs, and boat trailers. After we set it down, a man with a Bronco, addressing me, asked, “How did you do?” It may be hard to say that without a smile, but it came across with a certain cumulus rumble. At first, nonetheless, I thought he was a fisherman. I said, “Fine. And how did you do?” Then I looked beside the Bronco and saw his jet ski. He had changed out of his wetsuit. Back there on the river, I may have seemed to have been signalling him with a part of one hand. He snarled: “I had fun.”
THE FOUNDING FISH
T
he Schuylkill rises northwest of Reading and flows about a hundred miles before it bends right to run closely parallel to the Delaware River, framing the old city of PhiladelphiaâIndependence Hall, the tree streets, etceteraâin a mesopotamian isthmus. At Long Ford on the Schuylkill, near Valley Forge, settlers in the early seventeen-hundreds fenced the river in various ways to intercept the spring migration of American shad. They constructed rock dams, V-shaped weirs of piled stones, and fish racks. A rack was an underwater picket fence with gaps narrow enough to stop shad and wide enough to accommodate the current. Shad piled up against the racks like driftwood. Shad that got past the racks were driven back into them by men on horseback beating the water with bushes. Weir, rack, or fish dam, the methods were so effective that farmers upstream complained. Fresh shad in spring and salt shad the rest of the year were basics in a farm's economy. In 1724 and 1730, the colonial legislature passed acts forbidding such obstructions and calling for removal of the ones that existed. The fishermen of Long Ford ignored these laws. Meanwhile, the settlements upriver had even greater cause for grievance than deprivation of fish. Coming downstream in loaded canoes heading for the markets of Philadelphia, they were swept into the weirs, racks, and dams. Here are some examples just from 1732. Isaac Smally and partner, with a hundred and forty bushels of wheat in their canoe,
“stroke fast on a Rack Dam and in order to save ye Load from being all lost, he was much against his mind oblieged to leap into ye River, the water being to his Chin frequently dashed into his mouth, where between whiles he breathed, and both he and his partner held ye Canoe with great labour: whiles a young man there present ran above a mile to call help to gett off.” Marcus Huling “striking on a fish dam ⦠took in a great deal of water into ye wheat, by means whereof his wheat was much damnified.” In the “Extream Cold” of February, Jonas Jones “stroke fast on a fish Dam, and to save his Load of wheat was obliged to leap into ye River to ye middle of his body and with all his Labour and Skill could not get off in less than half an hour, afterwards proceeding on his journey with ye said wet cloaths they were frozen stiff on his back.”
Across the seventeen-thirties, similar things happened to the freight-laden canoes of Jacob Warren, Walter Campbell, Jonas Yeokam, Richard Dunklin, George Boone, James Boone, John Boone, Joseph Boone, and Samuel Boone. All lived upriver from Long Ford. All crashed into racks and dams. Official law enforcement was ineffectual-to-nil. So on April 20, 1738, upstream farmers came downriver in a fleet of canoes to enforce the law themselves. They deracinated fish racks and destroyed dams and weirs, but failed to get away before downriver settlers in their own fleet of canoes came out on the river and counterattacked. Big swinging “clubbs” broke a bone here, bashed a head there, and left John Wainwright “as Dead with his Body on the Shoar & his ffeet in the River.” The fish-dam defenders were superior in numbers and they dispersed and chased the upstream canoes, and wrecked them beyond repair after they were beached and abandoned.
All those Boones on the losing side were siblings or close relatives of three-year-old Daniel Boone, whose Quaker parents, Sarah Morgan and Squire Boone, had settled in 1731 in what became
Exeter Township. A story from Daniel Boone's later childhood, for which I am indebted to the biographer John Mack Faragher, shows that the fishing war was not a total loss for Boone's family and neighbors. In what must have been the early seventeen-forties, Sarah Morgan was cleaning newly caught shad at the edge of the Schuylkill one warm spring afternoon while her idle son Daniel lay on his back with his hat across his eyes. Two girls came along, picked up a bucket of shad guts and overturned it onto Daniel. He got up and smacked both of them, bloodying their noses. They ran off crying, and came back with their mother, who heaped scorn on Mrs. Boone as well as her son. Sarah looked inquiringly at Daniel. He said, “They are not girls. Girls would not have done such a dirty trick. They are rowdies.” Mrs. Boone then said to the rowdies' mother, “If thee has not brought up thy daughters to better behavior, it was high time they were taught good manners. They got no more than they deserved.”
The Schuylkill was to become the most storied river in the American history of American shad. This honor could have gone to almost any river of the eastern continent, so relatively abundant were the shad runs of the eighteenth century, but in the winter of 1777-78 George Washington elected to bivouac his army on the right bank of the Schuylkill.
It was the spring shad run in the Schuylkill that saved George Washington's army from starvation at Valley Forge.
The local shad run on the Schuylkill came as a godsend.
Then, dramatically, the famine completely ended. Countless thousands of fat shad, swimming up the Schuylkill to spawn, filled the river. Sullivan's men, accustomed to
treading out fresh-water mussels in the stream, were astonished to see the water almost boiling with the struggling fish. Soldiers thronged the river bank. Then, at the advice of Pennsylvanians accustomed to the yearly fishing, the cavalry was ordered into the river bed. Carrying huge bushes, broken tree boughs, and long sticks, the horsemen rode upstream, noisily shouting and beating the water, driving the shad before them into nets spread across the Schuylkill at Pawling's ford, where the Perkiomen flows into the river. So thick were the shad that, when the fish were cornered in the nets, a pole could not be thrust into the water without striking fish. Thousands of the tasty, rich shad were netted at each haul. The netting was continued day after day, with more than a hundred horsemen continually beating the water, until the army was thoroughly stuffed with fish and in addition hundreds of barrels of shad were salted down for future use. The lavish fish feast was a dramatic close to a long period of privation.
In article upon article and book after book, a shad fisherman given to riffling pages will be drawn to the Schuylkill River in the fourth spring of the American Revolution. The random quotations above are, respectively, from Mary Anne Hines, Gordon Marshall, and William Woys Weaver's “The Larder Invaded: Reflections on Three Centuries of Philadelphia Food and Drink” (The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1987), David G. Martin's “The Philadelphia Campaign: June 1777-July 1778” (Combined Books, Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, 1993), and Harry Emerson Wildes'”Valley Forge” (Macmillan, New York, 1938).
With respect to George Washington, it would not have been a leap of the imagination for him to anticipate the spring shad run
and choose a campsite accordingly. He was a commercial shad fisherman. Moreover, he did not require Daniel Boone to tell him that the Schuylkill was a prime fishery. While another river might be half a mile wide, this one was small enough to string a net across and by 1777 had long been synonymous with shad. Not to mention other species. Even in 1704, there was an established “fishing Damm” in Lower Merion Township. The best Schuylkill fishing spots were before long in such demand that stiff fees were charged for one cast with a hoop net. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, notices like this one (February 27, 1766) were not uncommon: “TO BE LETT, a SHAD and Herring Fishery, near the mouth of Schuylkill.” In 1767, to ease farmers' tensions during the spring migration and give the fish themselves half a chance to complete their mission, the legislature decreed that fishermen on opposite banks had to fish on alternate days and, right bank or left bank, could use only one seine per twenty-four hours per pool. In 1771, fishing was banned in the Schuylkill from Saturday sunset to Monday sunrise.
The boats in use in fishing and freighting were pine, cedar, and chestnut canoes. William Penn observed a canoe hewn from a single poplar and carrying four tons of bricks. There were shallops piled high with hay, arks piled high with produce, and long anguilliform multipart rafts with steering oars bow and stern. These vessels, as noted, tended to “stroke” and disintegrate in the very places where shad congregateâthe river's shelving rapids. Rounding the great bend at Spring Mill (now known in Schuylkill Expressway traffic reports as the Conshohocken curve), boatmen moving downstream came into view of rapids they called falls, the beginnings of a twenty-four-foot drop in six milesâSpring Mill Fall, Rummel Fall, Mount Ararat Fall, and Great Falls, more commonly known as the Falls of Schuylkill, which have been drowned for nearly two centuries in a dammed
pool in the city of Philadelphia. The
Pennsylvania Gazette
, March 28, 1771:
TO BE LETT, and entered upon the 15th day of April, THAT large and convenient TAVERN, where Mrs. CUMMINS now lives. The situation is one of the most pleasant in the neighbourhood of Philadelphia, and being only five miles distant, and a good road, it has long been noted for a resort of the best company, when the weather would permit. It has the advantage of a Shad fishery at the door.
The
Pennsylvania Gazette
was owned and edited by Benjamin Franklin, who knew a clean river when he drank from one. He first saw Philadelphia as it came into view from a boat on the Delaware he helped to rowâon Sunday morning, October 6, 1723. He landed hungry and walked into town. He was seventeen years old. On Second Street, he bought three oversized rolls from a baker. He put one under each arm, and began to eat the other. It seems to have made him thirsty. “Then I turn'd and went down Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, eating my Roll all the Way, and coming round found myself again at Market Street Wharf, near the Boat I came in, to which I went for a Draught of the River Water.” In the mid-twentieth century, a pollution block at Philadelphiaâactually, a thirty-mile anoxic sagâwould stop absolutely the springtime runs of American shad. But this was not the twentieth century. The river bottom was clearly visible even fifteen feet down. And shad in uncountable numbers ran up the Delaware and the tributary Schuylkill.
In July, 1748, a notice in the
Pennsylvania Gazette
said that Preserve Brown was selling pickled shad by the barrel at the upper end of Water Street. On Second Street, Preserve's son Preserve sold “Good Four penny Beer.” Both Preserves were buyers of oats.
By 1748, when you sat down to high tea in Philadelphia you could almost count on being offered a plate of pickled shad. October 17, 1765:
Some time in September last, was left at the House of George Gilbert, at the Sign of the Crooked Billet, near the Slip, in Vine Street, a Barrel of Salt Shad, branded on the Head Reuben Hains. The owner is desired to come and pay the Charges, and take the fish.
John Kaighn, of Second Street, took an ad on October 31, 1771, to say that he was selling “silver watches, neat fowling pieces, and fine and coarse three thread laid seine twine. Also pickled shad.”
Isaac Melcher, of Second Street, June 9, 1773:
Genuine Madeira, Lisbon and Teneriffe WINE, by the Pipe or Quarter Cask; West India and Philadelphia RUM; best French Brandy; Holland Geneva; German Scythes, Cutting knives, Grass hooks and Whetstones; best Oil flints, genuine French Indigo; choice Bohea Tea; Burlington Pork; and Fresh Shad, in barrels.
September 14, 1774:
Choice Shad, in Barrels and Half Barrels are to be SOLD by William Milnor, in Water-street ⦠They are exceeding fat, and are warranted sound and well cured; the great inconvenience that farmers and others, at a great distance from rivers, labour under in getting their supply of fish in the season, appearing obvious to the subscriber, he, in order to remedy this, erected a fishery on Patowmack river,
in Maryland, where the shad are taken in cool clear water, three hundred miles from the sea, and salted down immediately out of the water, which renders them much better than when they are carried a great distance before they are cured ⦠Country store-keepers taking ten barrels, or upwards, shall have a proper abatement.
The
Pennsylvania Gazette
of January 4, 1775, reported “An Act to Prevent Frauds in the Packing and Preserving Shad.” The standard barrel volume was defined as thirty-one and a half gallons, “well packed and well secured, with a proper Quantity of Salt and Pickle, in tight Casks, made of good, sound, well seasoned White Oak Timber.”
I am much indebted to the Library Company of Philadelphia for the use of its electronic archive of the
Pennsylvania Gazette,
also the bound volumes. Now at 1314 Locust Street, the Library Company of Philadelphia was the first public library in America. It was foundedâas who would ever guess?âby Benjamin Franklin.
W
illiam Penn visited his colony twice, for two years each timeâ1682-84, 1699-1701. Soon after his first arrival, he held a council with the Lenape and asked for fishing rights on the Schuylkillâso obvious was the abundance and importance of the fishery. In a pamphlet about Pennsylvania that Penn wrote in England in 1685 is a section called “Of the Produce of our Waters,” the produce of greatest importance being whales, sturgeon, and shad.
Alloes, as they call them in France, the Jews Allice, and our Ignorants, Shads, are excellent Fish and of the Bigness of our largest Carp: They are so Plentiful, that Captain Smyth's Overseer at the Skulkil, drew 600 and odd at
one Draught; 300 is no wonder; 100 familiarly. They are excellent Pickled or Smokt'd, as well as boyld fresh: They are caught by nets only.
Penn's daughter Margaret fished in the Delaware, and wrote home to a brother asking him to “buy for me a four joynted strong fishing Rod and Real with strong good Lines,” but shad would not have been her quarry. Shad fishing did not attract anglers in large numbers until well into the twentieth century. In 1776, a sport-fishing tackle shop did exist in Philadelphia, as this advertisement in
Dunlap's Pennsylvania Packet
attests: