Thoreau was a sometime fisherman. He “caught white chivin of great size in the Aboljacknagasic, where it empties into the Penobscot, at the base of Mount Ktaadn.” But his hands-on relationships with fish went far beyond the imagination of an ordinary angler. He actually said, “I have not yet met with the philosopher who could in a quite conclusive undoubtful way show me the ⦠difference, between man and a fish.” He could all but converse with river partridge, more commonly known as perch. In the evening at pond's edge, he would ripple the water with his fingers, and perch would come to his side. He understood the chain pickerelâ“the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes ⦠stately, ruminant ⦠lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon ⦠still, circumspect ⦠motionless as a jewel set in water,” and then exploding forward like a barracuda to eat whatever might swim into range. Thoreau continues: “I have caught one which had swallowed a brother pickerel half as large as itself, with the tail still visible in its mouth. Sometimes a striped snake, bound to greener
meadows across the stream, ends its undulatory progress in the same receptacle.”
Wading in shallow water, he visited the nests of sunfishes.
I have thus stood over them half an hour at a time, and stroked them familiarly without frightening them, suffering them to nibble my fingers harmlessly, and seen them erect their dorsal fins in anger when my hand approached their ova, and have even taken them gently out of the water with my hand; though this cannot be accomplished by a sudden movement, however dexterous, for instant warning is conveyed to them through their denser element, but only by letting the fingers gradually close about them as they are poised over the palm, and with the utmost gentleness raising them slowly to the surface.
The thought of American shad in their thousands coming up against a new commercial damâdesperately trying to find a way to complete a reproductive journey their forebears had made since time immemorialâwas just too much for Thoreau. It was in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” that he made his noted lament, “Poor shad! where is thy redress?” and pictured them approaching the continent to “inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter.”
He is radically and almost subversively anthropomorphic in his regard for the founding fish, asserting that American shad are “armed only with innocence and a just cause,” and suggesting that the dams that impede them will ultimately crumble, the shads' “watery dream” will be fulfilled, and nature will take back her own, for these fish are “reserved for higher destinies.” Meanwhile, he urges them, “Keep a stiff fin and stem all the tides thou mayst meet.”
Thoreau was nostalgic about the “dim visions we still get of
miraculous draughts of fishes, and heaps uncountable by the riverside, from the tales of our seniors sent on horse-back in their childhood from the neighboring towns, perched on saddle-bags, with instructions to get the one bag filled with shad, the other with alewives.” He described certain fishermen on the Connecticut River suspended in armchairs from a high steep rock face, scooping shad with dip nets. One dipped shad, he reported, had a rattlesnake's head in its stomach.
Three years after the river trip, during the period when Thoreau was reorganizing his journal notes into the more tightly structured composition that was published in 1849, his brother, John, cut himself slightly when a razor he was stropping slipped in his hand. He developed tetanus, and died. The scholar Linck Johnson, author of “Thoreau's Complex Weave: The Writing of
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
,” noted Thoreau's predilection for shad among all familar species and pointed out the ways in which Thoreau associated them with his brother: “Like John, who was âcheery still' when confronted by the seemingly cruel âfates', the shad confront their âstern Fates' with equanimity.”
Thoreau mentions a revolutionary militia unit known as The Shad, which stood bravely at the bridge in the Battle of Concord, prepared in every way except training. A day had been scheduled for military drilling, and the militiamen had all showed up, but their captain's sense of duty had been overcome by his sense that shad were in the river. The captain went shad fishing. The soldiers learned nothing. The name Shad was applied to the unit, and later, according to Thoreau, to “all the irregular militia in Christendom.”
George Edward Pickett, who was a cadet at the United States Military Academy when Thoreau was writing “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” may never have read or heard of the Concord militia unit known as The Shad but he would live to cause an army to deserve the name. This was, of course, the Pickett of the chargeâthe Confederate general, fifty-ninth in his West Point
class of fifty-nine, who helped end the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania when he ordered his troops to scramble up Cemetery Ridge under heavy Union fire on July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg. Pickett followed the charge, while two thousand seven hundred of his soldiers fell. That was not, however, the scene reminiscent of the Concord militia. On April 1, 1865, in Virginia, Pickett was defending an intersection known as Five Forks, six miles south of the Appomattox River and a good bit closer to the Southside Railroad, the last remaining supply line to Richmond. While thirty thousand Union troops led by Little Phil Sheridan approached from the southeast, Pickett's twelve thousand, spread two miles wide behind fences and in ditches, braced to meet them. Pickett's supreme commander, Robert E. Lee, was headquartered ten miles away, near Petersburg. Should Pickett fall to Sheridan, Lee would be forced from Petersburg, the Federals would capture Richmond, and the Confederate cause would be lost. Someone mentioned shad. The spring spawning run was in full penetration of the continent. The fish were in the rivers. Tom Rosser, another Confederate general, had caught some, and on the morning of April 1st ordered them baked for his midday dinner, near Hatcher's Run, several miles from Five Forks. He invited Pickett and Major General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, to join him. Pickett readily accepted, and rode off from his battle station with Lee. The historian Shelby Foote continues the narrative (“The Civil War,” vol. 3, p. 870): “Neither told any subordinate where he was going or why, perhaps to keep from dividing the succulent fish too many ways; with the result that when the attack explodedâdamped from their hearing, as it was, by a heavy stand of pines along Hatcher's Runâno one knew where to find them. Pickett only made it back to his division after half its members had been shot or captured, a sad last act for a man who gave his name to the most famous charge in a war whose end was hastened by his threehour absence at a shad bake.”
Pickett's lust for American shad was not an eccentricity in his time, as John Graham could have told you. John Graham? Honored guest at a dinner at Buena Vista House, in Gloucester, New Jersey, April 17, 1864, at which the menu listed Shad
la Bordage,
Shad
Rôti sur le qril,
Shad
Rôti en entier
, Shad
Friture
, and more Shad
Rôti.
No other entrées were offered. Just Shad, Café, Pain, Beurre, Dessert. Bordage was ship's planking. The Shad
Rôti en entier
might have required a very large platter. Roe shad of more than thirteen poundsâexceeding by two and a half pounds the greatest specimens in modern angling recordsâwere not uncommon in the Delaware in that era. With fish of such size in the river, it seems incongruous that “as thin as a shad” was a cliché in vogue at the time. True, when shad spawn out they do become thin to the point of rigor mortis. In any case, Abraham Lincoln knew the expression. One day, in the winter of 1862-63, he used it as a springboard for what his biographer David Herbert Donald called “an atrocious pun.” It was, in fact, a pun so bad it was good. A light eater and not a drinker, Lincoln was consuming even less than usual in those grim, anxious daysâan apple and a glass of milk for lunch, an analogously hearty dinner. He had become very thinâ“cadaverous,” according to Donald. Told that he looked “thin as a shad,” he said he was worse off than that. He said he was “thin as a shadder.”
Two years later, after John Wilkes Booth murdered President Lincoln on the fourteenth of April, Booth fled south, hiding in woods, looking for ways to cross the Potomac River and the Rappahannock River and fade into the former Confederacy. This was at the height of the 1865 spring migration. Booth was assisted at both rivers by shad fishermen. The Potomac was two miles wide where he crossed, in a twelve-foot flat-bottomed boat that had netted seventy shad some hours before starting out with Booth. The party lost its way at night on the wide river, but made it across on a second try.
On the Susquehanna, shad economics had caused the Great Safe Harbor Shad War (upriver interests versus downriver interests), which was fought in the eighteen-fifties. In a book on the fisheries of Hunterdon County in New Jersey, Phyllis B. D'Autrechy mentions a widow who inherited shad (1860), and another widow, who inherited even more shad (1866), and a doctor whose bill was paid with shad, and a tailor who sold a garment for four shad. In 1867, Thomas De Voe published “The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.” Of American shad, De Voe said: “This well-known fish is a general favorite among all classes of persons, as its flesh is considered among the best, sweetest, the most delicate, as well as being the most plentiful when in season. Nothing but its numerous bones can be said against it.”
In the eighteen-forties, a standard pork barrel held forty shad. By the end of the eighteen-sixties, the same size barrel held a hundred shad. In eastern American rivers, the species had seriously diminished not only in numbers but in size, as it would, cyclically, into and beyond the century to come. In Thomas Jefferson's era, one shad would feed one poor family. By 1870, one shad was too small, andâ
la Bordage, Rôti en entier
âtoo expensive. As the fish's popularity had risen, ruthless and reckless harvesting had proceeded uncontrolled. While dams had shrunk the population so had widespread pollution. Across the years 1825 to 1875, the spring migrations of American shad declined by eighty per cent.
The natural way to deal with something like that is to set up a government agency. In 1871, Congress established the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries. Various states had been establishing their own commissions as well. With respect to the American shad, which had become not only a domestic food of prime importance but also a major export, the cumulative result of the commissioners' deliberations was to pin their hopes on Seth Green.
For some years, Green had been having exceptional success in the artificial fertilization and subsequent hatching of the species. Where nature achieves one or two fry out of a hundred eggs, Green was hatching ninety-eight per cent. He stripped milt and eggs from living fish and combined them without first immersing them in water. The technique would become known as dry spawning. It has been described by the fisheries scientist and aquacultural historian Nick C. Parker as “the first significant contribution of Americans to the practice of fish culture.” Green was in business as well as science. He had begun his career selling fish at his own stall in a market in Rochester. He gave lessons in pisciculture for ten dollars an hour. For fifteen years, he did what he could to keep his dry-spawning method a trade secret. It didn't help that his friend Thaddeus Norris pretty much spelled it all out in an article called “A Plea for the Shad” in the April, 1869, issue of
Lippincott's Magazine
. Green had first tried his technique in Holyoke, whereâin Norris's wordsâhe “expressed the spawn and milt from shad into tubs; and after stirring gently, and allowing the fecundated shad-seed to stand a while, has placed them in his hatchingboxes, which he anchored in the current. Placing ten thousand eggs in a box, so arranged as to keep them suspended and in motion by the action of the current passing through, his loss in hatching hardly averaged one egg in a thousand.”
Green obtained a patent on the hatching boxes. Roughly a foot and a half square, they had wire-mesh bottoms and strips of wood fixed on a slant to the sides, affecting the flotation in such a way that the bottom screens were slightly tilted toward the current. This kept the eggs in constant motion, as they needed to be. In Holyoke, on the payroll of several New England states, he hatched forty million shad in a couple of weeks. As an upstate New Yorker and a New York fish commissioner, he went on to establish a large hatchery in the Hudson River at Coeymans, ten miles south of Albany. His boxes were in shallow water in rows of six. Forty-two
of them show in a pen-and-ink sketch in
Harper's Weekly
for April 27, 1872. On the riverbank, Green had a wall tent that would have looked like home to General Pickett. It was from Coeymans that Green took shad fry to California on the two-year-old transcontinental railroad, initiating a West Coast shad fishery that has far outgrown the runs of eastern rivers. Pennsylvania wrote to him asking to rent some hatching boxes for three years. That will be two thousand dollars, Green replied. With New Jersey's help, Pennsylvania paid, and shad runs in the Delaware soon began to rise. Never again would he make the mistake he had made in New England, where he told commercial fishermen that his purpose was to make shad “cheap.” He paid the same fishermen to collect fish for him to strip, and they readily pocketed the money, butâaccording to
Harper's Weekly
âthey also enjoyed “flopping shad across Mr. Green's face, stumbling over the boat and upsetting the pans of impregnated spawn, or dropping the lantern into the water at a critical moment.”