Reevaluating New England Salmon

OK, at long last, time to revisit and reassess, as I promised many weeks ago, the uncertain topic of New England’s prehistoric and early-historic Atlantic salmon runs.

This subject was a staple of my weekly Greenfield Recorder outdoor column “On the Trail” in the 1980s and 1990s, when an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful Connecticut River Atlantic salmon-restoration program was trying to justify itself. By the dawning of our new millennium the tide had turned against the altruistic effort’s feasibility.

Although I continued to studiously track, compare, and contrast the annual spring spawning runs of shad, salmon, blueback herring, and sometimes lamprey eels up our Connecticut River basin, it was by then clear that the salmon program was fast-tracking to its demise. So, I backed off and let others run with the baton.

Finally, the feds pulled the plug on salmon-restoration in 2013, by which time the paltry number of annual returns could no longer justify the expense.

Readers may recall the impetus for my most recent foray into regional salmon runs after years of back-burner neglect. Reading a 50-year-old book about New Hampshire’s frontier settlement, I noted a reference to the 18th-century diary of a Bedford, New Hampshire man named Matthew Patten, who counted among his many annual chores fishing the spring Merrimack River anadromous fish runs, including salmon.

Patten also occasionally fished for non-migratory native fish such as pickerel, perch, and hornpout, but not as aggressively, while capitalizing on occasional summer salmon found secreted in small, cold-water-tributary lairs awaiting fall spawning.

I bought a copy of the Patten diary, discovered it contained no index, and spent three days compiling a hand-written version for future reference, recording mostly fishing data but also miscellaneous items of personal interest – like, for instance, a heavy June 30 frost today unheard of.

I soon introduced Patten’s 1754-88 diary to my scholarly friend Peter Thomas, a retired archaeologist and historian. Immediately intrigued, he one-upped me by finding an online copy and laboring to produce a useful, 75-page, annotated digital index, along with two Excel spreadsheets tracking Patten’s many fishing activitie. He and fellow retired archaeologist Stuart Fiedel, both PhDs with many years of field experience, found the “new” information relevant to their current, ongoing examination of historic and prehistoric New England anadromous-fish migration, particularly in the Connecticut Valley.

Though I haven’t yet carefully dissected the spreadsheets, I’m sure they’ll become useful at some point.

Thomas and I have discussed anadromous fish runs and ancient fishing practices for the approximate 10 years I’ve known him. He led an archaeological dig at Riverside/Gill in the 1980s that revealed much evidence of Native American fishing long before European colonists reached our shores. Likewise, his Hinsdale, New Hampshire dig at the Sokoki “Fort Hill,” overlooking the confluence of the Ashuelot and Connecticut rivers, revealed some fishing culture. Plus, our recent discussions have focused on the dynamics of ancient weirs still discernable in some Connecticut Valley rivers.

My own recent research hit a brief snag with too many irons in the fire, so to speak. The most impactful wrinkle was an unexpected communication glitch between me and US Fish and Wildlife Services Connecticut River Coordinator Ken Sprankle. After years of easy exchanges, he was suddenly unable to respond to my queries when his government server blocked responses to my private email address linked to an old business website.

When we finally connected by phone and I mentioned the Patten diary, it immediately rang a bell. On the spot, Sprankle pulled from his office bookshelf a 21st-century source previously unknown to me. A glance at the index, footnotes and bibliography revealed that, as he suspected, Patten was an important source.

The book, Fishing in New Hampshire: A History, was published in 2003 and authored by Granite State historian and novelist Jack Noon. The introduction alone, by celebrated American author John McPhee, immediately validated the book in my mind. Then, when I read promotional snippets of praise by reviewers on the opening pages, one of them was none other than my old North Country pal, the late John Harrigan, former editor/publisher/outdoor columnist at Lancaster, New Hampshire’s Coos County Democrat newspaper.

Noon’s paperback has achieved “rare book” status in the online marketplace, inflating its cost and confirming its value as a source. Then again, the steep cost could merely reflect a tiny print run. I hunted down a reasonably-priced copy, bought it, waited for it in the mail, and couldn’t put it down once I opened it.

Noon introduces a refreshing new spin on ancient New England salmon presence – one in sharp contrast to anthropologist Catherine Carroll Carlson’s thesis that, yes, they existed, but in insignificant numbers compared to other anadromous fish. This opinion that shook the salmon-restoration world was based solely on the curious rarity of salmon in the archaeological record.

Of course, that begs the question as to whether the absence of salmon evidence in New England’s archaeological record proves they were irrelevant. Noon doesn’t think so, and frankly, I have evolved to agree.

My opinion has changed over some 40 years, especially since striking up friendships with a handful of professional archaeologists in recent years.

Initially, because Carlson’s scientific findings supported the position I was piecemealing out weekly in my Recorder column – based on second- and third-hand reports from published town histories – I was quick to take her bait hook, line, and sinker. My support of her thesis was only buoyed as she sharpened her attack in various scholarly journals between 1988 and 1996.

Convinced by the start of this new millennium that the Connecticut River salmon-restoration failure was a settled issue, word of Noon’s 2003 book somehow escaped me. It apparently received no attention from the New England Outdoor Writers’ Association. At least nothing I recall. Maybe the snub had to do with Noon’s non-member status. Had the organization’s newsletter mentioned Noon’s book, I wouldn’t have missed it.

Noon does cite Carlson in his bibliography, listing only her Fall/Winter 1996 Federal Archeology piece, “The Insignificance of Atlantic Salmon.” By then she had published her 1992 doctoral dissertation The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications, and was dancing in the end zone with a thesis damaging to the struggling salmon-restoration effort.

Otherwise, Noon pays Carlson no heed, totally ignoring her hypothesis in favor of his own reasoned approach: that there were lucrative annual salmon runs on many New England rivers up and down the coast, ranging as far south as the Connecticut, Housatonic, and Hudson rivers. The problem, according to Noon, was that unlike Native Americans whose cooperative, part-of-the-whole lifeways respected conservation and sustainability, Europeans exploited and soon destroyed the resource with wasteful commercial harvests in nets and seines aimed at maximizing profits.

As these interlopers overharvested forests, created insurmountable mill dams, polluted salmon streams with gill-clogging sawdust, and fished with apparatuses that invited waste and overharvest, they also made no effort to record and quantify for posterity the 17th-century anadromous-fish runs that greeted them here.

As to why only a few of the 75 Northeastern fishing sites listed in Carlson’s study produced salmon evidence, well, that may forever remain a mystery. Perhaps it had something to do with the reverence Indians held for salmon, which were less plentiful and more valued than their anadromous companions. Maybe they disposed of salmon remains with ritualistic respect and dignity compared to more populous shad, river herring, and lamprey eels, whose processing scraps found their way to garbage pits when not used to fertilize horticultural plots.

Although it’s probably now too late to determine why Atlantic salmon are absent from our archaeological record, we know they were here, and were treasured by Indians and colonials alike before they disappeared due primarily to foreign exploitation of the fish and their precious spawning channels.

I think Carlson, a West Coast native intimately familiar thick Pacific salmon runs, took a provincial attitude and overstated salmon insignificance here. I wondered how she had missed the insights of Patten’s diary – and found that actually she hadn’t. When, however, she did choose to mention him in her “Where’s the Salmon?” chapter published in Holocene Human Ecology in Northeastern North America (1988), she did so by lifting a June 7, 1785 entry that buttressed her argument that shad and eels were far more abundant than salmon.

Carlson probably stumbled across that Patten reference in passing, and used it without ever taking a deeper dive into the journal. Or perhaps she did dig a little deeper, found the diary lacked a convenient index, and pushed it aside in the rush to complete her dissertation.

Too bad. For had she thoroughly investigated Patten, she would have found that New England salmon were far from rare and insignificant. Human greed and a new commercial paradigm did a sorry number on a valued indigenous food resource in an exploited, colonized land.

 

Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Mad Meg theme designed by BrokenCrust for WordPress © | Top