An interesting little booklet focusing on a topic I have been immersed in for five decades came to my attention a month ago while perusing a classy little monthly catalog I receive from Callahan & Co. Booksellers of Peterborough, New Hampshire. In business since 1975, the Live Free or Die merchant specializes in “books about hunting, fishing, field sports and sporting bibliography,” with, I might add, a healthy dose of natural history as well.

Here, word-for-word, is the catalog listing that drew my curiosity:

Moss, Douglas D. A HISTORY OF THE CONNECTICUT RIVER AND ITS FISHERIES. Connecticut Board of Fisheries and Game; no date. Illustrated with B&W photographs and reproductions. 6 by 9 inches. 14 pp. Paper wrappers. A history of the river, and the populations of shad, Atlantic salmon and alewife. Very good.

Surprisingly, I was unfamiliar with the title, and could not recall ever seeing it anywhere, not even in a bibliography or footnote. How could I possibly resist ponying up 12 bucks, including shipping, to deliver it home?

The package arrived in the mail a few days later. I opened the padded envelope, removed the booklet from its protective, cardboard-reinforced plastic sleeve, and gave it a quick read. Interesting. Yes, very interesting.

Given the contents, including a short, introductory Moss bio, I was sure it had been published in the early 1960s – some seven years before an aggressive restoration program aimed at salmon and other anadromous fish kicked into full-speed-ahead mode.

After reading it, my first chore was pinning down the precise year it was published. A keyword cyber-search produced a quick answer. One of the first hits was a September 25, 1960 book review from the New York Times archives. So, it must have been published that year, which coincided with Moss’s retirement.

Just out of curiosity, I checked to see if the review was written by well-known Times outdoor columnist Nelson Bryant and came up with an even better result. It was the work of Franklin County’s own John W. Randolph, whose landed East Colrain estate some three miles up the hill from me, now owned by his son John, still contains his humble grave and that of his wife.

Though I never met Randolph the NYT columnist, I do know the son, who I often visited and who gave me permission to hunt his acreage, including an old orchard that produced many grouse and woodcock flushes. An outdoor writer himself, young John’s career went from outdoor editor at Vermont’s Brattleboro Reformer and Bennington Banner before founding the popular Vermont Sportsman and then becoming editor/publisher of Fly Fisherman magazine, from which he retired. He was quite an athlete in the late 1950s at Arms Academy in Shelburne Falls before graduating from Williams College and serving in the Marines.

In his NYT review, the elder Randolph praised Moss for finally putting to rest ridiculous exaggerations about colonial-era salmon abundance in our Connecticut River valley. He felt it was long overdue to set the salmon record straight, and Moss finally did so. Having digested Moss’s skepticism, he also seemed tepid to the possibility of re-establishing a viable future salmon fishery on the Connecticut and its tributaries.

If such opinions were out there in black and white and discussed in the public square, where did the newfound optimism of the 1980s come from? It’s not like some of the people involved in the restoration program weren’t aware of Moss’s work. They just chose to ignore it with a new, hopeful sheriff in town.

Moss’s booklet summarizes his diligent fishery research during an 18-year career at the Connecticut Board of Fisheries and Game (CBFG), cut short in 1960 by an unnamed “physical disability.” A 1935 Cornell University graduate, Moss followed a CBFG career path from deputy warden to aquatic biologist to a final six-year stint as Fisheries Division chief.

As a CBFG researcher, his goal was pretty straightforward. Like many others, he had heard and was dubious about fanciful tales of colonial fishermen walking across riffles on the backs of salmon. Thus, he embarked on a quest for tangible evidence to support such wild claims.

Because he found reliable colonial records to be virtually nonexistent, he had to rely on second-hand information published in town histories of Connecticut Valley cities and towns. The best among them was Sylvester Judd’s History of Hadley, which describes the river-fishing scene below South Hadley Falls and at the mouth of small tributaries. In doing so, he compares and contrasts voluminous annual shad runs to significantly sparser salmon migration.

Judd had an edge over other authors of Connecticut Valley town histories because he was older. Born in 1789, he would have been there for the end of the shad runs past South Hadley Falls, and would have spoken to many fishermen and merchants who knew the game. That gave him an advantage over later historians like Deerfield’s George Sheldon (1818-1916) and Whately minister Josiah Howard Temple (1815-93), who had to rely mostly on second-hand chatter.

I understood Moss’s research path, which in many places crossed my own 1980s trail, and echoed my conclusion that local anadromous fish runs were dominated by American shad and smaller herrings, not salmon. Such a conclusion was not difficult to ascertain, but it was not what true-believer salmon-restoration promoters wanted to hear. Thus, no mystery why Moss’s pessimistic observations relating to unfavorable environmental, commercial, and industrial factors were ignored by the pie-in-the-sky salmon experts representing state, federal and private organizations hellbent on success and rudely dismissive of learned critics.

I entered the fray 20 and more years after Moss’s booklet hit the street. By that time a well-oiled, multifaceted salmon-restoration initiative was powered by altruistic, unyielding proponents who stifled insightful warnings of colleagues bold enough to even suggest that re-establishment of a viable sport-fishery for salmon here was fantasy.

After decades of diminishing returns and ridiculous excuses, more and more negative backroom whispers found their way into the conference room. By the dawning of our new millennium, the handwriting was on the wall. Finally, in 2012, the plug was pulled on the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program, draining a 35-year-deep swamp saturated with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Perhaps Moss’s pessimistic approach should have been heeded.