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Updated: June 9, 2025
Near the house was a shed containing some forty or fifty barrels of pickled salmon, but the fish, from their having been badly put up, were spoiled. Mr. Schwartz attempted to explain the particular causes of this, but I could not understand him. The salmon are taken with seines dragged across the channel of the river by Indians in canoes.
Well aware of the fact and now in the hands of destiny, the princess and I lay down as bidden in the prow, and the man covered us lightly over with one of those fine meshed seines used by these people to catch the little fish I had breakfasted on more than once.
Their seines were as old-fashioned as those used by the Apostles in the New Testament, the simple kind you lowered from a boat and dragged ashore. The Indians had taught them how to spear large fish and erect weirs out of stakes and brushwood to entrap migrating schools. Such methods worked well enough during the season.
The natives use gill nets and seines in some localities, and scoop nets in others. Sometimes they build a fence at right angles to the shore, and extend it twenty or thirty yards into the stream. This fence is fish-proof, except in a few places where holes are purposely left. The natives lie in wait with skiffs and hand-nets and catch the salmon, as they attempt to pass these holes.
I purchased cargoes of wheat from the granaries of Pennsylvania; they were landed at Albany and brought up the Mohawk in boats; from thence it was transported on pack-horses into the wilderness and distributed among my people. Seines were made, and the lakes and rivers were dragged for fish.
The spot where we landed was a small but lovely gravelly cove, that was shaded by three or four enormous weeping-willows, and presented the very picture of peace and repose. It was altogether a retired and rural bit, there being near it no regular landing, no reels for seines, nor any of those signs that denote a place of resort.
Next to nature, it seems as if man's actions were the most natural, they so gently accord with her. The small seines of flax stretched across the shallow and transparent parts of our river, are no more intrusion than the cobweb in the sun.
And just after Elizabeth's marriage came on the hardest and most distinctive part of the fisher's year. All along the rocky coast the "huers" were standing watching for the shoals of pilchard, and the men were in the boats beneath, waiting for their signal to shoot the seines.
Early in July the salmon enter the river in immense numbers from the sea, and are caught by the natives in gill-nets, baskets, seines, weirs, traps, and a dozen other ingenious contrivances cut open, cleaned, and boned by the women, with the greatest skill and celerity, and hung in long rows upon horizontal poles to dry.
Intrepid mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial fish will not rise to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with seines and nets and gentlest persuasions.
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