THE GREAT LAKES
by Tony Taton

When the New World was just discovered by the people of Europe and Scandinavia, the only people here were Indian tribes, who inhabited the lake area as far back as 300 before Christ.

The lakes were just as they were when they were formed by the great glacier movements, stocked with plenty of fish and wild fowl. Lake Ontario was the first to be faced with the white man's entrepreneurial ways. The red man only used the fish, furs and fowl for their tables until the new Europeans taught them the value of game by trading measures.

As far back as the late 1600s and into the 1700s, Lake Ontario was full of Atlantic salmon, white fish, sturgeon and herring, along with lake trout. As the ethnic groups took up lands by its shores and waters, they found the fish and game free for the catching. At first few white fishers were on its shores; then as the populations grew into towns, villages (fishing villages), and then into small cities came the beginning of the end with over fishing, waste and the raiding of the spawning area of gravel and sandy bottom land.

Nets with small mesh were used when large mesh was needed. They kept the large ones and threw the small fish on the beach to die and never grow up and spawn as their predecessors did. First came the sturgeon, which were caught, killed or placed on the shore to decay and rot. Then came the Atlantic salmon, which came in from the ocean to spawn on the shallow gravely bottom; then back to the ocean annually at various seasons of each year.

White fish were next to feel the crunch as the years of uncontrolled, unmanaged indiscriminate fishing continued. Herring were next; the Canadians, Indians and some of the knowing people of the U.S. tried to set up seasons, mesh sizes, areas for non-fishing in fine spawning grounds were of little or no avail.

As the immigrants moved westerly into the Lake Erie and Georgian Bay area, the same scenario took place, only more so, because Erie was longer than Ontario and now settlements, villages and towns with more brokers and more people were involved in the fishing industry.

Immigrants were given the land at low cost or sometimes free to settle it for homes and small farms. The average family could make out well with a few acres, while fishing, trapping and hunting, for the whole Lake Erie was a crisscrossing of wetlands, rivers and fine fertile land with the right climate for grapes, fruit and flowers.

Into the 1700s and 1800s, much fine wine was made in the Erie basin and shipped to the coastal cities by the vineyard of this area. Cities like Cleveland, Buffalo, Sandusky, Toledo, plus many smaller areas such as Erie and Port Clinton grew up into fishing areas with five harbors, shipping fresh fish to east and west.

Of all of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie was probably the most abused lake and the most quickly devastated of any of the fresh water seas as they were called. Both Ontario and Erie are very shallow lakes, and the fish spawned in the shallow area, especially in the western end of Erie.

Can you imagine a few fishing trips with perhaps one mile of gill nets following the spawning fish into the shallow spawning beds, placing a large half circle of net behind the schools (three to five miles wide) to catch them after spawning. Understand those fish will never spawn again, so the over fishing, with killing small mesh gill nets and pound nets really depreciated Lake Erie over a period, along with the changing of the entrances, flow of stream waters into the lake all along the shores upset nature's plan for the fish, affecting how they spawned, where and the sediments, which flowed into the bottom, creating run off silt and sediment from farms, industry and lumber mills etc.

As the population grew and other industries came into being and the demand for fresh fish grew, so did the fishes grow with wealthy entrepreneurs entering the lakes with newly developed gear, such as steam drive tugs with coal to pick the fish directly from the small fisherman in the lift areas, paying him on the spot and taking the catch to Cleveland, Toledo or Sandusky for direct shipping by train or truck.

The largest of the giants of the past entrepreneurs was Alfred Booth, whose headquarters was in Chicago, Illinois. Booth controlled the market, the prices, the fisherman and families completely. He built fishing vessels, nets and equipment, along with a large tug equipped with the needs of the families who sold him their catch.

They lifted, transferred their catch to his mother boat, sold them, bought what they needed and then back to fishing. Not only did he control one lake but mostly all of them in the mid-1800s, with offices and stations in Canada (Georgian Bay), Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Duluth, Thunder Bay, Escanaba, Fort Willow, St. Sault Marie and the island of the St. Mary's river, so in essence he set the prices, supplied the equipment and did the whole number on the catches of all of the lakes.

With coming of the lumber, mining and agricultural, plus other industries on the shores of the lakes, one is able to look back and see the destruction of the Great Lakes fishing as it was when the white men came into the lake areas.

So in essence one is able to get a good reading of the number which was done to each of God's Great Lakes over a period of two or three centuries.

Greed, money, industry, changing our wet lands, tributaries, river creek entrances to the lakes, polluting the lakes with sawdust, mining waste, farming, over fishing, bad managing, foreign fish and species placed into the lakes from ballast tanks of the world's ships into the lakes have really caused a large challenge to our fishing biologists.