Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/842

822 artificially hatched and placed in the river, and thus, by constant reparative effort, a scant measure of plenty is at present with difficulty maintained.

In the golden days of their former abundance no shad were so highly prized as those captured in the upper reaches of the Susquehanna, whose clear, running waters only the better conditioned could attain, and which in their long journey against a fresh and swiftly flowing stream were presumed to acquire a flavor and excellence peculiarly their own. When the first settlers of the Wyoming Valley found their abiding place in the glades of its forested river that beneath the budding leafage of the spring rippled cheerily to the far-distant sea, they were amazed and confounded at the sudden revelation of its wondrous treasure of fish. The dreary winter of seclusion and solitude, of cold and privation, of coarse and scanty food had passed and gone, and the gladdening rays of the returning sun had quickened the face of Nature into joyous life. In their long deprivation the isolated community hungered for the coming fruits of the earth—of fresh food there was little or none—and toil and hardship, unsustained by proper nutrition, told heavily upon the weaker members of the lone and distant settlement. Then it was, in the time of their stress and suffering, that the ocean's bounteous harvest was borne against the fierce current of the swollen river, to diffuse joy and gladness in remote and difficult wilds. It was the assured possession of its fluvial crop that peopled the valley, for not only did this manna of the wilderness tide over the waiting interval between seed time and harvest, but, salted or smoked, afforded a winter supply of nourishing food that during the felling of the forest and the clearing of the land sustained the strength of the industrious pioneer. It, moreover, formed the subject of commerce, or rather, in those rude days, of barter, for the salted product was teamed through the primeval forest to the settlements upon the upper Mohawk and to the infant colonies that struggled for existence where are now the flourishing communities of Syracuse, Oneida, and others of that populous and prosperous section. It has been maintained that the first commercial routes established by mankind were probably those for the acquisition of salt; and the early existence of the ill-defined and perilous way that led to the Onondaga salt springs and to other sources of saline supply instances the assertion. A hundred shad, not unlikely over a quarter of a ton in weight, was the exchangeable value of a bushel of salt, weighing perhaps one fifth as much. Every farmer had an ample store of barreled shad, running from thirty to forty to the pork barrel, a measure that would probably require twice the number of the comparatively immature catch of to-day.