The fisheries: sturgeon, walleye, and the mussel beds

THE LIVING RIVER

The river was a larder before it was anything else: The Miami named a river for the sturgeon, and the naming was reportage: lake sturgeon and the great fish runs of the western Lake Erie basin made the Maumee system one of the rich fisheries of the interior, feeding Kekionga long before it fed a market. The market era fished the river's mouth — the commercial fisheries of Maumee Bay and the lower river belong to Toledo's record — while Fort Wayne's own take stayed local: the nineteenth and early twentieth-century press is full of the banks of the three rivers as the town's common fishing ground, boys and fishermen at the junction and up the St. Joe and St. Marys on any Saturday, a use the ACGSI's newspaper gleanings preserve in passing a hundred times.

The run that still defines the river comes up from the lake. Each spring, as the water reaches 40 to 50 degrees, walleye leave western Lake Erie, the Detroit River, and Lake St. Clair and run the Maumee to spawn — by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' statement, one of the largest migrations of riverbound walleye east of the Mississippi, drawing wading anglers to the riffles below Fort Wayne through March and April. The less visible fishery is in the mud: the Maumee system and its tributaries hold freshwater mussel beds whose species — the endangered rayed bean and clubshell, the threatened round hickorynut — are the named beneficiaries of the federal fish-passage money described below, and the reason a twenty-first-century city finds itself removing small dams on a creek named for a scout. A river that began as a larder is now inventoried like one.

Sources:

1. Ohio Department of Natural Resources — the Maumee walleye run's scale, timing, and origins in Lake Erie, the Detroit River, and Lake St. Clair.
2. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Fort Wayne Rivers Fisheries Improvement Project — the rayed bean, clubshell, and round hickorynut mussels and their host fish.
3. Allen County Genealogical Society, Three Rivers newspaper gleanings — the banks of the three rivers as the town's common fishing and swimming ground in the early press.