The First Stocking: Shad in the River, 1873

June 1873; the verdict of the basin's record

The St. Joseph's salmonid century had a false start, and its first documented stocking was not a salmon at all. The Michigan State Board of Fish Commissioners' work is summarized in the Michigan DNR's own research report on exotic fish introductions: Jerome (1875) listed the stocking of 210,000 American shad fry in June 1873 in the Grand, Detroit, Flint, Raisin, and St. Joseph rivers — about half the fry obtained at Camp Green on the Hudson River, the remainder at South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts. The St. Joseph planting was a river-level act of the fish-commission era, made from the Michigan side into a river the two states share; no Mishawaka landing or local agent for it appears in the record reached, and it is printed at river size. The fish did not take. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission's technical review of the basin's introductions (Technical Report 45, 1985) carries the American shad in its unsuccessful column — introduced from 1870, never established — and the shad appears in no later survey of this reach: not in Gerking's 1945 drainage list, not in the 1972 whole-river survey's tables, not in the 1979 tributary collections printed below. The entry stands because the pattern matters to everything that follows in this section: this river's famous modern fish are also introductions, and the difference between 1873 and 1984 is not the idea but the engineering — a hatchery on this city's east side, five ladders, and a counted, monitored program in place of fry poured into a river and forgotten.

Principal sources

1. Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Research Report No. 1689, "Introduction of Exotic Fish into Michigan" (10 June 1964) — Jerome (1875): 210,000 shad fry, June 1873, the St. Joseph among the five rivers.
2. Emery, "Review of Fish Species Introduced into the Great Lakes, 1819–1974," Great Lakes Fishery Commission Technical Report No. 45 (April 1985) — American shad, introduced 1870, not successful.