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St. Joseph County waters, 1880
The list: "The waters of this county are quite prolific of the finny tribe." Chapman's fish chapter sorts the county's catch by the period's families. Among the game fish — his "sickle-backed family" — are the black bass, the goggle-eye, the crappie ("croppy"), and two sunfish, "never caught larger than four pounds." The pike family gives "the pickerel, weighing from five to twenty-five pounds, and the gar pike." The suckers run in all the county's streams: red-horse, white-sucker, two black-suckers, mullet — and "the buffalo," which is the buffalofish, a big sucker of the river, and not the bison of the prairies; the two animals share a name in this county's record and nothing else, and the file keeps them apart. The catfish — channel cat, mud cat, and two small kinds — run "from one to thirty pounds," and the bull-head is "yet abundant." Chub, silver-sides, fresh-water herring, and minnows close the list. It is a working fisherman's fauna: bass and pickerel at the top, suckers and catfish as the river's reliable weight, and no fish in it that needs a hatchery, a ladder, or a law to be there.
The silence in it: Two absences in the 1880 list carry information. Chapman names no sturgeon for the county's own waters, though the sturgeon was the spear-fish of the Fort St. Joseph fishing floor downstream and the famous fish of Niles, a few miles up — the county list is a list of what county fishermen caught in county water, and the great lake-run fish does not appear in it; the sturgeon entry below states the fish's river record at its documented size rather than enlarging it from the fort's account. And he names no walleye — the fish the modern river's anglers know best after the stocked salmonids — which enters this county's documented record only with the state-stocked river of the late twentieth century. The 1880 list is therefore the baseline in both directions: what the river held on its own, and what it did not.
Sources:
- Chapman, History of St. Joseph County (1880), Chapter II, p. 344.