The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  He also marketed them, mainly in Alexandria, averaging, over the years, ten shillings per hundred shad. “This river … is well supplied with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year,” he wrote, “and, in the spring, with the greatest profusion of shad, herrings, bass, carp, perch, sturgeon, &c. Several valuable fisheries appertain to the estate; the whole shore, in short, is one entire fishery.” In his diary he noted that “the white fish [i.e., shad] ran plentifully at my Sein landing having catch’d abt. 300 in one Hawl.” Always, he said, from the first catches of the spring migration he set aside “a sufficiency of fish for the use of my own people.” Evidently, his people desired more. They borrowed seines from him. Sunday, April 13, 1760: “My Negroes asked the lent of a Sein today, but caught little or no Fish.” The Potomac is a mile wide at Mount Vernon and the longest seines were drawn in circles far out on the river by boats, then hauled ashore either by hand or with a windlass turned by horses.

  The American shad at Mount Vernon were passing through, or, in any case, intending to. Their spawning grounds were between Alexandria and Great Falls, inside and a little outside the modern Beltway. It was toward the end of the shad run of 1608 that Captain John Smith and fourteen others discovered the Potomac River. Sailing out of Jamestown, scouting the tidewater country in what Smith described as “an open barge neare three tuns burthen,” they evidently got up at least as far as the site of Chain Bridge, which connects Arlington and the District of Columbia. The idea that “pristine” rivers teemed with life—that precontact American rivers were so thick with fish that you could almost walk like Jesus Christ on their backs—is sometimes thought of as gross exaggeration, but Smith described fish “lying so thick with their heads aboue the water, as for want of nets (our barge driuing amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of vs euer seene in any place so swimming in the water.” When the frying pan failed him, Captain Smith leaned over the side and went after fish with another form of tackle. He wrote: “I amused myself by nailing them to the ground with my sword.”

  Washington was a sport fisherman, too, but with a great deal less passion than he exhibited for hunting. He “went a dragging for Sturgeon” now and again. When he was in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, in mid-summer 1787, he went up the Schuylkill in a phaeton for a reminiscent day at Valley Forge, and fished there for trout. Three days later, he was up the Delaware, casting again. August 3, 1787: “I went up to Trenton on another Fishing party … In the Evening fished, not very successfully.” August 4: “Fished again with more success (for perch) than yesterday.” As President, recuperating from an illness in 1790, when New York City was the capital of the United States, he went after striped bass and blackfish at Sandy Hook and caught plenty. But back in the pre-war Mount Vernon years, most of his journal entries that have to do with sport begin “Went a hunting … Went a hunting … Went a foxhunting.” July 25, 1772: “Went a fishing and dined at the Fish House at the Ferry Plantation.” December 3, 1772: “Went a Fox hunting … and killd it after 3 hours chase.” In October 1770, on a canoe trip on the Ohio River, he used trotlines to catch catfish. They were modest for the Ohio but in comparison with the Potomac were “of the size of our largest River Cats.” Back at Mount Vernon, though, fishing was business. April 10, 1771: “Began to Haul the Sein, tho few fish were catchd, and those of the Shad kind, owing to the coolness of the Weather.”

  The champion of inland navigation was not without a countervailing sense of an owner’s riparian rights. In “Life of George Washington” (1856), Washington Irving tells a story of a

  vagabond who infested the creeks and inlets which bordered the estate, lurking in a canoe among the reeds and bushes, and making great havoc among the canvas-back ducks. He had been warned off repeatedly, but without effect. As Washington was one day riding about the estate he heard the report of a gun from the margin of the river. Spurring in that direction he dashed through the bushes and came upon the culprit just as he was pushing his canoe from shore. The latter raised his gun with a menacing look; but Washington rode into the stream, seized the painter of the canoe, drew it to shore, sprang from his horse, wrested the gun from the hands of the astonished delinquent and inflicted on him a lesson in “Lynch law” that effectually cured him of all inclination to trespass again on these forbidden shores.

  Of Mount Vernon’s daily bill of fare, Washington once wrote: “A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready … those who expect more will be disappointed.” There was a garbage pit just outside the main kitchen. It is known to zooarchaeologists as the South Grove midden. Mount Vernon’s slaves lived in a building called the House for Families, and their midden was below them in a small cellar. Boxes of bones from these middens are in the laboratories of the Department of Archaeological Research at Colonial Williamsburg. Joanne Bowen is the curator of zooarchaeology there. When I called on her one autumn day and asked about the Mount Vernon middens, she said, “They must have stunk to high heaven.” Broadening the topic, she spoke of “the apparent disregard of odor on the part of colonial people.” She said, “They were not above putting trash in cellars in New England. If a ravine was outside the door, trash went into it.”

  The House for Families at Mount Vernon was torn down in 1793 and replaced by new living quarters on another site, ending definitively a stratum in time for the contents of the old cellar midden. Wildlife bones are forty per cent of what was found there when the cellar was excavated in the nineteen-eighties, including fish and venison, wild mammals, wild birds, and turtles. Bones from the main house, excavated in the nineteen-nineties, are only 10.3 per cent wild. They include one—1—shad bone. There is a whole boxful of shad bones from the House for Families. Of George Washington’s consumption of American shad, Bowen remarked, “Archaeologically, I would have to say, it was a minimal part of his diet.”

  Her field is known in Europe as archaeozoology, because in Europe the biological aspects are emphasized. “Zooarchaeology” is North American, where anthropological aspects are emphasized. On both sides of the Atlantic, the discipline is young. In earlier excavations, at Mount Vernon as elsewhere, interest in bones was low. Joanne Bowens doctoral dissertation for Brown University was on the diets of two Connecticut River families in the eighteenth century. “You can tell diets better from bones than documents,” she remarked to me in Williamsburg. In her lab she had material from more than eighty sites, and she was working on bones from a trash pit in Jamestown in use in 1610, 1611, and 1612. She had analyzed bones from Harpers Ferry, from the African Meeting House in Boston, from the Henry Tucker House in St. George’s, Bermuda. Other archaeologists bring bones to her from their digs, or send her their data. From Annapolis, the table scraps of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, were 1.7 per cent fish. Bones excavated at the Brush-Everard House, in Williamsburg, reflect a typical Williamsburg diet of 1700, she said—ninety-five per cent beef, pork, and mutton, plus “dribbles of chicken, fish, turtles, and birds.”

  She said, “It is a common tale about colonial days that fish were so plentiful they jumped into the boat. The bones tell you another side of the story. The bones have forced us to rethink. They’re a wake-up call for how we think about the past. The essential message is that fish were not the major contribution to the colonial diet, not by a long stretch. They were never eating as much fish as we thought they should have been. Fish would not have been more than fifteen per cent.”

  Herding, animal husbandry, arrived with the first Virginia settlers, she continued. “Very quickly they established a diet that was not unlike what they had in England.” By 1620, herds were established to the point that beef was the predominant meat. Shad bones are characteristic of slave foods. The “English” didn’t eat fish.

  After she presented these discoveries at a Smithsonian Institution seminar in Washington, one participant was so disbelieving—so
certain that the facts were subversively false—that he asked in a ringing voice, “Who is that woman?”

  Joanne Vickie Bowen has brown hair, a shy look, a darting sense of humor always at the ready. She has been at Colonial Williamsburg since the early nineteen-eighties and worked previously at the American Indian Archaeological Institute, in Washington, Connecticut. She grew up in the District of Columbia, went to public high school, and on to Beloit College, in Wisconsin, and then to graduate school in Providence. For the stove in her apartment there, she bought fish all over Rhode Island and as far away as Gloucester, Massachusetts—every kind of fish she could find—and for obvious reasons cooked them whole. The bones of those fish are on laboratory trays in Williamsburg. If you need an example of the trend to the finicky in American culinary taste, Bowen is ready to give one. She says that in the late eighteenth century students at what is now Brown University complained to the administration because at table they were not getting their fish whole. Whole meant with the guts in.

  Her father, Murray Bowen, was a psychiatrist at the Menninger Clinic who went on to do pioneering work in family therapy at the National Institute of Mental Health. Her paternal grandfather owned a combined funeral home and store that sold furniture, hardware, carpets, and appliances in Waverly, Tennessee. On a visit to Waverly many years ago, Joanne told her grandfather how astonished she had been to learn that early Americans ate the jaws of pigs. He said to her: “Child, don’t you know the best cut of meat?”

  In Williamsburg, she has given bone-chewing parties at which the table settings include spittoons. She describes the bonechewers as “students, volunteers, and professors.” They show up with a lot to learn. Dog-chewed bones and human-chewed bones look alike, she says. It’s a basic problem in taphonomy. Robert L. Bates and Julia A. Jackson’s “Glossary of Geology” defines taphonomy as “the branch of paleoecology concerned with all processes occurring after the death of an organism until its discovery.” Bowen told me that a whole subgroup in her field focuses on wolfchewing and dog-chewing. Documents from medieval England contain edicts forbidding the populace to chew bones. Africans, though, have been chewing bones since Lilith, Eve, and Adam. This fact has caused me to think of myself as John McAfrican. Routinely, I chew up and swallow the cancellous ends of pressurecooked pork spareribs. Cancellous bone is porous and, according to Webster, is “made up of intersecting plates and bars which form small cavities or cells … found near the ends of the long bones and elsewhere where both rigidity and lightness are essential.”

  Bowen said, “It has been claimed that the incidence of arthritis is less where bones are eaten,” and she added, incidentally, that cuts of meat become smaller as you go forward through the American diet for three hundred years. In the eighteenth century, bones were chopped. In the nineteenth century, they were sawed. The saw cuts, she said, do not “follow the natural lines,” and she does not like working on them. “You could cut bones with a kitchen cleaver. It’s a talent we’ve lost. We’ve done butchery studies—gotten our axes and cleavers and gone out and used them. In the eighteenth century, heads and feet were well received. Heads and feet were delicacies, not to be tossed. It didn’t matter how wealthy you were. You ate ’em. Peyton Randolph. George Washington. They all ate those pieces. Heads and feet. The total picture is truly compelling. How different our world is from theirs.”

  In 1988, Catherine C. Carlson, of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Massachusetts, published a paper she called “‘Where’s the Salmon?’ A Reevaluation of the Role of Anadromous Fisheries in Aboriginal New England.” She quoted Anthony Netboy [sic], author of “The Salmon: Their Fight for Survival” (Houghton Mifflin, 1974):

  New England salmon provided food for the Indians, who taught the colonists how to fish for them and prepare them in their fashion … The fishes, which were sometimes so thick in the rivers that they overturned small boats, were probably as vital to the aborigines as the wild turkey that has received so much publicity. To an extraordinary extent salmon served the Indians as the staple of their diet.

  Carlson begged to differ:

  The ultimate goal here is to explain why the evidence for aboriginal salmon exploitation in New England is almost totally nonexistent, while questioning the entrenched notion that salmon in New England was as important as salmon on the Northwest Coast … critically examining one of the numerous myths that have become ingrained in the environmental archaeological literature … All available evidence indicates that salmon was an extremely minor component of the prehistoric resource base … even at “classic” fishing locales, such as the falls at Riverside on the Connecticut River … The generally disappointing results of the modern salmon enhancement programs in New England may be due more to the fact that salmon is not naturally abundant in these waters than to historical and modern dams and pollution … Some accounts describing salmon actually may be referring to shad … Are shad, alewives, and/or sturgeon combined the “salmon” of prehistoric New England? Unequivocally, these three species are evident in the archaeological faunal record.

  From various New England Indian middens, she recited the faunal record. At a site on Sebago Lake, in Maine, dating from Middle Archaic times, a hundred and sixty-two identifiable bone fragments were discovered. Twenty-one per cent were deer bones, 9.3 per cent were from small mammals, 6.2 per cent from reptiles and amphibians, 3.1 per cent from birds, and 58.6 per cent from turtles. Only 1.8 per cent were fish bones. Among them, only one deteriorated fragment may have been from a salmon.

  From a three-square-metre midden on the Connecticut River near the present locations of Turners Falls and Gill, Massachusetts, five hundred and ninety fish-bone fragments were removed—all bones of shad or alewives.

  The moon of the peak migration was known as the Spearfish Moon—the Algonquian April moon. According to the historian Charles Hardy, “the Lenape called the month of March Chwame Gischuch, which translates as the month of the shad.” The Micmacs—another Algonquian tribe, centered in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—mythologized the shad, finding its origins in its myriad bones. The shad was once a discontented porcupine. The discontented porcupine asked the Great Manitou to change it into something else. The Great Manitou “seized the animal, turned it inside out, and tossed it into the river to begin a new existence as a shad.”

  When George Washington thought to join the navy, in 1746, his mother was not in any way happy about it. He was fourteen. His brother Lawrence had helped him obtain a midshipman’s commission. So far so true. Owen Wister takes up the narrative:

  The boy’s kit had been carried aboard, and he was himself on the point of following it, when a messenger from his mother overtook him, and brought him her final word.

  Her final word seems to have been, “Get off the ship.” Had she been lenient, Washington might have been somewhere on the high seas—who knows in what uniform?—rather than at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78. Wister:

  In the next order for supplies that his mother sent to England, she asked for a “good pen-knife.” This, when it came, she gave to the boy in token of his recent signal submission to her, adding, “Always obey your superiors.” He carried the token all his life, and to some of his intimates he from time to time explained its significance. One day at Valley Forge, when the more than half-naked men had eaten no meat for many days, and when Congress had failed once more to provide, or even to suggest any way for getting, food and clothes, the ebb was reached, and Washington wrote his resignation as commander-in-chief of the army. Among the generals sitting in council, Henry Knox spoke out, reminding him of the pen-knife, and upon Washington’s asking what that had to do with it, he said: “You were always to obey your superiors. You were commanded to lead this army. No one has commanded you to cease leading it.” Washington paused, and then answered, “There is something in that. I will think it over.” Half an hour later, he tore his resignation to pieces.

  In that account, fact and fiction are so conflatedly spiral tha
t they resemble an electric barber pole when the shop is open. Just as Wister went on to say, the knife-pearl-handled, single-bladed, three inches long—is in the museum of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons’ Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22, in Virginia. George Washington was the first Worshipful Master of that lodge. (http://gwmemorial.org/Collections/george_washingtons_penknife.htm.) The knife was given to the museum in 1812 by George Steptoe Washington, the late President’s nephew and executor. It presumably crossed the Delaware in the general’s pocket on December 25, 1776. It presumably rode through the triumphs at Trenton and Princeton and on to the disappointments at the Brandywine and Germantown before the march up the Schuylkill in the third week of December, 1777, to the winter campsite at Valley Forge. Washington had been there three days when he wrote to the Continental Congress, in York, Pennsylvania: