A Fish Story
The Blue Pike, Sander vitreus var. glaucus. Used under Wikipedia Commons license.
I grew up first in Buffalo and then Grand Island, and yet as a kid I barely put a toe in the Lake Erie or, God forbid, the Niagara River.
Before I was born, my parents had been very nearly swept to their doom over the Falls while out on a neighbor’s boat, and they put a scare in me very early about that water.
Once I had (more or less) put away childish things, though, I began to have a deep curiosity about exploring the Niagara watershed. After much study of WNY history, I felt like I knew the land pretty well. But the water was still a great mystery.
Then a couple of Februarys ago, I took the plunge (not literally) and ventured out on frigid, windswept Lake Erie with a professional guide, who has since become a good friend, Ryan Shea of Brookdog Fishing Company. I had been fishing elsewhere, always with a truly laughable lack of success, and the other childhood stories I had been told about the abysmal water quality in Lake Erie caused me some skepticism. So my expectations were appropriately low.
Was I ever stunned to find Erie clear as crystal, and even I—one of the world’s most profoundly inept anglers—was soon pulling up fat, healthy bass and freshwater drum like an old pro. (Well, maybe not quite like a pro, but this is a fish story.) All of my prizes were released unharmed, which was the plan all along, so I didn’t go to catch supper. I went because I knew nothing would be better for my research for the book I was working on at the time (A Murder in Ashwood) than seeing Buffalo from the water.
At the turn of the last century, that view would have been very familiar indeed—not only for the numberless canallers and lake sailors, but for most landlubbers too. If you wanted to visit Crystal Beach, Woodlawn Beach, Fort Erie, or Grand Island, you had to take a ferry from the foot of the aptly named Ferry Street. While this was somewhat less spontaneous than piling into a car and driving, it was not necessarily worse. It was scenic, hewed to a reliable schedule, and did not compel one to read the same license plate over and over while trapped on the Peace Bridge.
This got me interested in Buffalo’s historical fishing culture, and that in turn led me to a particular fish that is emblematic of the rise, fall, and rise of the Niagara fishery: the blue pike or blue walleye. This fish isn’t a distinct species per se; it is a color variant or ‘morph’ of the still-extant yellow pike or walleye.
Declared extinct in 1983, the blue pike was until the 1950s a Lake Erie staple, preferring the deeper and colder parts of the lake. In its 19th century heyday, millions of pounds each year (reportedly as many as twenty-six million pounds) of blue pike were hauled up and sold—some to markets as far away as New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. But most of the catch stayed local, and in the 1880s to early 1900s was sold to Buffalo fishmongers for six to seven cents a pound—right off the dogsled.
Did you say ‘dogsled’? Indeed. Buffalo’s professional fishermen—ice fishermen at this time of year—congregated in a shanty town at the foot of South Michigan Street. From there, between four and nine hundred men each day would harness themselves or a dog to a small sled—or hoist a miniature sail—and off across the frozen surface of Lake Erie they would go, as far as twelve miles from shore. They would leave around four in the morning, and if they had a dog or dogs to pull the sled—or a good tailwind—they could be twelve miles offshore in as little as an hour. If a fellow had to pull the sled himself, it would take several times that.
A jaunty angler preparing to Leave the Foot of Michigan Street, 1895.
Having arrived at the offshore fishing grounds, the fisherman would erect a canvas windbreak and start boring multiple holes through the ice. There they would drop their lines and remain for five or six hours; at around eleven o’clock they would begin the return journey with, they hoped, a much heavier sled. Most men planned to be back to the foot of Michigan by no later than noon or one o’clock, which gave them plenty of remaining daylight to sell their catch and make any necessary repairs before the next day’s outing. Any later and —if something went wrong with the sled, for example—there was the horrifying prospect of being trapped on the Lake Erie pack ice when darkness came on.
Returning home by dog and wind power, 1895.
If the work sounds dangerous, it was—‘leads’ of open water could open up suddenly, or the ice that had seemed so stable could break off and start heading for the Falls. Every year men vanished, froze to death, and lost fingers, toes, and feet to frostbite. In 1901, the Dillon brothers’ two sheep dogs collapsed and died on the trip back across the ice, and it took them until after midnight to return to home base— half-dead and severely frostbitten. Others were not so lucky, and never showed up again after an unlucky trip out onto the ice.
But the money was good. A typical day’s catch was about a hundred or a hundred-fifty pounds, and at six cents a pound wholesale, in ice season a determined angler was bringing in as much as $9 worth of fish in each six-hour day—about $450 in today’s money and nine times a typical laborer’s daily wage. And most of them would go out on every acceptable day, holing up at home or in the saloon when the weather was simply too horrible to make the trek.
What, then, became of the blue pike—the sole (no pun intended) livelihood of thousands of Buffalonians and their families over more than a hundred years? It’s the same old story: Overfishing and declining water quality from the dumping of chemical waste and sewage did, over decades, poison the once-crystalline Lake Erie. And in 1964, only two hundred pounds of blue pike were caught in local waters. Compared to the millions of pounds annually pulled up only a few decades before, this was an extinction event to compare to the much-better publicized passenger pigeon.
Today, though, we may miss the blue pike, but the waters around Buffalo are again teeming with fish: bass, drum, lake trout, salmon, and—yes—plenty of the blue pike’s yellow cousin. The water looks good, smells good, and once again is a tempting way to see Buffalo with entirely new eyes.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.