The Founding Fish by John McPhee Page A

forty-six miles upstream before they encounter one of the world’s largest concrete structures. They stop to think it
over. They have been likened to a crowd waiting for an escalator, which, literally, a lot of them are. The ladders at Bonneville Dam can accommodate more than a hundred thousand shad a day, and one or two million go on to spawn upstream. The majority spawns below Bonneville, and shad fishermen are all but shoulder to shoulder among the big boulders on the tailrace side, casting heavy darts on eight-pound test into the ten-mile current. Every so often a fly fisherman appears and stands off downstream, where the backcasting of his dense ten-weight sinking line won’t attract a lawyer.
    The American shad does not derive from these American waters. The species originated in the rivers of eastern North America, and first appeared in the West in 1871, two years after completion of the transcontinental railroad, when Seth Green, of the New York Fish Commission, came over the Sierra Nevada by train with four milk cans full of baby shad from the Hudson River. Seth Green could cast a dry fly a hundred feet. An aquacultural pioneer, he was in his fifth season of hatching shad. He had worried the fish across the continent, trying to keep their environment healthy. In Chicago, he tried the drinking water and found it too oily. Chicago water, though, had Omaha water beat to death. In Omaha, Seth Green filled a bucket with water and poured it into another bucket, then poured it back, and poured again—bucket to bucket—until he had oxygenated and purified the water. On he went, five years before Little Bighorn, through the homeland of Cheyenne and Sioux, where a heat wave was hostile to the shad. The train carried ice cut in winter. Gently, gingerly, his fingers turning red, Seth Green flicked ice water into the milk cans, keeping temperatures down around eighty degrees. Two thousand shad died, but ten thousand made it to Sacramento, and by stagecoach up the Sacramento River a hundred and fifty miles to Tehama, where Green let them go.
    He liked their chances in all environmental respects but one.
There was something alarming about thousands of millions of cubic yards of the Sierra Nevada being flushed off the mountains by giant nozzles working gold. The ocean was brown at the Golden Gate. Enough material was going into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal. Washed-down rock, gravel, sand, and mud choked the American River. The American and the Yuba were tributaries of the Sacramento River. The mining detritus had raised the Sacramento seven feet. Seth Green planted the fry in the Sacramento. He reported to the New York commission: “I can only say that if they do not have shad in the Pacific Ocean there will be but one cause, the roily water, caused by washing the mountains down for gold. However, I think the fish will get through all right.” Shad deal well with turbidity. The shad would make it. They’d be back in four years. A reward was posted—fifty dollars!—for the first adult shad caught in California. According to Volume I of the “Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission” (1881), Baltimore Harry caught the first shad.
    Baltimore Harry’s fish had come home to California, but by no means did all the transplants behave in the traditional way. They spread out. They rapidly invaded other rivers. They not only went up the Feather, the Yuba, the American, the Mokelumne, the San Joaquin, they also went up coastal rivers far from the Golden Gate. They went up the Russian, the Eel, the Klamath, the Trinity. In the words of the 1887 Report of the Commissioner, United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, they upended the “dictum of fish-culture that fish plants in a river would return to it when mature for the purpose of spawning.” Actually, one or two per cent of Eastern shad stray to other rivers, and a similar small percentage began the expansion in the