Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933

Abstract

The Great Lakes make up a huge inland sea that contain about onefifth of the fresh water on earth. This large and diverse natural system is overlaid by a complex grid of political boundaries that delineate two nations, one province (Ontario), and eight states (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). Britain officially represented Canada in foreign affairs until 1933. By the last third of the nineteenth century, the fisheries of the Great Lakes were in trouble, as over fishing and the consequences of use and development took their toll on what had once seemed like a limitless resource. Fishing the Great Lakes is divided into four parts: “The Rise of Commercial Fishing, 1800–1893,” “Great Lakes Waters in a Developing Drainage Basin, 1815–1900,” “Policy Makers and the Great Lakes Fisheries, 1801– 1896,” and “Toward Lamprey Eve: The Great Lakes Fisheries, 1896–1933.” The heart of its analysis focuses on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where it considers the precontact fishery, the development of commercial fishing, habitat change as a result of agriculture, mining, lumbering, and urban/industrial development, and national and international efforts to save the commercial fishery. The high points of these efforts came with the appointment in 1892 of a Joint Commission Relative to the Preservation of the Fisheries in Waters Contiguous to the United States and Canada and with unsuccessful efforts to ratify a fisheries treaty negotiated in 1908. The bulk of this book leads up to these two key events; thereafter, the concluding sevenpage chapter carries the story up to 1933. (Readers should also see Kurkpatrick Dorsey, The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy: U.S.Canadian Wildlife Protection Treaties in the Progressive Era, 1998, part 1, “The Inland Fisheries Treaty.”)