The run

“The herring are running!” must have been a great cry once, for men, women, and children over the whole Cape. There was a deep meaning in this seasonal event, since the fish were a part of the local livelihood the year around. Nowadays, so far as commerce is concerned, the alewives lack their former importance. In Massachusetts, although they come into a number of streams and rivers few alewives are taken for the market. I understand that in recent years only the runs at Brewster and Middleboro have been open for commercial use, the fishing rights having been sold to the highest bidder.

For all that, it still seems a live, high, and social morning when you wake to the gabbling of gulls in the distance and know that the alewives have finally arrived. The sun spreads down new warmth. There are cool sweeps of breeze, broad runs of blue in sky and sea past the gray and white houses, with those silver hordes starting to enter inland veins in a bold reminder of perpetuity.

This season the rights to fish the stream had been bought from the town by a firm that wanted them for lobster bait. On the eighteenth day of the month a big red truck had pulled alongside the seining pool and the old mill. Three men were down in the pool, with their rubber boots on, putting a wide net in place. It was rimmed with cork floats and roped at the center to a hoist fixed to a small dock on the bank. A little wire gate was closed at the stream entrance on the upper side of the pool, so that the fish could go no farther. The run was officially on; and until it thinned out two months ahead, the fish would be hauled from the pool four days a week, thrown into barrels, and trucked away to be sold as lobster bait.

A sign was posted at Stony Brook, reading: “No herring may be taken or molested in Stony Brook on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in accordance with state law. Residents of Brewster are entitled without charge to one dozen herring daily on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during the open season, and should obtain them from J. B. Salvadore, Jr., who has purchased the Herring Fishery Rights for this year, or may take them from the brook on these days if he is not present.” It was signed by the selectmen of the town of Brewster.

On the down side of the road a bunch of children were celebrating the coming of the fish. The alewives, crowding, resting, circling, and slipping up through the pools and falls of the fishway—their bodies a fretted-lavender brown in the bubbling waters—were now fair game for the inland world they had come back to. Three boys were competing for a crab net they were dipping into the water, scooping after the fish, and as often as not heaving it up empty. One of them was professionally pinching the belly sides of a fat, gleaming alewife to see if it was a female and would emit some of its roe. Then he flung it back into the water with furious energy; and it slapped hard when it hit, and he cheered.

Were they under the law, these predators? Well, this play, or hunt, this spring jubilation had been going on for several hundred years.

“Let the kids play around there, I say,” said Herring Harry. “We were kids too. We didn’t start out old.”

In barer, colder, perhaps simpler days, days when men lived closer to their natural surroundings and were more dependent on them than they think they are now, the alewives meant food and revenue, an abundance returning to your own back yard. They came under the heading of useful acquaintances. But now the roe, or fish eggs, is the only part of the alewife that is highly considered locally. It is a very bony fish and most people reject the idea of eating it, forgetting the days of “good salt herring” when the children ate them on sticks like candy. So the Brewster resident gets his allotment for the roe, to be fried in butter. An ambitious gardener can bury the rest under his corn plantings to serve as fertilizer, if the cats permit, though it is still a very good way to make corn grow tall in unreceptive soil. A hundred years ago or more, when it was done extensively, it resulted in rich yields. I have heard that one acre set with a thousand fish would produce three times as much corn as an acre without them. It is a practice that we inherit from the Indians, although the Indian agriculturist was likely to be plagued by wolves instead of cats.

Cape Codders, even so comparatively short a time ago as fifty or sixty years, would not have liked to hear this farming method belittled. Some of them may even have regarded it with delight. I recently talked with a man who was a boy in the 1890’s and remembers walking behind a wagonload of “very dead” fish in a field made ready for corn. A man in the wagon pitched out a forkful of herring into each prepared hole as they creaked along, while another, walking behind, shoved dirt over them and planted the seed. He can remember a relative cocking a keen ear one night and saying, “Listen! You can hear it growing. By God, when their feet hit that stinking mess don’t they start up and go!”

Although to know them may have been to understand their worth, I find one early writer, Marshall McDonald Douglass, in his North America, 1740, who does not give the tribe much credit. “Alewives,” he says, “by some of the country people are called Herrings. They are of the Herring tribe but much larger than the true Herring. They are a very mean, dry and insipid fish. Some of them are cured in the manner of white Herrings and sent to the sugar islands for the slaves, but because of their bad quality they are not in request: in some places they are used to manure the land. They are very plenty, and come up the rivers and brooks into ponds in the spring.” None the less, they used to be smoked or pickled in brine and shipped out in barrels to the West Indies, and whether or not the quality was bad the demand was enough to make the trade in them into one of great volume, part in fact of the famous swap for molasses, later turned into New England rum, which was so important in our early history.

Before I try to defend these fish against any further imputations, I should explain their name. “Herrin’” is the name and pronunciation on Cape Cod. I don’t call them alewives just to defy such Cape Codders as might be fussy about it, but to differentiate them from their more famous cousins the sea herring, which spawn in salt water. Cape Cod has its alewives committees, and it may be that the fish were called alewives here before they were called herrin’.

You can still read statements to the effect that the original name “alewife” is a corruption of the Indian word “aloofe,” which meant bony fish. In 1871 a gentleman named J. Hammond Trumbull tried to scotch this bit of etymology by pointing out—in a government publication on Sea Fisheries, that the Narragansett and Massachusetts Indians called the alewife and herring “Aumsu-og,” as had been noted by Roger Williams. In any case, whichever Indianism we choose, it seems more likely that the name stemmed from English dialect. “Allizes,” not at all like aloofe, was one of the names applied to it in company with the allice shad. To quote Mr. Trumbull again: “The modern English ‘allis’ was in old French and old English ‘alouze’ or ‘aloose,’ nearer than the modern form of the name to the Latin ‘alausa.’” The latest in this chain of spellings is of course Alosa, the scientific handle now applied to the shad, and in some texts to the alewife.

To the English colonists an alewife was also an alehouse keeper. A Dictionary of Americanisms quotes a volume printed in 1675 which said: “The alewife is like a herrin’, but it has a bigger bellie, therefore called an alewife.” (Let that quotation be of some comfort to the proponents of herrin’. The name has a formal heritage.) The writer was surely not making a direct physical analogy between a woman and a fish. The original alewife he probably has reference to is a shad, but Pomolobus pseudoharengus does have a deep body and is heavily built forward, so perhaps a comparison with a hearty alewife of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England would not be too far-fetched.

The poet Skelton described an alewife, Eleanor Rummying by name, who lived in the time of Henry VIII. She brewed a “hoppy ale,” and “her face was wondrously wrinkled, lyke a rost pigges eare bristled with here”—at which point I will let the analogy go on its merry way.

The alewife has had a variety of local and common names, the kind that indicate touch and sight, the handing on of natural meetings—the signposts of its contacts with man and his history on the eastern shores of this continent. It is known as “sawbelly,” for example, referring to the fine sharp little notches or teeth on the midline of its belly; and for the large eyes, set on each side of its small head, it has been called “wall-eyed herring,” “big-eyed herring,” or “blear-eyed herring.” It is also the “spring herring,” “branch herring,” “river herring,” or “fresh-water herring.”

This old New England name of alewife has its modifications in “Ellwife” and “Ellwhop” on the Connecticut River, and there were variant pronunciations in other regions. In the state of Rhode Island alewives were called “buckies” and in Maine “cat-thrashers.” In Canada the name is “Gaspereau,” sometimes “Gasparot.” The term “alewife” is uncommon in the maritime provinces. There seem to be three Gaspereau Rivers, two in New Brunswick and one in Nova Scotia, in addition to a town of that name in New Brunswick, and a lake in Nova Scotia. Apparently the place name derives from the fish, and not the other way around. In its 15th Report, for 1917, the Geographic Board of Canada says “after a fish,” in explaining the name of the Gaspereau River. Another Canadian term for alewife is “kyak” or “kyack,” which sounds like a derivation from northern Indians. Mr. A. H. Leim of the Biological Station at St. Andrews, New Brunswick, writes me that he has only heard “one or two fishermen call them ‘kyacks’; one of these was an old poacher on the Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia who always used this name. I assume the word is of Indian origin.”

Finally the alewife is called “grayback,” a name that distinguishes it from a close relative often confused with it, which is called the “blackback,” “blueback,” or “glut herring” (Pomolobus aestivalis). The blueback shows up in a late spring run, and seems to spawn in the lower reaches of a stream, instead of migrating up to its headwaters. It has smaller eyes than the “grayback” and as its name indicates its back is dark blue, instead of greenish gray, but as colors fade at death, this is no sure test. The two species of alewife can only be told apart conclusively by dissection. The lining of the blueback’s body cavity is black instead of pink or gray.

These names are also indicative of the range of the alewife, all the way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Carolinas. In the spawning season they come inland by way of sandy inlets, great tidal bays, fresh-water river mouths, or creeks only a few yards wide. Most of the streams by which they are still able to swim up have their local history of fishing alewives, either with traps, weirs, dip nets, or even pails. In the fisheries of Maine it is known as “alewife dipping.” This is an important “food fish,” even though it may never have approached the sea herring in numbers, nor been as famous as the cod.

If the English sailor, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, had been ashore in the springtime instead of on his ship when he gave the Cape its name, it might now be called Cape Alewife.

Though they are only part of a multitude of other lives that nurtured the American past, the alewives should be given high and special credit. William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation testifies to their vital importance in the Pilgrims’ first year. After the Mayflower left in early April of 1621, Squanto, that greatly helpful Indian, showed them “that in the middle of April they should have store enough come up the brook by which they began to build, and taught them how to take it, and where to get other provisions necessary for them.” This brook ran, as it still runs, through the town, so that the Plymouth inhabitants were lucky to have their supply of alewives close at hand—they seemed to have depended on them primarily for plantings, also taught them by Squanto. The fish came in “fat and fair” and amazingly plentiful after a lean winter full of apprehension. At first apparently each inhabitant took freely of the fish in the brook, but this seems to have resulted in “injuring the property of those near the place of taking.” As a result the Town Brook became town responsibility after a few years, and the fishing was regulated. The cost of a weir was distributed among the inhabitants and the fishing put under the charge of town officers, with fines set for taking alewives without permission. Innumerable fish laws were passed after that, from the Colony of Plymouth to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The fish ran comparatively free for a while, but through the progression of these laws you might watch, in town after town, the gradual growth of human population plus human concern for a valuable product. In 1709 a general law provides: “That no wears, hedges, fishgarths, stakes, kiddles, or other disturbance or encumbrance shall be set, erected or made, on or across any river, to the stopping, obstructing, or straitning of the natural or usual course and passage of the fish in their seasons, or spring of the year, without the approbation and allowance first had and obtained from the general sessions of the peace in the same county....” An Act of 1741, to “prevent the destruction of the fish called alewives, and other fish,” might indicate that the colonists were beginning to notice a decline in their numbers and to be apprehensive about it, although it is hard to judge. A History of Barnstable County, published in 1890, has this to say: “Early in the last century the supply of herring so far exceeded the demand for fish food that the surplus was used to fertilize the fields, and the growing custom of using them in each hill of planted corn was checked in 1718, the town fathers [of Bourne] ordering that none should be taken in the future to ‘fish corn.’”

Apparently the alewife population did start to decrease a long time ago. Fishermen along the Merrimack River noticed a diminishing in numbers as early as the mid-eighteenth century; and somewhat later they thought it might be due to the number of small ponds which had been dammed up. These ponds had access to the river and so provided spawning grounds. Certainly the alewives, through man’s agency, began to suffer great setbacks in the old use of their runs. Some of the first culprits were the woolen mills, and corn or grist mills such as the one at Brewster—they blocked up many of the runs, in spite of the fish laws. Then a tremendous industrial expansion put cities and factories along all big rivers and many large streams, adding more mill dams across the runs. The resulting sewage and manufacturing wastes polluted the waters, destroying many fish, and making some rivers completely unfit for migration. Extensive deforestation also resulted in the drying up of a number of streams and the lowering of water levels. The nineteenth century was a notorious plunderer.

Alewives in any large number now coincide with undeveloped areas, which happen to be comparatively few along the Atlantic coast. As a result of industrialization the original heavy runs were so reduced that the only important, commercial runs are now in the southern part of the alewife range, notably the Chesapeake, or north of Rhode Island. Although the fish still have much less access to their ancient, natural routes, the existing runs are probably less carelessly protected by law. State laws put the responsibility of keeping the fishways clear on the localities through which they run, but the state supervises their condition, and if a run is too depleted the state can forbid the sale of its fishing rights. Whatever may be said about their decline in the long run, it is quite likely that state supervision has helped to increase the alewife population during comparatively recent years. It certainly seems to be true that the number of fish at the Brewster run has increased since the fish ladders were built in 1945. The new fishways made the rocky, often clogged stream easier of access, and cut down on fish mortality as they ascended. They can, in other words, be brought back; although there are fishermen in Maine who estimate that the alewife population is only a third as large as it was some fifty years ago, and there are those who say the decline has been even greater in Massachusetts.

A great many of the old alewife fisheries lost their vitality because there was no longer any local dependence on them nor any general call for the product. A recent article in the Maine Coast Fishermen said this: “A few weeks ago in Wareham, Mass., the local selectmen refused to auction off the fishing rights, feeling the bids were too low. An old timer of the town, who has watched these migrations since he was a boy, recalled that the alewife rights to the stream in question once brought as much as $12,000 a year.” In the smaller run at Brewster, incidentally, the bid taken during the last spawning season was $450.

Control is still local. Where there are still good-sized runs, the towns appoint alewives committees, whose members are re-elected annually at Town Meeting. In Brewster, on a salary of some twenty-five dollars a year, plus small wages for time spent, it is their job to keep the Herring Run area neat; to post regulations; see that no individual gets away with more than his allotted portion of fish; and keep the stream free from obstruction so that the fish can proceed to their spawning grounds, as well as into the nets of the concessionaire. The town sells annual rights for the privilege of fishing the stream in season, four days a week. On the other days the alewives are allowed to go ahead and propagate their kind. The five hundred barrels or more of fish that have been taken yearly from Stony Brook happen to have been used recently for lobster bait.

To some extent, incidentally, their use and commercial value depends on their condition and flavor. An alewife’s flesh is best when it has been taken directly out of salt water. The ocean flavor is progressively lost as the fish migrates through inland streams. So they have their highest value where the runs are located close to the sea, or tidal rivers such as the one at Damariscotta, Maine.

The West Indies trade is over, as well as the days of “good salt herring.” The most likely place to see indications of alewife now is on the stupendously bountiful shelves of a chain store, in the form of a can with a picture of a cat on it. And the future of the alewife, in human hands at least, seems to depend on a wider demand for it. It is valued neither for sport nor edibility, but is used for cat and dog food, fish meal, and pickled fish, with some, as at Brewster, being taken for lobster bait. Apparently there is an innate prejudice among some New Englanders against using a traditional food fish for other purposes, and a belief that selling it for meal or cat food is less profitable. Put this down to thrift, or respect for old ways, still it stands against the fact that the alewife’s latest value comes from its status as a processed, rather than edible, food. “Reduction” is what they call it when the alewives are turned into fish meal, and in a sense perhaps they have been reduced, at least in our personal esteem. They now belong to a technical age with the rest of us.

With modern methods of handling, packing, and transportation the old fisheries may have been left behind, but it should be said that, because of its new status in commerce, ignominious or not, the alewife may stand a better chance. The State of Maine, for example, has been undertaking thorough study of the alewives in order to find out how old runs can be brought back, or new ones created. They are a fish that are very responsive to management. When barriers are removed and open fishways are made, they take their opportunity.

All is not well with the traditional ways, though the alewives may be perfectly ready to go beyond them. In the old days on Cape Cod there was hardly a seafaring man who did not take his salt herring aboard with him, and on land, after being salted, dried in the sun, and smoked, they were strung on sticks and sold for ten cents a stick. There were many smokehouses on the Cape, and in the wintertime dried fish hung on the barn rafters above the haylofts. I have a comment on those days from Mr. Alexander: “None of your First National Stores then,” said he. “We lived off the earth ... potatoes and smoked herrin’. That’s why some of us old goats lived so long.”

It is hard to find smoked herring these days. It is a skill that seems to have almost gone; and I am told that there used to be a good deal of variation in the product. Smoked fish are now easier to find in Maine than on Cape Cod. I bought a pair recently in a small general store in Maine at the excessive price of fifteen cents. A dried alewife was handsomer than I had suspected, and the smell not unpleasant, although I might not say as much for a barnful. The head and eye sockets were encrusted with salt, and the hard thin body was colored a bronze and smoky gold as though heat still roamed the scales. I was reminded for some reason of a metal bowl I had once seen that came from the land of the Incas. I peeled off the scales and chawed a toast to our ancestors.