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A Fish Story for the Fourth
By Dougald Scott
A Fish Story for the Fourth
By Dougald Scott
According to some historians, the revolutionary war would not have been won without the help of the American shad. In the winter of 1777-78, George Washington's Continental Army was encamped along the Schuylkill River at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. Conditions were harsh and food was in short supply. In a letter dated February 16, 1778, Washington wrote:
"For some days past, there has been little less than a famine in camp. A part of the army has been a week without any kind of flesh, and the rest three or four days. Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been ere this excited by their suffering to a general mutiny and dispersion. Strong symptoms however, of discontent have appeared in particular instances."
The story of how the American shad ended the famine and rescued Washington's army was popularized in a 1938 book, Valley Forge by Harry Emerson Wildes. He wrote:
"Then, dramatically, the famine completely ended. Countless thousands of fat shad, swimming up the Schuylkill to spawn, filled the river...Soldiers thronged the river bank...the cavalry was ordered into the river bed...the horsemen rode upstream, noisily shouting and beating the water, driving the shad before them into nets spread across the Schuylkill... So thick were the shad that, when the fish were cornered in the nets, a pole could not be thrust into the water without striking fish...The netting was continued day after day...until the army was thoroughly stuffed with fish and in addition hundreds of barrels of shad were salted down for future use."
Having run a commercial shad fishing operation on his farm, there is no doubt that Washington was looking forward to the spring shad run on the Schuylkill to feed his troops. But in recent years, historians have taken a closer look at the shad run of 1778 on the Schuylkill. They have found documents describing how the British, as a tactical maneuver, set up a barrier seine across the Schuylkill to block the shad run near Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the British documents do not address how successful the seine was in blocking the shad run. Careful analysis of the historical record now suggests that the typical early spring shad run did not arrive at Valley Forge. Rather, the evidence shows that shad were very scarce until several large shipments arrived by land from other locales in early June.
So it appears that the American shad did not save the Continental Army from starvation at Valley Forge. Does this mean the fish did not play a crucial role in American history? The answer is NO; shad played an integral role in feeding the Continental Army, and in fact, were crucial to the settlement and expansion of the American Colonies. By the beginning of the Revolutionary War, shad fisheries were well established on all the major rivers of the Eastern seaboard and thousands of barrels of salted American shad were consumed by Continental Army throughout the war. It is unlikely the first settlements in New England would have survived were it not for the Native Americans introducing the settlers to corn and showing them how to plant it using a shad as a fertilizer. Settlement of the river valleys over the next 150 years would have been much more difficult without the dependable shad runs supplying a cheap source of protein.
The sources for this article were: "The Valley Forge Fish Story," by Joseph Lee Boyle (available on-line at http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/articles/shad/); and The Founding Fish by John McPhee. The McPhee book is a fascinating account of the American shad as viewed through the eyes of a dedicated shad fisherman.