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

by Margaret Beattie Bogue

Overview

    Fishing the Great Lakes is a sweeping history of the destruction of the once-abundant fisheries of the great "inland seas" that lie between the United States and Canada. Though lake trout, whitefish, freshwater herring, and sturgeon were still teeming as late as 1850, Margaret Bogue documents here how overfishing, pollution, political squabbling, poor public policies, and commercial exploitation combined to damage the fish populations even before the voracious sea lamprey invaded the lakes and decimated the lake trout population in the 1940s.
    From the earliest records of fishing by native peoples, through the era of European exploration and settlement, to the growth and collapse of the commercial fishing industry, Fishing the Great Lakes traces the changing relationships between the fish resources and the people of the Great Lakes region. Bogue focuses in particular on the period from 1783, when Great Britain and the United States first politically severed the geographic unity of the Great Lakes, through 1933, when the commercial fishing industry had passed from its heyday in the late nineteenth century into very serious decline. She shows how fishermen, entrepreneurial fish dealers, the monopolistic A. Booth and Company (which distributed and marketed much of the Great Lakes catch), and policy makers at all levels of government played their parts in the debacle. So, too, did underfunded scientists and early conservationists unable to spark the interest of an indifferent public. Concern with the quality of lake habitat and the abundance of fish increasingly took a backseat to the interests of agriculture, lumbering, mining, commerce, manufacturing, and urban development in the Great Lakes region. Offering more than a regional history, Bogue also places the problems of Great Lakes fishing in the context of past and current worldwide fishery concerns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299167639
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	06/28/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Margaret Beattie Bogue is professor emerita of history and liberal studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Around the Shores of Lake Michigan: A Guide to Historic Sites, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and of many other books and articles on fisheries, wetlands, and agriculture in the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS Illustrations Tables Preface Acknowledgments 1. Legacies from the Wilderness Part I. The Rise of Commercial Fishing, 1800–1893 2. Lake Ontario Salmon in an Early Agricultural-Commercial Economy 3. Patterns of Growth through 1872 4. The Expansive Heyday, 1875–1893 5. A. Booth and Company Bids for Great Lakes Dominance 6. Fishers of the Great Lakes, 1850–1893 7. The Fishers and the Fish Part II. Great Lakes Waters in a Developing Drainage Basin, 1815–1900 8. Agriculture, Lumbering, Mining, and the Changing Fish Habitat 9. Commerce, Community Growth, Industrial-Urban Development, and the Changing Fish Habitat 10. The Fish React: Changing Species in Changing Waters Part III. Policy Makers and the Great Lakes Fisheries, 1801–1896 11. The First Regulators: The Provinces and the States 12. Changing Ideas: The United States and the Great Lakes Fishery 13. Canada's Regulated Fishery, 1868–1888 14. Charles Hibbert Tupper and the New Broom, 1888–1896 15. To Save the Fish: The Crisis of the 1890s and the Canadian–American Joint Commission of 1892 Part IV. Toward Lamprey Eve: The Great Lakes Fisheries, 1896–1933 16. Commercial Fishing: From Prosperity to Recession 17. Policy Makers and the Ever-Widening Stain 18. Public Policy and the Declining Fish Resource 19. The End of an Era 20. Reflections Notes Glossary of Fish Species Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Bogue (history and liberal studies, Univ. of Wisconsin; Around the Shores of Lakes Michigan: A Guide to Historic Sites) has written the definitive history of the decline of the Great Lakes fisheries. More than a natural history, the book is also a social history of the population's relation to, and attitudes toward, the fisheries. The author uses records of early explorers and fish dealers, American and Canadian documents, court records, newspapers, company histories, and biographies to document 150 years of fishing the "deer of the lakes" (whitefish) by Native Americans, diverse immigrant groups, and commercial fisheries trusts. The state, national, and international regulatory efforts to conserve and to save threatened species during the Depression provide important background for today's regulatory actions. This book is a significant history of economic development in the Middle West and is a comprehensive study of the living marine environment of the northern and southern Great Lakes, the largest freshwater bodies in the world. Highly recommended for U.S. and Canadian academic, marine science, and public libraries in the Great Lakes region.--Margaret Aycock, Gulf Coast Environmental Lib., Beaumont, TX Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

"The discovery, exploitation, and destruction of the Great Lakes fisheries is an important story that should be told, and Margaret Bogue is the first to tell it from such a broad historical, geographic, and environmental perspective. The great strength of Fishing the Great Lakes is the very extensive historical evidence drawn from American and Canadian archives."—Stephen Bocking, Trent University, Ontario, author of Ecologists and Environmental Politics

"Bogue addresses a problem that has caught the attention of no other historian, despite its very basic interest to both the United States and Canada. This book fills a huge void in our understanding of the fisheries of the Great Lakes."—Kurk Dorsey, University of New Hampshire, author of The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy

From the Publisher