Shad Runs, Fishing Weirs and Smuggling on the Merrimack River

The Spring Run on the Merrimack

Every spring, when the ice goes out of the Merrimack and the river runs the colour of strong coffee with the cream turned, the fish come up from the sea. The shad come first, big and silver and fat with roe. Close behind them come the alewives, the river herring, and in a good year they crowd up so thick that an old-timer in Bow once swore to me he crossed Garvins Falls on their backs and wet his boots only to the ankle. He was a liar, but he was a liar standing on a true thing.

The Pennacook people fished those falls long before any Englishman drove a fence post in this valley. Amoskeag, at Manchester, was their great fishing ground, and the old name is said to mean the place of many fish. At the outlet of Lake Winnipesaukee the first colonists found weirs of stone and stake that the Indians had built, and the place is called The Weirs to this day. For the reader in Portsmouth, a weir is a fence of stakes and brush set in the current. It funnels the fish into a pen, and from there they are scooped out like coins from a collection plate, though the fish are the more honest of the two.

The shad is the finest-tasting fish in fresh water, and I am persuaded it was designed by a committee of porcupines. It has more bones than a Concord graveyard. In my practice as a dentist I have pulled more shad bones out of Pittsfield throats than molars out of Pittsfield mouths.

Then the mill men dammed the river at Amoskeag and at Lowell, and in 1848 they finished the Great Stone Dam at Lawrence. The shad struck those dams like drunk men at a locked church door. They ignored the fish ladders built for them, much as my patients ignore my advice about sugar. Mr. Thoreau paddled the Merrimack and wrote in 1849 of the poor shad shut out by the dams, and asked who would speak for them. I will speak for them: they were delicious. The runs below the dams kept coming all the same. This very season the legislature at Concord has named fish commissioners to see about bringing back the shad and the salmon, and Massachusetts is doing the same. I have never before seen two legislatures agree on anything, and it took a fish to do it.

Folk fried the catch, planked it and baked it, and fried the roe in butter until it popped like musket caps. Whatever could not be eaten went into barrels: a layer of fish, a layer of coarse salt, then fish again, pressed under a head and sealed. The alewives were salted or smoked, and the surplus went onto the fields, a fish or two in every hill of corn, as the old Plymouth farmers learned it. Mark those barrels of salted fish, for they are the whole secret of what follows.

A Wagon of Fish Is the Best Alibi

Picture a May night at Hooksett Falls. Lanterns hang along the bank like a necklace on a fat woman, and seines go out on poles. Men stand thigh-deep in water cold enough to shrink a Baptist's vices to the size of a grape. A hundred wagons wait up on the bank with boys asleep under the axles, and somebody is fiddling. Every farmer from Epsom to Chichester to Allenstown has come with barrels and salt, and every fishing party brought a jug against the cold water. In such a crowd, who notices a few kegs? The shad run is the one season when an honest farmer looks exactly like a smuggler.

Now consider the empty wagon, as a natural philosopher would. It rides high and rattles like a deacon's conscience, and every deputy wants to know what it is rattling about. A wagon loaded with salted fish answers his questions before he asks them. Its springs sag, which explains the weight. It stinks, which explains why nobody stands near it. And it is going where every other fish wagon is going, home from the river.

The runners packed their barrels the way a dentist packs a cavity. They set a smaller keg inside a fish barrel and packed alewives and salt all around and over it, so that a foot of brine-soaked fish lay between the keg and the daylight. Some built a false head halfway down, with fish above and spirits below. A deputy would pry the lid, find a hundred dead eyes staring up at him out of the brine, and hammer it shut again faster than he had opened it. A deputy's curiosity ends where the brine begins.

No man profited more from this than Deputy Asa Thurlow, God rest his digestion. Asa loved fried shad more than he loved his wife. He would stop a fish wagon on the turnpike, march around it twice and say, 'I'll need to inspect a sample for evidence.' Then he walked off with the two fattest roe shad, and that evidence went to the tavern in Suncook village and into the skillet with a slab of pork fat. The runners soon learned to lay their plumpest shad on top of every barrel, as a tithe to the church of Asa's belly. I once watched him eat eleven at one sitting. Afterwards he came to my chair with bones stuck in his gums like a pincushion, and I charged him a quarter apiece to pull them. He was the best-fed man in Merrimack County and the worst-informed.

My bear Barnaby has a chapter of his own in this history. One spring a weasel-faced informer out of Concord, a fish peddler named Elihu Snell, came up the turnpike to sniff around Fort Wilkins. He used a cart of salted herring for a disguise and carried more of it in his pockets. You do not walk a cart of fish past a four-hundred-pound bear in May, when he has slept all winter. Barnaby knocked Snell flat, licked the brine off his face, and peeled the coat off him like husking an ear of corn so he could eat the herring, pockets and all. I came out with a ham bone, a broom and no great hurry. By then the bear had taken a bite the size of a biscuit out of the seat of Snell's britches, and the tooth marks came up in the shape of a W. Snell never informed on anybody again. He took up preaching, and I am told he never sits down for any part of it.

The Captain's Knuckles and the Franklin Eel

Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer out of Manchester, sat by my stove and told me how the trade looked from the other side. He is no friend of the trade, but he is an honest enemy of it. He admits the fish barrel fooled him for a season. Then an old cooper taught him that a barrel packed solid with salted fish answers your knuckles dull, like a stump. At a landing in Hooksett he walked a row of some thirty alewife hogsheads, knocking as he went. He got twenty-two barrels of thud, and then one that sloshed, with a hollow ring under it. Under a foot of foul fish sat a ten-gallon keg. The owner told him it was pickled spring water, for the comfort of the fish. 'He said, "Well, they're comfortable now, ain't they?"' the Captain told me. 'I couldn't argue it.'

Below Franklin, where the Pemigewasset and the Winnipesaukee meet to make the Merrimack, a clever weir keeper tied stone jugs on short lines to the bottoms of his weir stakes. The cold current kept them cool, and nobody could see them. The Captain waded in after them in May, up to his belt. As he felt along the stakes, an eel as long as his arm came in at his boot top and went straight up his trouser leg. The keeper laughed so hard at his dance that he fell into his own weir pen. The Captain got the jugs and the keeper, and the eel got clean away.

The Blue Line on a Fisherman's Gums

The Captain's last story was no laughing matter. A fisherman outside Concord grew greedy and cheap. He made his worm from old lead pipe pulled out of a mill drain, used a fish-pickling tub sealed with lead solder for his fermenter, and ran his spirit through all of it. When he grinned at his arrest, a blue-gray line ran along his gums at the edge of the teeth, as though drawn on with a slate pencil. That is the lead line, Burton's line in the medical books, and I have seen it in my own chair. When a man shows it, the lead is in his blood and his bones, and cramps, shaking hands and slow wits follow. The Captain smashed the worm with an axe, staved in the tub, and took the man to a physician instead of a jail.

Water, Wash and the Order of the Cuts

I will say this plainly. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and what follows is for history and education. I have been arrested twice, and I do not recommend it.

Keep the fish out of the still-house. Never draw your mash water below a weir, a mill or a barn. Take it from a clean spring upstream of everything, because if the water smells, the spirit will remember it. Your wash is only a few parts in a hundred alcohol. The still's job is to separate what you want from what will kill you, and the copper's job is to clean up the sulfur along the way. Mashes also differ in how much poison they carry. Corn or rye makes very little methanol. Apple or pear pomace makes a good deal more, because the pectin that sets your grandmother's preserves breaks down into methanol. The man running pomace must be twice as strict about his cuts.

Methanol boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's thermometer and good ethyl spirit at about one hundred seventy-three. So the methanol comes over mostly at the front of the run, though some of it trails along behind. Run the still slow and low, and catch the spirit in small jars, never in one big crock. The foreshots come first, smelling of varnish and the glue pot. Throw them out, a gill and a half or more for every five gallons of wash. Next come the heads, harsh as solvent, which belong in the lamp and never in a throat. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean, and those you keep. Last come the tails, oily and flat, which you set aside to run again. Judge each jar by nose and by a drop on the finger, one jar at a time, and write it all down.

Spirit vapour is heavier than air. It rolls along the floor and gathers in low places like a snake looking for a boot. Keep open flame away from the condenser outlet and the collecting jars, check every joint before you light, and never walk away from a running still. Keep lead out of the worm and out of the solder. Use proper copper and silver solder or sound mechanical unions, and keep it all clean.

Ashes, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

A message came from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. His uncle swears the old-timers threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Take the red oak first. Red oak is so open in the grain that you can blow your breath clean through a stave, which is why coopers make whiskey barrels from white oak. Red oak shavings will give the run some colour and a puckery taste like licking a fence post, and nothing more. Hickory ash is what your grandmother leached to make lye for her soap. It will make the run taste of soap, but it will not take out the heads. The cut is the cure.

Then there is the blue flame. Old hands will tell you to set a spoonful alight and trust it if it burns a clean blue, and they recite 'Lead burns red and makes you dead.' But methanol burns a pale blue too, so faint you can scarcely see it in daylight. The bead in a shaken jar tells you about strength and nothing about safety. Safety lies in the cuts you made and the metal you made them in.