Penobscot River -- Poaching -- 1880

Description of Atlantic salmon poaching activities in the Penobscot drainage, from 1880 Maine Fish and Game Commission Report.

POACHING -- BANGOR

"The great trouble is not in the laws themselves so much as the continued changes made in them from year to year, rendering it difficult for the people to understand or remember, or even know what they are. The laws are nearly correct now, they require but few slight changes, and they can be codified and printed in pamphlet form and generally distributed. The chief fault is not in the laws but the power of enforcement. The Wardens, both for fish and game should not be appointed for districts and counties, but for the State at large. They could then be sent where their services are most urgently needed by the Commissioners. The Wardens when appointed for a locality, are liable to be intimidated, or influenced by interest. The salary is not sufficient to warrant their being appointed for a locality remote from their own home and property. At Bangor the position is a peculiar one, and requires that the Commissioners should be vested with power to increase the force when required. It is a common boast, and used to imply a threat by the class of persons who infest the river during the salmon season, that they have men in the crew who would "as soon as shoot a man as look at him." The Wardens on this secton of the river have been repeatedly assaulted, and in a manner and with dogged persistence that renders it miraculous that they have escaped with their lives. One was struck with a stone and left lying for sometime senseless upon the ground. It should be borne in mind that all this has occurred in the same district, and nearly in the same locality or neighborhood, where three murders and once case of manslaughter have been committed within a few months.

"The river is broad below the water works dam, where the fish collect in large numbers before the first great obstruction on the river. In the vicinity of a city like Bangor, there is always a large class of idle, dissipated men, ready for any wild enterprise. The taking of a salmon affords tempting means of obtaining rum and tobacco. We should have a boat on this station all the time day and night. The river at Orono at Basin Mills and at Great Works, is often tempting ground for poachers. The poachers from Bangor go on to the forbidden ground between the dam and toll bridge, with a boat's crew of four good oarsmen; if they are detected and pursued, they trust to escape by means of a stronger crew; and if out-rowed, they run their boat ashore and escape. We seize the boat and it is the next day claimed as having been stolen."

EAST BRANCH --

"We published in our report of last year, a letter from a friend, commenting upon the fact that while in the past few the years the salmon were so reduced in numbers on the east branch of the Penobscot, that netting was entirely abandoned, as producing but two or three fish for the whole season, in 1879 over one hundred salmon were taken on the river at the Hunt Farm. This year, 1880, six hundred and eighty-six salmon were taken at the same place, up to the 15th of July, when all legal fishing ceased."

WEST BRANCH --

"The west branch of the Penobscot has been full of salmon this year. The gates of the West Twin dam are kept closed, to economize the water, until opened for the passage of the logs of the great west branch drive. The salmon wait below for the opening of these gates, and then seek to make their way to their spawning grounds. This year, after the drives had passed, the gates were again closed by some crews of lawless men, and the salmon wantonly slaughtered. Crews of men sent to remove the obstructions on Ripogenus, and at other places, were guilty of many criminal acts that deserve severe punishment."

MATTAWAMKEAG --

"The unprecedented drought of the year, we feared, at one time endangered our breeding fish. Those in the Mattawamkeag, below Gordon's falls, before the fishway was completed, fell back as the water shallowed, into the deeper pools of the Penobscot. Many at the worst period of the drought were slaughtered in the deep pools, where they could not escape; as many as twenty-five were killed in one single pool."

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