Forest Prairie Edge by Merle Massie

Author:Merle Massie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 2014-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Commercial Fishing

Overland freighting tied in with burgeoning commercial fisheries. In fact, the growth of fishing as a commercial enterprise led to an intriguing shift in freighting contracts. Hauling fish back for the large commercial fisheries or as private enterprise came to be viewed as the primary freight, offering the best profit. Other supplies going north were of secondary consideration.31 Commercial fishing began on lakes close to Prince Albert as early as the 1890s, when Candle Lake, Big Trout (Crean) Lake, and Montreal Lake were fished. As with the lumber industry, commercial fishing was a winter occupation. Before mechanized cold storage, fish were transported frozen. The Prince Albert Advocate reported in November 1894 that one William Spencer, “whose seventy-odd years of age seem to have made but slight impression in either his appearance, spirits, or powers of endurance,” recently returned from inspecting fisheries in the northern part of the district on foot. “He reports the fish very plentiful and the catch a profitable one,” the paper noted, with a combination of glee and awe. The paper also reported an interesting story that connected boreal water landscapes and the new inroads into farming:

A good fish story comes from the north. It seems fish are very plentiful in Montreal and surrounding lakes, and when the settlers there run short of hay, as they frequently do, the cattle are induced to eat fish by sprinkling salt over them, which the cattle lick, and in this way eat the fish for the sake of the salt. That is only to get the appetite for fish cultivated, however. After that the cattle become addicted to the “fish” habit and in this particular instance a sagacious old ox is said to have frequently gone down to the lake, broken open a hole through three feet of ice, and feasted to satisfaction on the fish which swam into the hole thus made.32

The growth of commercial fishing—for whitefish, trout, pickerel, and northern pike—led to the posting of a fisheries overseer at Prince Albert in 1893 to issue permits and ensure compliance with fishing regulations.33 Commercial fishing ebbed and flowed according to profits and environmental constraints. As early as 1909 there were complaints of overexploitation. A 1909 commission investigated the industry and made recommendations regarding season dates, net dimensions, licences, and other technical concerns. Cleaning and packing procedures, the demand created by the First World War, and improvements in cold storage and transportation led to higher prices and general expansion of the industry.34

During the First World War, northern inland commercial fishing grew. Prices for fish rose, allowing better profits and improvements, such as fish boxes and cold storage, that ensured a better end product. Between 1920 and 1940, the annual commercial production of northern Saskatchewan almost doubled.35 A newspaper article dated c. 1926 on the Prince Albert region trumpeted that “fishing in the northern lakes and streams is important and last year more than 5,673,650 pounds of northern pike, pickerel, trout and whitefish, valued at about $450,000, were shipped to the eastern markets.

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