The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [57]
At first, Green had a success rate of only 25 percent. Not content with that, he experimented, and before long his trial-and-error approach paid off. He discovered that water should never be mixed in with the spawn and milt, because it diluted potency. Using a method he called “dry impregnation,” Green had a 97 percent efficiency rate. He secretly produced fish at his compound for a couple of years, cutting brook trout fillets for market and selling his spawn in Buffalo, Niagara, and Rochester.82
This anonymity, however, didn’t last forever. A series of admiring articles about Seth Green’s upstate hatchery appeared in New York City newspapers. His discovery resulted overnight in a rush to create trout ponds everywhere. Such fish farms were seen as a highly profitable investment, an easier way to get fish onto the nation’s dinner tables than fishing in streams and lakes with rod and reel or nets. Green was suddenly in high demand as a teacher and demonstrator. In 1867 New England fish commissioners hired Green to start propagating the American shad on the Connecticut River, where stocks had been seriously depleted.83 Although he was subjected to torrents of antiscientific ridicule from disbelieving fishermen, Green carefully erected dams, waste gates, and hatching boxes in four New England states. Fishermen on the Connecticut River, now deeply resentful of Green’s wizardry, vandalized his hatchery equipment and cut holes through all his nets. Undaunted, Green began keeping watch over his homemade boxes, leaping out of bushes in the morning hours with a loaded Winchester to frighten would-be saboteurs away.
For a while, Green had a bigger worry than angry fishermen: it turned out that shad couldn’t be hatched through artificial impregnation the same way trout were. From a way station in Holyoke, Massachusetts, he experimented with burying the eggs in gravel placed in the troughs. Every day he made scientific adjustments to his contraptions, but the shad eggs wouldn’t hatch. Despite the continued harassment of local fishermen, Green’s stoic persistence and surgical repairing eventually paid off. When he checked the boxes one afternoon, the shad had hatched. It was an important moment: he had established that shad eggs could hatch in only thirty-three hours, far less time than trout eggs took. And his success rate was even higher: Green claimed that 999 out of 1,000 shad eggs hatched under his new protocol. By the time he closed his Holyoke shop in 1872, Green had released 40 million shad into the Connecticut River. But the river men weren’t wrong. Before Seth Green arrived on the scene, shad had been selling at 100 for forty dollars. By the time he finished replenishing the river, the market price per 100 had plummeted to three dollars.
Although Green received excellent press coverage, due in part to his Trout Culture, published in 1870,84 New England’s fish commissioners gave him only a measly stipend of $200 for all his innovative hard work. (By contrast, in 1871 the California Fish and Game Commission introduced hatchery shad into the Sacramento River and paid Green handsomely for inspiring the hatcheries85).Outraged at his shabby treatment by the New Englanders, Green accused the commissioners of not understanding the magnitude of his accomplishment. His goal was to restock America’s lakes, rivers, and streams, but he needed a sponsor for such a huge undertaking.
It was at this point that Green joined forces with Robert B. Roosevelt, the nation’s richest enthusiast for fish culture. Using his political contacts in Albany, R.B.R. had already petitioned the legislature to launch the state fishing commission. When Green was appointed to the commission