Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [49]
“There’s nothing smaller than seventeen inches in there,” Robert says. “Some go seven, eight, ten pounds—we take them all trying to spawn.” Historically, of course, most fish would have preferred the Truckee, both because of size and because it enters Pyramid from the east; cutthroats still have a genetic memory of the ocean and instinctively try to head in the direction their spawning ancestors followed from the Pacific. But these fish were released here soon after hatching, and this is their natural point of return.
Robert and the workers have already separated out fifty males and fifty females; the latter are ripe, ready to shed their eggs. They’re big fish, drifting gigantic and gentle in the holding tanks. This many females will produce about a hundred fifty thousand eggs, which is all the hatchery’s trays and tanks can handle until the renovations on the Numana hatchery are complete. “But that’s nothing against what we’d have had before the whole lake basically got fished out,” Robert says. “The original cutthroat would head up the Truckee up to the vista, way up in the mountain area into the cold water from the spring snowmelt, and there were so many that they’d say the river would turn black. But at the time there was a commercial fishery right alongside the people fishing for sport—they were taking them left and right, and there was no program to replenish it.”
At its peak the fishery at Pyramid Lake was taking out up to two hundred thousand pounds of trout a year with traps and gill nets, the equivalent of twenty thousand ten-pound fish. And that’s only the fish that were shipped by Wells Fargo—the numbers don’t include any sold locally or caught for personal use. The combination of Sierra ice and the speed of the Virginia & Truckee Railroad meant that trout could be eaten as far away as Chicago. Such shipments were becoming a national habit; in the decades after the Civil War, ice and railroads let Americans get used to eating fish caught hundreds of miles away (on the day New York’s Fulton Fish Market first opened in 1882, it offered trout from Vermont, Quebec, and Long Island, along with hatchery-raised brook trout, rainbows, two kinds of bass, and landlocked salmon). “Fresh” and “local” were no longer synonymous.
“There used to be a railroad right up there—they were taking the trout out through Fernley, sending them all over the place,” Robert says, “and with the agricultural dams there was no way for them to recover. It got to the point that there was no fishery at all.”
When Robert said there was no program to replenish the trout, he was actually understating how bad things got—in fact, the programs that were in place couldn’t have done more damage to the local cutthroat if they’d been designed to. The worst of these was the Derby Dam. The Derby was the Bureau of Reclamation’s very first project (literally Specification Number 1, Drawing Number 1), and when completed as part of the 1905 Newlands Project it instantly sealed off the trout’s historic spawning channels. The day the dam closed for the first time, hundreds of trout were left flopping in what little water remained downstream; onlookers rushed into the channel and clubbed them to take home. Meanwhile the agricultural diversions—which removed some quarter million acre-feet of water a year from the river, mostly to grow cantaloupes on land better suited for growing native pasture and other low-value crops—promptly dropped the level of Pyramid Lake some eighty feet. Though the Nevada Fish Commissioners complained loudly about the lack of adequate fish ladders, Frederick Newell, the bureau’s first commissioner, said outright that “fish have no rights in water law,” with Senator Newlands,