Commercial fishing

Summary

Commercial fishing is the island’s oldest continuous industry and the reason Europeans and Americans came to the archipelago at all. It predates Strang, it survived him, it drew the Irish settlement that replaced his kingdom, and it was still “one of the principal occupations of the people of the harbor” in 1912. Whitefish and lake trout, salted and packed in barrels made on the island, went by schooner and steamer to Buffalo and Chicago. The trade collapsed in the mid 20th century with the fish populations it depended on.

The archipelago’s advantage was position: reefs and shoals that make the group dangerous to navigate also make it productive to fish, and the harbour let boats work grounds that were closer to Beaver Island than to Mackinac.

Before Strang

Quaife’s judgment, written in 1930 with the Strangite records in front of him, is that the fishery was already established when the Mormons arrived:

Although Strang continually referred to the islands as an uninhabited land which had been set apart for the Saints by God Himself, others had preceded them into this region. An extensive fishing industry had long flourished in the waters adjoining the islands, and traders were already established on the shores of Paradise Bay.

Anishinaabe fishing in the archipelago long predates all of this; see Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago. Strang’s own 1854 account describes Anishinaabe crews working the fisheries under a credit system that stripped them of their catch — “on a fishery where a dozen Indians were engaged, they were often plundered in this way to the amount of one hundred barrels in a season.”

The trade as it worked, 1854

The most detailed account held here is Strang’s chapter “The Fisheries” in Ancient and Modern Michilimackinac. It has to be read as advocacy — Strang is arguing that the fish trade is moving from Mackinac to his own island, and he was himself an antagonist of the fishermen — but its structural description is consistent with what other sources show.

Scale. “As early as 1824 small quantities of white-fish and trout begun to be sent to Buffalo for market. In the space of thirty years this branch of trade has increased from two thousand barrels to two hundred and fifty thousand, of which it is supposed one-half are taken in what were formerly known as the Mackinac fisheries, extending from Death’s Door to Middle Channel.” That places roughly 125,000 barrels a year in the northern Lake Michigan grounds by the mid-1850s.

Method. Strang credits French technique with making a year-round fishery possible: earlier fishing was in the shallows and the streams, while “The first Frenchmen in this country introduced the French modes of fishing, by which the fish were pursued to the deep waters, and thus a supply was obtained all the year.”

Credit and debt. The chapter’s central claim is that the business was controlled by traders at Mackinac who advanced barrels, salt and provisions against the catch: “Such were the habits of dissipation prevailing on the fishing grounds, that these frauds left the fishermen worse off at the close of every season; for they were destitute of credit.”

Relocation. Strang argues the trade was being “transferred to Washington Harbor, Saint James, Saint John, Saint Helena, Duncan, Detour, and divers other places”, each closer to the grounds than Mackinac, and that “the trade of Mackinac in fish must soon cease.” Of his own port he writes that Saint James is “the county seat of Emmet County, the seat of the fishing trade for Lake Michigan” where “the principal articles sold are fish and wood” and where “a great number of fish barrels” were made.

Barrels, twine and cooperage

The Daily Northern Islander’s price current in 1856 gives the trade’s whole supply chain in one column: white fish and trout by the barrel with separate buying and selling prices, fresh fish and herring, suckers, and then the inputs — fish barrels and halves, staves and hoops by the thousand, gilling twine, seaming twine and manilla cordeau.

Cooperage was a substantial industry in its own right. Elizabeth Whitney Williams: “There were many large cooper shops run. These furnished barrels to the fishermen to pack and salt their fish in. The cooper trade was” a considerable employer, and C. R. Wright “settled at Cable’s dock and carried on a large cooper shop to supply the barrels for the fishermen, which became a great industry.”

Fishermen against the kingdom

The fishery is not a background to the Strang story; the fishermen were the kingdom’s principal opponents and the agents of its end. Strang’s own narrative records armed parties arriving “from the fishing grounds” at Whiskey Point for the attempted expulsion of July 1850; nets lifted and stolen; a running conflict over theft in both directions; and the Garden Island whiskey trade. Quaife describes the fishermen as “a roistering crew with the free and easy habits of a population which was at once frontier, seafaring, and Irish”, who “soon perceived in the advent of the newcomers a menace to their own interests and ways of life.”

In 1856 it was fishermen and returning traders who drove the Strangites off. What they came back for was the fishing grounds.

The Irish fishery

Williams describes the trade at its height, in and after the Civil War:

One great reason that made the island so desirable a place to live at that time was its splendid fishing grounds. No one need to be without money in those days. Fish always brought a good price, and at the time of our Civil war brought a very high price.

Her account of the technology is precise and dateable: “In those days there were no tugs used in the fishing business, neither were there pound-nets used. There were many seines used. The fish caught were usually very large in size, both whitefish and trout.” Boats were sailed — she watches “the white sails of our fishing fleet hoisted nearly all at one time” and landing “over by the south point from the river”. Buying and outfitting passed from Cable to George Peckham and C. R. Wright, then to Dormer & Allen of Buffalo, who built a store and warehouse at the Point: “thousands of barrels of fish were caught and shipped every season. It soon became equal to the fish market at Mackinac Island, it being nearer to most of the fishing grounds.”

By 1902 the gear had changed enough for Scott’s Coast Pilot to warn mariners at Seul Choix Pointe to “Keep a lookout for trap nets” — pound and trap nets set from fixed stakes, precisely what Williams says did not exist in her youth.

Decline

The 2023 Master Plan states the outcome plainly: the archipelago “faced serious economic challenges in the early and mid-1900s, when fish population loss caused the commercial fishing industry to decline.” No source held here quantifies the collapse or identifies its causes on this specific fishery. A 1964 local retrospective records commercial fishing with the tug Silver Star from 1915 to 1935 and describes catches qualitatively as being measured in tons, but it does not supply a series or reconcile the date with the broader decline.

What remains is a sport and subsistence fishery under active management. The Master Plan records Lake Geneserath as a stocked walleye fishery monitored by the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians; Iron Ore Creek, the Jordan River and Cable’s Creek as designated trout streams; and a 2023 Michigan DNR survey of the inland waters. It also records LTBB staff confirming that whitefish yields for the tribes “are significantly down” as Lake Michigan warms — the same species, the same waters, and a decline still in progress.

The Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s rehabilitation guide gives the modern offshore management geography a different vocabulary. It groups the reefs and islands around Beaver into a West Beaver Group (Trout Island, High Island, Gull Island Shoal, and Boulder Reef) and an East Beaver Group (Hog Island Reef, Ile aux Galets, and Dahlia Shoal). The guide also quotes 1891 testimony that deep-water lake trout occurred “especially between the Manitou and Beaver Islands.” This connects present restoration units to older fishing geography, but it is not a continuous catch series and does not resolve the causes or date of the local commercial fishery’s decline.

The September 1964 obituary of Michael Cull supplies a fisherman-level view of that transition. It says Cull, born on Beaver Island in 1885, owned and skippered the tugs Betty C and LaFond, saw Lake Michigan fishing at its peak, and saw it “fizzel out” in 1940. The spelling and retrospective wording are preserved as source evidence; the obituary does not establish a precise end date for the industry or a complete vessel history.¹

The November 1968 Beaver Beacon supplies a detailed local memory of the November 11, 1940 Armistice Day storm. It names the Estonia, Evelyn, and mail boat Mary Margaret in and around Saint James Harbor, reports the loss of many boxes of fishing nets, and calls the storm a turning point in Great Lakes fishing. The account also preserves a harbor-scale sequence: boats returned from the Gull Island grounds, the Evelyn was run onto the beach, the Mary Margaret cast off, and the Estonia eventually beached safely after its lines parted.²

The same account is cross-checked against the June 1964 “Big Art” profile, which identifies Martin Arthur Larsen and his diesel tug Estonia and reports nearly $7,000 in net losses. These are retrospective local sources rather than a contemporaneous weather or fleet ledger, so the Estonia’s name and the storm’s reported effect are preserved without inferring a complete fleet list, registry history, or single proven ecological cause for the fishery’s decline.

The February 1965 Beaver Beacon preserves the physical infrastructure of that decline. Its Gallagher Dock retrospective describes fish measured in tons, remembers the Shamrock bringing in more than eight tons of lake trout, and records the dock’s demolition on February 8, 1965 for Yacht Dock expansion. The article lists many additional tugs but gives no registry or complete fleet chronology, so only the specifically detailed Shamrock is modeled as a vessel record in this batch.³

A May 1966 obituary supplies another episode-qualified fisherman record: William A. Belfy came to Beaver Island in 1908, co-owned the tug Silver Star with his brother Erwin, and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery after his death on May 8, 1966. This adds a named family/vessel connection without treating the obituary as a complete civil or commercial-fishing history.⁴

The May 1972 obituary for Lloyd McDonough gives a later community witness to that transition. It remembers his 39 years operating McDonough General Store, his twenty years as St. James Township supervisor, and an island that moved from fishing and farming toward tourism after the loss of fishing and the departure of many island residents. This is a retrospective local description, not a population series or a measured date for the industry’s end.⁵

Open questions

• How large was the Beaver Island fishery, in barrels, in any given year? Strang’s 250,000-barrel figure is for the whole northern lake and comes from an interested source. No landings series for this port has been located. U.S. Fish Commission reports from the 1880s-90s would give one.
• What caused the collapse, and when? Sea lamprey, overfishing, alewife invasion and habitat change are the standard explanations for Lake Michigan generally; nothing held here tests any of them against this archipelago, or dates the local end of commercial operation.
• Where were the fishing stations? Strang names Gull, Trout, Virgin and Rabbit Islands as fishing stations, and Whiskey Island and Fisherman Bay carry the trade in their names. None of these sites is documented archaeologically here. (“Virgin” and “Rabbit” are 1854 names whose modern equivalents are not established in this knowledge base.)
• How many boats, and whose? The schooner Nellie Johnson was built at Saint James in 1894, so vessels were being constructed on the island into the 1890s; Strang records “a few small schooners” built there by 1854. No vessel register for the port has been compiled.
• What were treaty-reserved fishing rights in practice? The archipelago falls within the 1836 cession, and LTBB and GTB exercise fishing rights today. The 20th-century history of those rights in these waters is outside anything held here.

See also

• Irish settlement of Beaver Island
• Elizabeth Whitney Williams
• Whiskey Island
• Fisherman Bay
• Garden Island
• Shipping and navigation
• Lumbering
• Anishinaabe presence in the archipelago
• Demography
• Michael Cull (Beaver Island fisherman, 1885–1964)
• Betty C (Michael Cull fishing tug)
• LaFond (Michael Cull fishing tug)