Existing comment:
"Such was the price that was paid for fish"
Colonel Unger and his men at the dam struggled to remove an iron screen attached to the bottom of the spillway bridge, but it was jammed with debris that would not budge. The screen had been installed years before to keep fish from escaping from the lake. In the summer of 1881, the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club stocked the lake with 1,000 black bass, which had been transported by special railroad tank car from Lake Erie at a cost of about a dollar a fish.
After the flood, people were particularly bitter about the fish screens. A man by the name of Isaac Reed wrote a popular poem at the time which began:
Many thousands human lives --
Butchered husbands, slaughtered wives ...
Mangled daughters, bleeding sons,
Hosts of martyred little ones,
(Worse than Herod's awful crime)
Sent to heaven before their time;
Lovers burnt and sweethearts drowned,
Darlings lost but never found!
All the horrors that hell could wish,
Such was the price that was paid for -- fish! |