“What fish do they find in the St. Clair?”

“Various sorts.  Trout and white-fish are the finest, but they are not so abundant at this season.  Sturgeon and pike are just now in season, and the pike are excellent.”

One of us happening to observe that the river might easily be crossed by swimming, the settler answered: 

“Not so easily as you might think.  The river is as cold as a well, and the swimmer would soon be chilled through, and perhaps taken with the cramp.  It is this coldness of the water which makes the fish so fine at this season.”

This mention of sturgeons tempts me to relate an anecdote which I heard as I was coming up the Hudson.  A gentleman who lived east of the river, a little back of Tivoli, caught last spring one of these fish, which weighed about a hundred and sixty pounds.  He carried it to a large pond near his house, the longest diameter of which is about a mile, and without taking it out of the net in which he had caught it, he knotted part of the meshes closely around it, and attaching them to a pair of lines like reins, put the creature into the water.  To the end of the lines he had taken care to attach a buoy, to mark the place of the fish in the pond.  He keeps a small boat, and when he has a mind to make a water-excursion, he rows to the place where the buoy is floating, ties the lines to the boat and, pulling them so as to disturb the fish, is drawn backward and forward with great rapidity over the surface.  The pond, in its deepest part, has only seven feet water, so that there is no danger of being dragged under.

We now proceeded up the river, and in about two hours came to a neat little village on the British side, with a windmill, a little church, and two or three little cottages, prettily screened by young trees.  Immediately beyond this was the beginning of the Chippewa settlement of which we had been told.  Log-houses, at the distance of nearly a quarter of a mile from each other, stood in a long row beside the river, with scattered trees about them, the largest of the forest, some girdled and leafless, some untouched and green, the smallest trees between having been cut away.  Here and there an Indian woman, in a blue dress and bare-headed, was walking along the road; cows and horses were grazing near the houses; patches of maize were seen, tended in a slovenly manner and by no means clear of bushes, but nobody was at work in the fields.  Two females came down to the bank, with paddles, and put off into the river in a birch-bark canoe, the ends of which were carved in the peculiar Indian fashion.  A little beyond stood a group of boys and girls on the water’s edge, the boys in shirts and leggins, silently watching the steamer as it shot by them.  Still further on a group of children of both sexes, seven in number, came running with shrill cries down the bank.  It was then about twelve o’clock, and the weather was extremely sultry.  The boys in an instant threw off their shirts and leggins, and plunged into the water with shouts, but the girls were in before them, for they wore only a kind of petticoat which they did not take off, but cast themselves into the river at once and slid through the clear water like seals.