Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 June 1908 — FISHERMEN ARE DISCONSOLATE [ARTICLE]

FISHERMEN ARE DISCONSOLATE

The local fishermen, especially the older ones, who used to fish on the Iroquois rapids and in the deep holes south of the Stackhouse bridge, where pickerel, bass and crappie were found in vast numbers, are disconsolate because of the removal of the rock from the channel in this city. Many a pickerel has been hooked in these holes—and a few speared on the rapids—so large that no line or hook was strong enough to hold them as they made a dash into the splatter-dock that lined the low, unapproachable banks, in a wild race for life. This was before the advent of B. J. Gifford in northern Jasper. When Gifford got his ditch finished to the Iroquois, north of the Stackhouse bridge, the sand and muck that it emptied into the river channel filled in all the holes In the channel as far down as the Groom’s bridge. Then the fish-laden holes, in many places 12 to 14 feet deep, picturesque with fringes of yellow flowers and waving grass on either bank, passed into history, and nothing remained but a few shallow ones farther down the river and the rapids in this city, and before another season has rolled around, before another light will be seen moving slowly up stream, before another struggling fish is impalled on a gig, they, too, will have passed from the stage of action, soon to be burled In oblivion. Then, with the ledge of rock on the Gangloff farm removed, and the channel completed through Rensselaer, the fishing on these beautiful rapids, made famous by the Indians centuries ago, and the delight of thousands of white men since the first settlement in this vicinity, will only remain as a delightful memory to the living—a secret sealed forever In the breasts of the dead. Who not say that the old fishermen have just cause for grief?