My dad enjoyed fishing, even in the Fox River, which was heavily polluted throughout his retirement and my early years. As he dunked a worm in the river and someone would ask him how the fishing was, he always answered, “The fishing is great. The catching, though, is pretty bad.”

I suppose that’s how it has been with anglers for the past few thousand years or so as they enjoyed the outdoors while trying to catch a wily denizen of the deep. Good fishing, the old saying goes among anglers, is when you aren’t catching anything; when you catch something, that’s great fishing.

The first folks to dunk a line in the Fox River were the Native People who lived here thousands of years ago. Artifact collectors have found bone fish hooks and even a few bone fishing spearheads along the river’s banks. In addition, stone artifacts called plummets, which are actually fish net weights, are found in Indian village sites dating back 1,000 years or so.

Fishing for those long ago Native People was a serious business – bad luck fishing wasn’t just embarrassing, it could mean going hungry – but it’s hard to believe at least some of those ancient anglers didn’t get a kick out of it, just like we do today.

The joy of fishing aside, we know that fish provided a major part of the diet of many Native American groups. Fish scales and bones from various species are commonly found in ancient village middens (trash heaps). Among the fish species discovered to be common in Midwestern Indian village sites are walleye pike, largemouth bass, bullheads, catfish, perch, rock pas, northern pike and sheepshead. In addition, Indians enjoyed eating various kinds of turtles and at least six kinds of freshwater clams. In fact, large numbers of clamshells usually are considered a clue as to whether a site might have been occupied by ancient Native People.

As the Late Woodland culture developed among the Indian groups living in the Great Lakes region (the tribes encountered in the Fox and Illinois River valleys by the first European explorers were examples of this cultural tradition), reliance on fishing did not lessen. Some Indian groups became very proficient at fishing, in fact, and traded dried smoked fish to other tribes, and then to the European traders who made their way into the region.

The impact of the fur trade on Midwestern Native People was severe, since it caused most groups to spend ever-larger amounts of time hunting and trapping fur-bearing animals rather than food animals. By the early 1800s, most local tribal groups were little more than employees of the large fur trading companies. That meant that food gathered by the women – including fish – became ever more important. It was so vital, in fact, that it sometimes led to extreme violence.

In 1831, newly arrived settler William Davis built a dam near the mouth of Indian Creek, a Fox River tributary just south of the Kendall County line in modern LaSalle County. Davis needed the dam to power the mill he was planning to build. But Potawatomi Indians living in a small village above the dam vigorously complained the dam was preventing fish from swimming upriver to reach their village. The village’s head man, after being contemptuously dismissed by Davis, attempted to remove the dam. Davis retaliated by severely beating the village leader. When the Black Hawk War broke out in the spring of 1832, the angry Indians returned to kill Davis and 13 others in what has come to be called the Indian Creek massacre.

The Davis incident was by far the most serious case of the clash of cultures caused by American settlers flooding into the Fox Valley as the region’s Native People saw their way of life slowly disappearing.

Which isn’t to say there haven’t been other, lesser, controversies from time to time. In 1883, the state of Illinois sued to require William Parker, owner of Parker’s Mills in the tiny village of Troy just north of Oswego, to install fish-ways (chutes that allow fish to transit dams) in his dam across the Fox River. Parker apparently did so, at least according to a brief note in an 1890 issue of the Kendall County Record.

By the late 1800s, the residents living along the Fox River’s banks began to depend on the river not only for the game along its banks and the fish in the stream, but for its commercial opportunities, as well. One of the main commercial opportunities of the era and directly related to the river was the button industry, which depended on harvesting Fox River mussel and clam shells. Many area residents participated in the clamming industry, using homemade flat-bottomed boats. The harvested clams were taken ashore and put in boiling water to open them. After scraping out the clam meat, the shells were transported to button factories, where the round buttons were cut out. Button factories were located in Yorkville and Millington at various times.

The ice industry, too, made use of the river’s water, with tons of ice harvested each year and then shipped out to help preserve food in homes and businesses.

But growing water pollution, which decimated the clam population, coupled with the invention of cheap plastics killed the mother-of-pearl button business. Pollution also killed the ice harvesting business, as well as the Fox River’s sport fishery, which was moribund for many years.

But with the passage of the first Clean Water Act in 1972 (prompted in part by “The Fox,” our homegrown ecological crusader), the Fox River began to recover. Today, it is largely back. Soil erosion and nutrient pollution from agriculture and lawn fertilizer-laden runoff are the most serious water quality problems the river faces.

While those problems are serious, they are not impossible to solve, something that could make for some great fishing, and even better catching, in the future.

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