to
be drawn up into the boat. In this way, where the Unios are thick,,
nearly every hook becomes freighted, and some may have two or three
shells clinging thereto. It is easy to collect fifty mollusks in
passing over a length of two hundred feet. Two drags are carried by
each fisherman, and the second one is put overboard as soon as the
first one is ready to be raised. This is suspended with the bar across
two upright forks on either side of the boat with the prongs swinging
freely, and the mussels are removed therefrom. When this operation is
completed, the drag is put overboard and the other one is ready for
lifting. This apparatus is very effective, and as much as a ton of
shells has been taken by one man in twelve hours, but the average is
very much less, probably not over four or five hundred pounds.
Objection is made to this manner of fishing, since many mollusks not
brought to the surface are so injured that they die.
A
cruder implement of similar type has long been employed on many logging
streams. The weighted branch of a tree is dragged on the bottom behind
a raft of logs, and the mussels attach themselves to the twigs in the
same manner as on the crowfoot hooks.
During
the pearling excitement in Arkansas, a considerable portion of the
choice pearls were found, not in the mussels, but lying loosely in the
mud of the shores, indicating that under some circumstances, as
agitation by freshets or floods, the loose pearls are shaken out from
the Unios. In some instances, indeed, the pearls were found upon or in
the soil at some distance from streams or lakes. It is reported that in
October, 1897, Mr. J. W. Mcintosh, of the northern part of Lonoke
County, while digging post-holes in the old bed of Cypress Bayou, found
a number of pearls, some "as large as a 44-caliber Winchester ball,"
lying within the shells at a depth of a foot and a half below the
surface. This peculiar occurrence is partly explained by the wide
extension of the waters in flood times over the low region, and by the
shifting of streams and the isolation of cut-offs.
Stray
pearls have been found in many other odd places, as in the viscera of
chickens and ducks, in the stomachs of fish, and even within a pig's
mouth. It is not an uncommon scene in the pearling region to see men
raking over the muck in hog-pens along the river banks, hoping there to
find a stray pearl lost from the mussels with which the animals had
been fed by persons who had indeed "cast pearls before swine." It is
related that a Negro near Marley, Illinois, in this way secured a pearl
weighing 118 grains, for which he received $2000 from a St. Louis
buyer, and which was ultimately sold to a New York dealer for $5000.
During
the height of the Arkansas pearling excitement in 1897, the speculative
spirit was so rife that many persons—unwilling to engage
