Shad…bones and all…is ‘America’s fish’

One of President George Washington’s favorite foods was a delicious heaping of American shad, the largest of the fishes from the herring family. He harvested shad in the Potomac River off shore from his Mount Vernon, Va., estate.

An expert on the shad species is Jim Cummins, who retired in 2016 after a career with the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, which constitutes the prime spawning grounds for shad once they leave their ocean habitat.

Cummins said shad is “tasty and sweet, but full of bones” – 769 in all, most of which are small “Y” shaped bones and found in shad where most fish fillets would be bone-free.

No doubt, George Washington knew the technique of “boning – the removal of the tiny ‘Y’ bones. It’s a skill, if not art, and often a family guarded secret,” Cummins said.

In the language of the Native American Algonquin people, the word for shad was “tatamaho,” according to Cummins. The legend tells us “an unhappy porcupine once asked the Great Spirit to change it into another form.”

The Great Spirit obliged, turning the porcupine “inside out” to emerge as a fish (the shad); its prickly quills on the exterior were transformed into fish bones on the interior.

On another front, author Timothy Ballard commented in 2016 that “miracles involving fish didn’t just happen in Biblical times; one occurred during the Revolutionary War as well.”

His essay for magazine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, credits the shad with saving Gen. George Washington’s army at Valley Forge, Pa., in the winter of 1778.

Ballard offered: “Washington feared that if food did not arrive soon, his army faced three choices: ‘starve…dissolve…or disperse.’”

“Suddenly, in the midst of the winter famine, there was an unexpected warming of the weather, too early to truly be springtime.” Yet, the waters warmed, “tricking the shad into beginning their run up the Delaware River early,” Ballard wrote.

He said thousands of shad, described as “prodigious in number” and in “Biblical proportions,” swam up the Delaware River and into its tributaries.  

One important tributary was the Schuylkill River; its mouth is just below Philadelphia, Pa., which was now occupied by British troops.

Fortunately, the shad made a left turn and found their way up the Schuylkill, traveling about 18 miles toward Washington’s Valley Forge encampment and congregating there, where the river is only about knee-deep. Soldiers became fishermen.

In 1938, historian Harry Emerson Wildes wrote about the occurrence, as if he were the play-by-play announcer.

“Countless thousands of fat shad, swimming up the Schuylkill, filled the river. Soldiers thronged the riverbank. The cavalry was ordered into the riverbed. The horsemen rode upstream, noisily shouting and beating the water, driving the shad before them into nets spread across the Schuylkill,” Wildes wrote.

“So thick were the shad that when the fish were cornered in the nets, a pole could not be thrust into the water without striking fish. The netting was continued day after day until the army was thoroughly stuffed with fish and in addition, hundreds of barrels of shad were salted down for future use.”

Wildes added: “Even today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gives credence to the claim that shad were responsible for ‘saving George Washington’s troops from starvation as they camped along the Schuylkill River at Valley Forge.’”

This, then, may very well have been one of the most pivotal moments in the American Revolution, fueling Gen. Washington’s troops to fight on.

The surrender of British Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis to Gen. Washington at the Battle of Yorktown (Va.) on Oct. 19, 1781, marked the end of the war, effectively achieving America’s independence.