Billy Bjorkquist, on the south side of the Manistee River, looks north to the former location of the Bjorkquist Bros. commercial fishing docks. Photo by S.A. McFerran.
By Stewart A. McFerran
Today, nobody heads to Lake Michigan to fish for blackfin cisco. Few have ever seen one. Billy Bjorkquist is one of them. When he was a boy, he would ride with his father and uncles on board their boat, the Bob Richard, leaving from the Bjorkquist Bros.’ commercial fishing dock on the north side of the Manistee River and motoring into Lake Michigan. If a blackfin came up from the deep his uncles would shout out, because blackfin were bigger than the other fish and rare to see even then.
The blackfin cisco is one of eight fish species in the coregonus group. They once teemed in the Great Lakes. Massive groups of coregonids once schooled in Lake Michigan. If today’s fishers could see these schools in their fish finders, they would be astounded.
Changing coregonus populations
Coregonus nigripinnis (blackfin) share a subgenus with whitefish, cisco, chubs and four others. In a pristine state, the ecology of the big lakes was dominated by these silver swimmers, relatives of trout. Some in the “leucichthys” group are still known to fishers today.
The likes of cisco and whitefish are found throughout the clear lakes of the north. Whether in streams, bays or the big lakes, aquatic life responds to conditions in the water. If one were to take an inventory of the freshwater creatures found in Lake Michigan, the list would change over time. A “biological index” can show the health of the environment. Certain fish such as cisco are associated with pristine water.
U.S. zoologist Walter Koelz rode with commercial fishers in 1917 and collected different kinds of whitefish and ciscoes caught in the lakes. He continued his field study until 1924, collecting some 14,000 specimens. Many of these fish are stored in jars at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. Koelz’s work provides an important view of the full range of coregonus group species present before invasive creatures muscled into Great Lakes ecosystems.
In the 1980s, I fished with commercial fisher Ross Lang in the Manitou Passage for deep-water chubs. These days it seems the chubs have all but disappeared from the Manitou Passage.
Titus Seilheimer, Ph.D., is with Wisconsin Sea Grant. (He tweets using the name “Dr. Fish.”)
“C. hoyi (chubs) are still present in Lake Michigan but currently at fairly low levels,” Seilheimer said. “There is still some limited commercial harvest of chubs in Wisconsin, although expect to pay $12 a pound for smoked chubs.”
“The last few years the United States Geological Survey bottom-trawl estimates of prey fish had more chubs than alewives,” he added. “This is significant because chubs are a native species and alewives are invasive.”
Net fishers from Manistee
I recently chatted with Billy Bjorkquist, who commercially fished part time in Lake Michigan for 40 years, beginning at age 12. He caught both blackfin cisco (Coregonus nigripinnis) and chubs (C. hoyi).
“They used to get what they called the blackfin,” Bjorkquist began. “They liked them because they ran bigger. They kinda faded away somehow. They were very rare. My dad and my uncle would recognize them. They would grab one of them out of there (the net) and say, ‘There’s a blackfin!’”
Bjorkquist said his father and uncle made their own fishing nets.
“They would tie all those little squares, and they got to be right,” he explained. “If they’re not, you won’t catch any fish if there is a bag or a wave (in the net’s structure, created by the net not being taut). They gotta be straight up and down.”
He said his father and uncle were skilled enough to tie them straight. In winter, his father would tie nets in the basement and look through his inventory for those needing repair.
“On my day off (Bjorkquist worked full time at the mill in Manistee), they wanted me to come down and make new nets,” he said.
“I couldn’t see a future in it; I lost money at fishing,” he continued. “I’d get a day off, my dad would say, ‘You’re off Thursday. We are going to do this and do that.’
“I did it for him,” Bjorkquist said. “It was hard work, but I could do that. I didn’t care. I told my dad, ‘I’ll fish with you as long as you want to fish. I’ll be here to help you, whatever you got to do. I can run the boat, I can set the nets, I can do everything, as long as we can find a little help.’”
“Some of the relatives said, ‘It’s an old horse; let it die.’”
Billy Bjorkquist opted for a career at the mill after seeing the heartbreak and backbreak of the Lake Michigan commercial fishers. The ecology was stacked against them, and the state was turning Lake Michigan into a sportfishing mecca. The brothers believed this came at the expense of commercial fishers and constituted an illegal taking of property and business resources that had been developed over 100 years. Even though he never fished full time, Billy was a big part of the Bjorkquist Brothers’ fishing operation.
With policies favoring sport fishers, and industrial-sized aquaculture operations raising sport fish in state-owned hatcheries, commercial fishers continue to struggle.
The blackfin can still be found in Canada’s Lake Nipigon, according to Randy Eshenroder, of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
Learning from changes in fish ecosystems
More ecological changes are in store for Lake Michigan. Knowing that fish such as the blackfin cisco once filled the big lake, fishers of today can gain an understanding of historic ecosystems. By asking what happened to the blackfin cisco, people can begin to seek solutions. Knowledge of fish populations of the past will inform fishers and fisheries’ managers as they consider the future of the lakes.
Read more about blackfin cisco at:
http://www.glfc.org/pubs/misc/Ciscoes_of_the_Laurentian_Great_Lakes_and_Lake_Nipigon.pdf
Read more in our October 2020 issue about the Bjorkquist Brothers and their commercial fishing history: https://freshwater-reporter.com/bjorkquist-brothers-commercial-fishers-of-manistee-2/
Epilogue: The Bjorkquist Brothers went out of business in 1982, after their nets were confiscated by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Ross Lang drowned in 1998 while fishing.
Stewart McFerran likes to illuminate current environmental issues in a historic context. He hopes readers will gain understanding and insight into ways people interact with their environment. He sometimes fishes at Lower Woodcock Lake, near his home.
