By Nanci Wakeman
In 1971 Peter Martyn went fishing in November with Al Milligan and Lid Haggart. He wrote about the experience and published the article in The Globe and Mail’s Weekend Magazine. He entitled it ‘Two Stubborn Men’ – Fishing the Great Lakes a dying business – 1972-02-06 (1)
Roy Milligan and Lid Haggart were commercial fishermen on Georgian Bay near Pte Au Baril, mostly catching Whitefish. This required battling snow, ice, and winter storms in late November. In 1955 their labour netted them 11 ton of Whitefish; on this trip in 1971, they netted 100 lbs. of marketable fish. Stubborn men indeed, as even when their exacting labour hardly put food on the table for their families, the men were happy fishing and wouldn’t consider quitting until they became too old to continue.
Is there a fishing gene? Lid Haggart started fishing in WW1. He ran away from home at 14 and got a job on a steamboat. He got his mate’s licence at 20 and became a Captain at 23. Lid Haggart’s business L.M. Haggart and Fisheries was started in 1910 on Mattanac Island. Marg Lloyd, the daughter of Lid remembers fishing with her father near Pointe au Baril, during the last year he was able to go out onto the bay. Marg wanted to take over the business but her dad said no. It was too hard to make a living by the time he died at 90.
According to Roy Milligan one of Al Milligan’s sons, fishing for Whitefish meant taking nets out to the shallow shoals at 4 am in late November when the Whitefish would come in to spawn. The fishermen would dig a hole in the ice to send the net out under the ice. They would then go back to the fishing camp for a hearty meal before going out again at 3:00 pm to dig another hole to pull in the nets. Often the nets would be full of seaweed that had to be picked out by hand.
Once the catch was brought back to the fishing camp it had to be gutted and spooned, then packed on ice which was chopped and stored in ice houses, constructed by the fishermen; packed in fish boxes that the fisherman made themselves; then taken to a truck on the highway which would transport it to the Bayfield area from where it was trucked to Hamilton, or sent by rail to Buffalo and Chicago. No conveyor belts or pre-made boxes for the fishers; the entire process was done by hard labour.
Marg Lloyd remembers a day when she, her father and one of their neighbours were coming back in from a fishing expedition trailing a mile of net behind the boat. She was sitting on the spinning stool, aft, when her father who liked a tipple once in a while, opened up full throttle and yelled to her to hold onto the nets. Finally, the neighbour got Lid to cut the throttle and Marg screamed at her father, “If you do that again, I will cut the nets!” “Good decision,” countered her father. It was a test that Marg is able to laugh about now.
Roy Milligan started fishing with his dad at 15. He quit school and headed out to the fishing camp on Frederick Island where they would spend 2 to 3 weeks. After 63 years of this life, the Ministry of Natural Resources burned down the fishing camp. It was illegal. Roy and his dad had camouflaged it so they could keep fishing but the MNR wanted the commercial fishing industry on Georgian Bay to be replaced by the tourist industry. It kept lowering the quotas for the commercial fishers until they were gradually forced out of business. The government ended up buying out the last commercial fishing operations on the Mink Islands.
According to Albert, Al Milligan’s other son, the lure of fishing is the water itself. And for many of us who are devoted to this freshwater ocean named Georgian Bay, that is something with which we can identify, even if we aren’t stubborn men and their stubborn children.
The initial article ‘Two Stubborn Men’ written by Peter Martyn is used with his permission.