Ever since fish flesh first met tastebuds, landlubbing humans have endeavored to find ways to finagle fresh meals from the nearest coast. But in Dr. Stone’s America, transport of live fish by rail had only just become a possibility by 1869, when the Transcontinental Railroad officially opened for business with the driving of the ceremonial 17.6-carat golden spike in Promontory, Utah. Having resigned from the ministry in 1868—on doctors’ orders to spend more time in nature—Dr. Stone, an amateur trout specialist, soon found himself elected secretary of the American Fish Culturists’ Association.
By 1872, Stone received a more federal calling: establishing hatcheries at the behest of the newly founded Fish Commission. Stone spearheaded the creation of the first such hatchery (Baird Station, named after his boss) on California’s McCloud River, where he personally packed cultured chinook salmon eggs in layers of moss before driving them to the nearest rail station, 22 miles away in Redding (through the Indigenous territory of Winnemem Wintu, whose residents viewed the hatchery’s arrival with profound skepticism). A San Francisco-based New Zealander would later ship some of these eggs as far afield as the Auckland Acclimatisation Society—one of many such organizations at the time dedicated to the import of foreign creatures into European colonies, in order to “enrich” the local flora and fauna.
Both Stone and the Fish Commission felt justified in shepherding these hapless creatures across thousands of miles, because they could no longer deny the reality of dwindling wild fishery stocks along the Eastern Seaboard (brought about not just by overfishing, but by the construction of dams that cut off access to upstream spawning grounds). By establishing Eastern food staples in the American West, Stone and his contemporaries ascribed to a form of conservation typical of the era, in which scientific interventions could help both nature and civilization with no apparent downside.
Seventeen days after his hard right turn off a bridge, Stone left D.C. again—this time, with eight 10-gallon milk cans, each containing 5,000 juvenile shad destined for the Sacramento River. En route, a cold snap in Utah drove one of Stone’s assistants to heat iron couplings in the train’s furnace; these couplings then heated the “reserve water” added to the jugs, two degrees at a time, to keep the shad alive (without also flash-frying them). But this ad-hoc approach—in 1879, Stone hired fellow passengers to babysit his jugs of striped bass fry—could only go so far. By 1881, the U.S. Fish Commission debuted a custom-designed baggage carriage as its first-ever official “fish car.”