Before the arrival of the English there, the Indians had fish in such vast plenty that the boys and girls would take a pointed stick and strike the lesser sort as they swam upon the flats. The larger fish that kept in deeper water, they were put to a little more difficulty to take. But for these they made weirs, that is, a hedge of small rived sticks or reeds of the thickness of a man's finger. These they wove together in a row with straps of green oak or other tough wood, so close that the small fish could not pass through. Upon high water mark they pitched one end of this hedge and the other they extended into the river to the depth of eight or ten foot, fastening it with stakes, making cods out from the hedge on one side, almost at the end, and leaving a gap for the fish to go into them. These were contrived so that the fish could easily find their passage into those cods when they were at the gap, but not see their way out again when they were in. Thus if they offered to pass through, they were taken. Sometimes they made such a hedge as this quite across a creek at high water and at low would go into the run, so contracted into a narrow stream, and take out what fish they pleased. At the falls of the rivers where the water is shallow and the current strong, the Indians use another kind of weir thus made. They make a dam of loose stone, whereof there is plenty at hand, quite across the river, leaving one, two, or more spaces or trunnels for the water to pass through. At the mouth they set a pot of reeds, wove in form of a cone, whose base is about three foot [wide] and ten [foot] perpendicular, into which the swiftness of the current carries the fish and wedges them so fast that they cannot possibly return. The Indian way of catching sturgeon, when they came into the narrow part of the rivers, was by a man's clapping a noose over their tails and by keeping fast his hold. Thus a fish, finding itself entangled, would flounce and often pull him under water. Then that man was counted a cockarouse, or brave fellow, that would not let go till with swimming, wading and diving, he had tired the sturgeon and brought it ashore. These sturgeon would also leap into their canoes in crossing the river, as many of them do still every year into the boats of the English.