46 The Sea

was rolled over to a long line in the ﬁsh warehouse. Here, lying on its side, a bung-hole was bored on the top side in the middle of a good wide stave. Every morning for several days afterwards, the warehouse man came with pickle and ﬁlled the barrels to compensate for shrinkage and soakage on the barrel head. Then one morning with mallet and bungs, each barrel was ﬁnally sealed. It was always the full barrels that squirted pickle in the bung-driver’s eye as a salute to a job well done.

In the early days of barrel making, the cooper made his own staves but from the 1890s onward, they were bought from a mill. Farmers in the winter cut slender ash for hoop poles—where the Indians had not taken them for basket making—and sold them in Souris to the barrel makers. The coopers made their own heads, or, should we say, their own barrel-heads. Four or ﬁve men were often found at work in a Souris cooper shop. The staves were warped in a steam box. A special chisel was used to make the groove at the end of the staves.

A cooper also made noggins, casks, tubs, butter ﬁrkins, well buckets, churns, pork barrels and many other items of pioneer necessity. But cooper shops are gone now. The last one in Souris, the old St. John shop, was torn down in 1957. Coopers in this eastern town included the large family of St. Johns; Richard and his five sons, Patrick, James, Richard, Martin and George. Donald Strahan and his son Angus who came from Cascumpec in the 18603 were also men of the hoop. So was William Maskell who often built between two and three thousand barrels a year. An area of Souris north east of the railway track on Main Street still retains the name Cooper Hill because several coopers, Mitchell, Gillis, Doucette and two Gormans all lived there.

Cooperage in Souris got a boost in 1883 when the Gloucester ships started to catch a double cargo and ship a half of it home via rail. In 1884, seven American captains in two weeks sent home 1,732 barrels by train from Souris. Perhaps it was a time of high prices? For the ﬁshermen, prices varied greatly from a low of half a cent each to the usual price of one or two cents. Mackerel were four cents in 1868. The year 1897 was another good one when the ﬁshermen got eight cents each. For the barrelled and salted fish the price ranged from $8 in 1877 when large catches were common to $30 per barrel in 1904, a year of uncommonly high ﬁsh prices.

British North American ﬁsheries and the trade of Maritimes have always been tied up with the United States markets. In 1856,when a Reciprocity Treaty with the Americans admitted all of Canada’s natural products free of duty to the US. market, a part of the bargain was that the inshore ﬁsheries were to be opened to the American vessels. Previously, their rights in our harbours were limited to shelter in storms and to obtaining supplies. This time of free trade was a great boon to the Maritimes. The merchants of Souris in this period sent their vessels loaded with dry ﬁsh and farm produce to the Boston or Gloucester markets and returned with hardware, salt, ﬂour and such staples.

The termination of the Reciprocity Treaty by the Americans in 1865, with the desire apparently to hurt Canadian Union, certainly hurt the Atlantic colonies. The day of prosperity to which the American Civil War had given such a boost was over. Many of the local fishermen, however, rejoiced. The three mile limit was again the boundary for the American seiners. Yankee captains who wanted their former privileges were asked to secure a license showing they had paid sixty cents a ton on their schooners. This was