Roger Clapp

Partial Transcript: Well, welcome to the fish weir, we'll talk about that in a moment, but first let me explain who I am and what I do: my name is Roger Clapp and right now I'm a retired scientist of the Watershed Association of the Tuckasegee River (the initials are WATR) and I've been a leader with the group for quite a while. And one of the things that I'm most proud of—and that's bringing the kids together from the Cherokee, from the community, and learning about the fish weir, what it means to the Cherokee Indians, and what it might mean to the future. Let me see if I can show you the weir here. If you look beyond me, you can see the break in the water, over to the left and then coming up this side. We are very high flow because of the rainfall that we've had recently. So, the river is high and you can barely see the fish weir, and that would never do for really understanding the fish weir and what it does.
So we're planning, on this year's workshop, to be the third Monday in June. Monday’s important because the Duke Energy, who manages the upstream dams, usually has low flow on that day. And we work with them and we hope to have a very low flow, so most of the rocks would just now emerge, you all can—you have to use your imagination right now, where most of those rocks are exposed and we can have the weir—well—how was the weir used? It was kind of—weir in German means "small dam". It's when the water drops, it becomes a dam and it focuses the fish to the throat traditionally, and we will put a fish trap, and see if we can get some fish and take a look at them. The workshop is much bigger than that. We also have some biology lessons and culture lessons in this whole area, which is very quiet, with only birds singing right now. It turns into a very exciting place with all the kids and all the volunteers. It’s just something else—

Partial Transcript: Well—with the Cherokee—it was a source of pretty reliable food. Hunting can have good years and bad years but, with the fish weir, they can really depend on steady meat in their diets. And so it complements the hunting that they did. Even as recent—within the last fifty years, the Allman’s who owned this property here, and we’re their guests, they used—their grandfather or something—I'll have to get the details—would get enough fish here for his own needs, and it was salted down and have saltfish during the winter. Something else we can work on?

Partial Transcript: Okay. The other weirs that I know of—they're about six remnant weirs on the upper Little Tennessee, down of the end of sand of town road. There's one in particular that's been partially restored and kind of has the structure of the "V". The others you just see the remnant rocks that tie into the soil, and those were where I identified, fifteen years ago or something, during the drought years, when we had especially low flow. There are others settled down near Atlanta, other Indian historical sites.

Partial Transcript: Well—one of their favorite foods would be the whole redhorse family, and the redhorse are related to carp and they cruise the bottom and eat algae off the bottom rocks and they used to use those to make stews and soups and things like that.
Looking forward, I think this workshop—this year we're going to have new faces and new stories and some new adventures, I hope. So we'll all be learning.

Partial Transcript: What you need to do is take a look over to the bare spot on the far side. Then, if you can see the breaking riffle down, almost to the last point, you can see—downriver, but it's still upstream. Then, the riffles come this way for the other arm of the "V". And the way it's situated actually affects the flows, and drives water against this bank, and it's an agent of change—it's eroding it itself—makes the stream bank here erode. So we'll talk a little bit about that.

Partial Transcript: Oh! What they would do, once again, is to put a trap at the end and then they would line up, somewhere upstream, and thrash the water with cane stocks, and drive and corral a fish downstream and into the trap.