“The English were very aggressive,” Milt Miller explains. “They stole most all their land off the Indians, called them savages; in my family, the home land was bought off of the Indians, who were treated as people. My grandparents on my father’s side had a large farm and the Indians would help plantin and harvestin the crops. They would butcher the pigs and cattle for meat, take clothin and food for pay. People them days fished and farmed to survive; money didn’t mean but very little. More important was to make it through the winter months, and they worked like beavers to do that.” In the 1890s, when Milt’s mother, Nettie Payne, had come to work on his Grandfather Miller’s farm in Accabonac, the Indian people were still helping with the harvest.
“My mother used to can stuff all summer, put stuff up, and the kids, we all got our little pans and went together to get cranberries, we’d gather beach plums, blueberries, huckleberries, and elderberries, and that was all preserved. The women would keep the house and make the butter and cheese, salt and smoke the fish and meat, prepare the vegetables and fruit for the winter months. They had a very large table, and all the family, including the Indians, sat to eat. There were times that the Indians stayed overnight, and there was plenty of room made for them. The Indian was treated as any other guest would be treated. It’s a hell of a good feelin to know that you come from a family that never had no discrimination against nobody.”
Because of the view of the ocean distance from the high bluff back of the beach, the Edwards clan had built houses “up on the hill”; their boat sheds and bait shanties were near the lifesaving station on the beach below, where whale crews could be mustered quickly. Living so close to the fish shacks on the beach, Milt Miller was more or less raised among the Edwardses, and his father, Russell Miller, had worked on the Edwards crews. Russell’s brother Wilbur, also a fisherman, drowned in 1902 when a sharpie overturned in rough weather while lifting fish traps for Captain Frank Parsons in Fort Pond Bay. (The Edwardses and Parsonses were the most successful fishing families on the South Fork, expanding their operation into fishing boats, docks, and packing houses; most of the Parsonses, who later succeeded in engineering enterprises, fished out of Montauk.) Like many fishermen in those days, Russ Miller helped man the surfboats at the old lifesaving station—later the Amagansett Coast Guard—which had a cupola on the roof, where a watch was kept day and night for ships in distress. The stations were spaced every four miles along the beach. In late autumn, with the onset of cold weather, the great whales would appear in the silver sea; the man on watch at the lifesaving station was often the first to cry “Whale off!”2 and the crew at the station was always on hand to go off in the first boat that could be mustered.
“In the winter months, in severe weather, they really had some bad wrecks,” Milt remembers, “and they had to have real good men that knew how to go through the surf and rescue people off these ships that come ashore. The captain had a special knowledge of the surf, and the crew were also good surfmen, good oarsmen, actin on the captain’s command without hesitation. It’s probably unbelievable today that men could even row a boat out through the surf in this type of weather.… They never talked too much about what they did. It was nothin to be a hero about, it was their job, helpin out in shipwrecks, saving lives, ready at all times to help each other. It gave me a sense of pride to be around a bunch of men like them, even with all the teasin that I had.”
In later years, Cap’n Russ was in charge of Coast Guard beach stations farther west, but he still had a local reputation as a surfman. Milt recalls with pride the day of the great hurricane of 1938, when he was getting a ride home with Captain Bert Edwards, at that time supervisor of East Hampton Town. After the storm had passed, “the water was way up over our knees and we had to stop the car and walk the rest of the way.” During the walk, Cap’n Bert spoke of Russ Miller’s quiet competence many years before when a storm came up on a winter day while the two were codfishing. Those were the days when small boat engines had first appeared, and Cap’n Bert had put one in his whaleboat. “I didn’t know anything about engines,” he told Milt, “and it wouldn’t start, water pump froze up. But your father knew that engine and bypassed that pump somehow; otherwise we would have never made it, never would have got in. I owe my life to him.”
Milt’s mother worked in the household of Captain Gabe Edwards, younger brother of the patriarch, Cap’n Josh. “My mother was a servant for them people, but not the way you would think of a servant now; she was part of the family, and I was, too. My mother worked for Cap’n Gabe’s wife at the time, and she used to tell me about how they cooked doughnuts and chickens and stuff in the whale fat while the men was working. Cook big meals right in the whale oil, that’s why it got the name ‘whale rally,’ a big rally, because the whole town would participate, come to the beach, women with children, with babies in their arms, children running all over the place. Up in that lot across from Cap’n Gabe’s house, that’s where the whale works was; all the Edwards lived along that area.”
Milt Miller believes that fishing is in his blood. Even before his birth, he says, his mother would carry him down to the ocean when fishing boats came in. The Miller cottage near the lifesaving station was the only house down in the dunes that was occupied year-round, and young “Freckles” Miller, as he was known to the rough surfmen, spent most of his early years in adult company. He still regrets having been too young to take part in the whaling adventure, but he has a vague memory of Cap’n Josh, then a very old man in a long white beard, and also of helping to shove off the boats “although I was probably in the way in more ways than not. Sometimes I would get knocked down only to be helped up again with a friendly pat on the head and the words, ‘take hold,’ which meant to help. I went out through the surf when I was a small boy, probably six years old. The men picked me up and put me in the boat, I couldn’t hardly see out over the top of the boat, settin in the bottom, that’s how small I was.”
From his earliest years Milt would hang around the fish shanties and listen to stories, “the times when after hours of bein towed at tremendous speed many miles from home, the harpoon pulled out, and sailin and rowin back all night empty-handed.” His father told him how he once was towed all the way west some twenty miles to Shinnecock, and having to tow the dead whale back as other boats came with food and coffee for the crew. “Couldn’t beach it at Shinnecock because there was no try works; might take all day and all night before they got that whale rowed back to Amagansett. Other times the whale would smash one of the boats and the other boat would pull men from the water and continue the chase. These were the bravest and boldest men that ever went whalin.
“Even in them days whaleboats cost a good deal of money, and the whales didn’t show up very regular. The Dominys in East Hampton had their own captains and boats, but the main whaling captains was the Edwardses; they owned the boats, and they must’ve had money at the time that they came here to settle, because they always had men workin for ’em.” Besides bunker fishing and haul-seining, the Edwardses tended big ocean barrel traps, set off Napeague, which were very profitable for six to eight weeks of the spring run, and Milt Miller and other boys would gather snow in winter and pack it down for storage into a deep cistern, for icing the fish.
“Them Edwardses was a hard bunch of men; they was some fishermen, I’ll tell you that, they owned just about all the fishin equipment around here. Nevertheless they was down-to-earth people. The captains was generally the outstanding men, the elders, let’s say, in the church. Those captains used to make me go to Sunday School; Cap’n Gabe’d treat you to a sermon if you didn’t go. Cap’n Gabe, Cap’n Clint, and the sons of Cap’n Josh—the Edwards boys, what they called the Edwards Brothers, Cap’n Sam, Cap’n Bert, Cap’n Evvie, and their sons, too—I fished with quite a few of ’em and they was really fine men, outstanding men in the town; there was never nothin you could hold or say against ’em.
“The crews was always a rugged bunch. I don’t think many of ’em attended
church or done anything else outside o’ drink and raise hell, and this is so even today. I have seen these same captains and crews standin on the beach lookin offshore at a whale and countin how long it took between the time the whale sounded and the time it blowed; they would predict the length and how many barrels it would yield. To hear them yell, Thar she blows! with a gleam in their eyes and hearty laughter! The urge to put chase and capture the whale was still there although whalin had stopped several years before …
“Never a day would go by without a walk along the ocean beach. The smell of the fresh salt air would awaken my whole body, and a walk at sunrise, watching the sun climb up out of the ocean would sometimes reveal a large arctic owl, all kinds of seabirds, geese, and ducks. It was not unusual to try to see how close I could crawl up on a seal that lay asleep. One time I found a drownded man who had washed ashore, and it didn’t take me long to return home and tell my story, cause this was the first dead person I’d ever seen.
“The whaleboat house was only a short distance from my house. With no other boy my age to play with, I spent many hours in an imaginary world of my own. The whaleboats were ready to go and all equipment in them—the sails, the oars, the harpoons, water kegs, everything in place where it should be, just the way the boats were made ready after the last whale chase. They had not been used for several years. These whaleboat houses were never locked and never a thing out of place or taken, until with age they decayed and collapsed, as their time had ended.”3
Before the coming of the railroad, commercial fishing on the South Fork was largely confined to salt or smoked fish and menhaden products, which could be processed and shipped without refrigeration. The railroad to Montauk, completed in 1895—three decades after rails had crossed the continent—ran right out onto a fish dock constructed at Fort Pond Bay, and a special fish train left Montauk every evening, stopping to pick up big “sugar boxes”4 of fresh fish carted up to depot platforms at Napeague and Amagansett, and arriving at the Fulton Fish Market early next morning.
In the first decades of this century the leading local fishery was cod. “In them days cod took care of the town all winter,” Milt Miller recalls. The fishery supported not only fishermen but also men laid off from summer building jobs or other work. These men dug the big skimmer clams5 used for bait, opened clams and baited cod trawls, tended the fish shanties and the horses used to drag the heavy boats above the tide line, and boxed and iced the fish when the boats came in. Forty or fifty bushels of skimmers might be required for a single crew, and each man was paid by the bushel or trawl according to what he did; only the regular fishing crew worked on shares. Codfishing also gave offseason work to farmers, who carted the boxes to the railroad station and took away the heads and guts, piling the offal under hay or seaweed in mounds perhaps one hundred feet long, to dress their gardens in the spring.
One of the men who dug for clams was Milton’s uncle, Elisha Ammon, Sr., who lived at that time in Accabonac. “When I was a kid,” says Elisha Jr., who was born in that Springs community in 1911, “my father’d get up in the mornin early, walk to Amagansett beach, help put the boat in the water, and the gang would go fishin, and he’d come back with the horse and wagon, drive all the way to Springs and clam, drive all the way back again to the bait house, open bait and bait trawls until the gang come ashore, ship the fish, and then they sat there till about ten at night baitin trawls for the next day, then he’d walk home to Springs. That was something! That was hard money.”
Usually, two men fished as partners, and sometimes a third man served as shore crew. Where there was no shore crew, the fishermen themselves would gut and dress the fish, open the bait clams (perhaps two bushels of skimmers to a tub of gear) and rebait and load the hooks for the next day. Often they worked until late at night, only to rise at four in the morning of what was often another eighteen-hour day.
Since the fish bit hardest at first light, great pains were taken to prepare tubs carefully so that the trawls could be set quickly even in darkness. Ordinarily four tubs or trawls, depending on conditions, were set out end to end, in a line nearly two miles long that extended seaward from behind the offshore bar. The cod trawl was a heavy tarred cotton runner rigged every six feet with a lighter “snood” line about thirty inches long, that carried the baited hook: each trawl was about five hundred fathoms (or three thousand feet) long. The five hundred-odd snoods were coiled carefully in a butter tub or a square wooden box, tapered so that it was wider at the top than at the bottom, with the baits hooked around the rim. In the early days cod were so plentiful that the boats would lay to offshore for an hour or so while the big fish found the baits; then the crew picked up the trawls and rowed ashore into the northwest wind, through the cold salt spray and ice-caked water. In later years, the crews would rise at 4 A.M., run the trawls out in the winter dark, and return to shore lifting trawls from the previous day before braving the surf with the heavy cargo.
In Amagansett there were four fish shanties on the beach, with large brass kerosene lamps hung from the ceiling, and also a line for drying the wool mittens. On hooks along the wall hung sticky oilskins—heavy cotton garments painted with an evil-smelling mix of linseed oil and paint dryer to make them waterproof. The shacks were warmed by pot-bellied stoves on which big pots of coffee were always ready; there were built-in bunks where fishermen could sleep for a few hours, and work tables where the shore crew baited trawls for the next day.
“When there was an extra big catch,” Milt says, “the boat crew would start gutting the cod on the way in, to lighten up the boat. If the captain didn’t think it was safe to go over the surf, he would string the fish on a line to lighten the boat even more and tow the fish in.” But even the best fishermen took chances coming ashore. One day Milt saw Captain Frank Lester’s boat, laden with cod, swamp in the surf, and codfish and trawl tubs washing down the whole length of the beach.
“The men at the shanty had now seen the hundreds of gulls followin the boat, and there was a joy of laughter. The bets were on of how many fish the boats would have, and a bottle of rum was passed around; the men would squirt their tobacco juice out and hold a cud of tobacco in their hand while taking a good long snort. The skids and rollers, the horse team, was ready, and as soon as the boat hit the beach, the men were in action. The team was hooked on and the rollers and skids in place and the boat was hauled up out of the surf to safety. The fish would be frozen stiff. The cap’n and crew, with icicles hangin off their sou’westers, saltwater ice glistenin on their oilskins, and the steam comin from their warm mittens, would head for the shanty and hot coffee when the boat was made secure, and the rest of the men would use hayforks to unload the fish into the wagons alongside.” The fish were carted to the bait shanties and forked out onto a fish-cleaning table; next to this gutting bench was a big tub of fresh water for rinsing the cleaned fish, and a stack of fish boxes. The heads and guts were slung into big wagon boxes for the farmers. Not far off, a doorless privy faced the ocean, so that its occupant might keep an eye out for returning boats.
In early spring the ocean crews would set gill nets for sturgeon. One calm morning—because the boy claimed he had permission from his mother—Captain Clint Edwards took Freckles Miller in the boat. “We left the beach by sunup and I was feelin fine until I lost sight of the land and then I was as seasick as I ever was or has been since. The whole world seemed to tumble around, and I can only remember Cap’n Clint had me lay across a seat and took a rope and tied it around me so I would not fall overboard while they were tendin net. I can only remember the first net and seein them roll in two large sturgeon; I was so seasick I passed out and only came to on the way back as soon as I could see the land. There must have been at least a half dozen more of these big sturgeon in the boat, over two hundred pounds each. The mate called the cap’n to show him that one of ’em had a ripe roe, cause his fingers when he pulled ’em out was covered with black eggs; this was caviar and was worth more than the fish.
“
Upon arrivin at the beach the first thing I saw was my mother standin there with her arms folded, and a hairbrush, and as I tried to walk on the beach after bein so sick, I couldn’t get my footin and was sick all over again. My mother was sayin ‘Where have you been, young man?’ havin the hairbrush ready to lay it on me, but Cap’n Clint took hold of her arm, sayin ‘Nettie, he’s been punished enough,’ and made her promise not to lick me when we got home. I can imagine now how upset she must’ve been when she got up in the mornin and I wasn’t home and she made several trips to the beach and couldn’t find me. Talkin later, the Cap’n and me, I knew it was important to tell the truth if I was ever to go fishin with him again.
“I was always underfoot down on the beach; learned how to cuss before I learned how to talk, and probably drank some liquor, too.” By the time he was six, Milt was opening clams, with a nickel or a dime for pay; later he learned how to scavenge from cod heads and guts the valuable livers and tasty tonguelike palates which he would ship off to the Fulton Fish Market by the quart. (“Ten, twelve above zero, bare-handed, down there in the guts, pulling them livers off, cutting them tongues out; I only lived a short ways from the fish shanty, but I used to come home cryin, my hands ached me so bad.”) His hard work won him a new nickname, Fishtongue, as well as a new mailorder bicycle, the Hawthorne Flyer, which was the envy of every kid in town.