The earliest encounters in North America with the animals is this idea that people should have free access to American animals. That is this incentive for settlement. It’s what you hold out to potential migrants to say that if you come here, you have access to these animal resources that you can use and that no one owns the animals. That’s really what it comes down to. That animals are unowned. They’re free and they’re wild.

And so fish are a really important resource to early settlers, particularly what are known as anadromous fish. So these are the fish that are born in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, to saltwater, and then come back to freshwater streams to spawn. Fish like herring shad that migrate at particular times of the year and in great numbers. So in these rivers that are coastal rivers that flow inland, you have seasons where the fish are migrating in fast numbers. They’re fairly easy to catch and so they become a really important food resource and a commercial resource as well to settlers.

Wild By Nature: Colonists and Animals in North America (Ben Franklin’s World podcast)