In 1966, Transcentral Railroad began vomiting oil from the riverside rail-yard on the Hudson River in New York state. The oil went up the river on the tides, blackened the beaches and made the fish impossible to sell at the markets in New York City.
One of the enclaves of fisheries on the Hudson is a little village called Peeskill, 30 miles north of New York City on the east bank of the river. The people who lived there back in 1966 were not affluent, tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking environmentalists, trying to preserve distant wilderness areas in the Rocky Mountains. They were factory workers, carpenters, labourers and electricians who made at least some part of their living by fishing or crabbing on the Hudson. Many of them were former marines, combat veterans from World War II and Korea.
By March of 1966, virtually everyone had come to the conclusion that the government was on the side of the polluters and that the only way they were going to reclaim the river for themselves was if they confronted the polluters directly.
About 300 people gathered in the Peeskill American Legion Hall and somebody suggested that they put a match to the oil slick coming out of the Transcentral pipe. Somebody else said they should roll a mattress up and jam it up the pipe and flood the railyard with its own waste. These weren’t radicals or militants, but that night they started talking about violence because they saw something they thought they owned—the abundance of these fisheries and the purity of the Hudson River, which their parents had enjoyed for generations—being robbed from them by a large group of entities over which they had no control.
And then a guy stood up, a marine from Korea called Bob Doyle. He was a great fly fisherman and spin fisherman and had written half a dozen books on angling. Two years earlier he had written an article about angling on the Hudson. Researching it he had come across an ancient navigational statute of the 1888 Rivers Act that said it was illegal to pollute any waterway in the US. You had to pay a high penalty if you got caught, but also there was a bounty provision which said that anybody who turned in the polluter got half the fine.
That evening, Bob Doyle stood up with a copy of that law and a memo. He said,