[Ads-l] How prevalent is "to upstream"?

[Joel Berson]

Before taxis, there was the colonial New England Yankee practice of upstreaming in river fishing.  I have read about legal disputes that went to the Massachusetts General Court.  The General Court licensed weirs to towns or individual entrepreneurs to trap fish that spawned upriver.  Such a weir would be required to be opened some fraction of the week to allow enough fish to continue upriver for breeding or the benefit of upriver towns.  (One of those days would be the Sabbath, when humans were prohibited from fishing but fish were permitted to swim.)  But sometimes a town (or individual) set a weir downriver that allowed an inadequate number of fish through.  A town upriver (or the licensed individual) would then complain.

This was "upstreaming", catching fish before they reached the authorized weir -- although of course "upstream" in this case means the fish (taxis?), but downstream according to the flow of river water.  I have not, however, encountered the terms "to upstream" or "upstreaming" themselves.

I do not remember my source, since at the time this was not relevant to my research.  But I find it discussed in "The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord", by Brian Donahue (not my former source), for the Concord River, which flows into the Merrimack, p. 189, online at

The Great Meadow

  
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The Great Meadow
 The farmers of colonial New England have been widely accused of farming extensively, neglecting manure, wearing ...  |   |

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Licenses for weirs near Medford, Mass., which I assume must have been on the Mystic River (or perhaps Alewife Brook), were given as early as 1634, according to the following source from the Medford Historical Society and Museum (although I suspect this does not say anything about "upstreaming" disputes):

A Peculiar Plantation: 17th Century Medford - Medford Historical Society & Museum

  
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A Peculiar Plantation: 17th Century Medford - Medford Historical Society &a...
 Early one summer morning in 1629 three young men, the Sprague brothers, just arrived in Salem from old England, ...  |   |

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Joel

      From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 3:53 PM
 Subject: [ADS-L] How prevalent is "to upstream"?
   
…or in the passive, “to be upstreamed”, as employed in this NYT Metropolitan Diary item a couple of weeks ago:

Dear Diary:

On a cold Friday night on West End Avenue at 83rd Street, an older man and woman hailed a cab that flashed its lights in response. As the cab waited for the light to change, a young man grabbed it. The older man could be heard saying to his wife that being “upstreamed” was part of New York City life and to be accepted. The young man unexpectedly jumped from the cab, approached the couple, apologized and turned toward Broadway to find another cab. The older man saw a second cab and hailed it, calling out to the younger man, who happily climbed in. Only in New York can being upstreamed create an encouraging circle of good citizenship.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/nyregion/metropolitan-diary-upstreamed-hailing-a-cab-on-west-end-avenue.html

It seemed as though everyone involved, and several commenters, were familiar with the term (as well as the practice, advertent or in-), but I’m pretty sure I’d never previously encountered the lexical item, despite growing up in and around NYC. True, I've very rarely taken taxis and you can’t be upstreamed by someone at a bus or subway stop.  Is this a particularly NYC expression?  Googling, I do find a number of examples (it’s not new) but not all *that* many, once you filter out the irrelevant homonym from the tech world.  Well, I suppose not entirely irrelevant since the software expression ultimately employs the same metaphor (upstream is ‘closer to the source’), so maybe it involves polysemy rather than homonymy.

The dictionaries I consulted (OED, AHD, Urban) don’t include an entry for the (active or passive) verb. 

LH
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