The Red Lakes long supported successful commercial, subsistence, and sport walleye fisheries and also supplied walleye eggs to stock or enhance lakes across Minnesota. In the early 1900s, Minnesota operated a commercial fishery on Red Lake, while Upper Red Lake's 48,000 acres open to non-reservation anglers became one of the state's largest and best walleye lakes. Hatcheries at Redby and Waskish used abundant eggs from spawning runs in the Blackduck and Tamarac Rivers, not to maintain Red Lake's naturally reproducing population, but to propagate walleye elsewhere. Over time, technological improvements and over-fishing contributed to the fishery's collapse as the lakes' size no longer protected fish from harvest. By the 1970s, the walleye population fluctuated in boom-and-bust cycles, and in the early 1990s the cycle was broken when the last dominant year class was harvested before it could replace itself. A strong 1995 black crappie year class briefly became the dominant game fish because of reduced predation and competition, but that fishery was not expected to last. A major obstacle to preventing collapse was divided authority over a shared resource, with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources managing off-reservation waters and the Red Lake Band, under the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, controlling harvest on reservation waters; without collaboration and shared information, separate efforts were ineffective. The Red Lake Walleye Recovery Plan, signed and implemented in 1999, suspended walleye harvest, increased enforcement, and stocked fry aggressively to restore a healthy self-sustaining population. Recovery was viewed optimistically as successful fry stockings in 1999 and 2001 showed good survival and promised future egg production sufficient to replace natural mortality and support safe harvest levels. The account also argues that managing the lake for crappie was unrealistic because walleye are better suited to the Red Lakes' large, shallow, wind-swept basins, and that removing eggs for stocking elsewhere did not cause the collapse because hatchery practices used surplus eggs and returned some as fry, producing a net increase. A 1927 letter from Ranger L. J. Noyes reported extraordinary egg-taking on the Tamarac River at Waskish, including about 93,000 walleye yielding 620 quarts of spawn, or 50,000,000 eggs, as evidence of the lake's once-great abundance.