Rocky Mountain Trout Fishing, by Don Orth

Fly fishing for trout in the western US is more than a leisure activity. Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It begins with “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” Later Maclean writes that "Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart.” The iconography of western fly fishing that Maclean and others wrote about was created by anglers, fisheries managers, tourists, guides, businesses, and region promoters.  The history of Rocky Mountain fly fishing parallels the history of our western frontier as well as fisheries management (Brown 2015). Although Henry David Thoreau maintained that “In wildness is the salvation of the world,” humans are part of the trout fishing system and helped create, destroy, or maintain the trout fishing we have today.  Here I provide a brief overview of this history.  

Montana is world famous for its fly fishing—yet a brochure boasts a photo of a brown trout on the cover (see below).  I’m not a purist or a nativist when it comes to trout. Admittedly rainbow trout outnumber native brook trout in my home state as well as surrounding states.  History of trout fishing is far from sacred.  

Cover of brochure of the Montana River Outfitters.

Era of the Displaced Native Americans (or Custer’s Last Trout Fishing) 

First trout fishers were native Americans. Native Americans used a variety of fishing methods, including weirs, spears, nets, traps, baskets, hook and line methods, baits, and even deer hair in flies. Native Americans also caught fish by hand via tickling or huddling.  This method is different from noodling for catfish, where the noodler uses fingers as bait grabbing the catfish by its mouth. American naturalist William Bartram (1739-1823) described native Americans fly fishing (Monahan ND). 

The story of Rocky Mountain trout fishing begins with displacement of native Americans from their fishing and hunting grounds. Uninhabited wilderness had to be created through the dispossession of Native people before it could be preserved (Spence 1999).  Explorers, trappers, pioneers, soldiers, and homesteaders brought fishing gear to frontier outposts.  The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) included a designated angler, named Silas Goodrich. The expedition first described several new species of fish, including the Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout and Westslope Cutthroat Trout, caught by Goodrich. Later military expeditions spent time trout fishing in addition to fighting Native Americans. Custer last stand might have been avoided if he’d joined a column of reinforcements under General George Crook.  Crook’s soldiers were comfortably camped close by on Goose Creek near the Tongue River—fishing (Monnett 1993; Owens 2002; Lessner 2010). Crook was a fly fisher, and it’s sad to think Custer would have avoided his last stand at Little Bighorn if he went fishing with General Crook.

Era of Rugged Individualism 

The term ‘rugged individualism’indicates the ideal whereby an individual is totally self-reliant and independent from outside, usually state or government, assistance. It is closely associated with the western expansion. Frontier settlers were disproportionately male, prime-age, illiterate, and foreign-born (Buzzi et al. 2017).   The Homestead Act (1862) provided adult citizens who had never borne arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land.  Settlers did not want government interference with his freedom as he followed the frontier road to riches. By the 1890s loggers were removing timber, trappers we’re removing beavers, farmers were irrigating arid lands for agriculture, and some were buying land for fishing in remote areas of Rocky Mountain.  Miners and railroad workers introduced fishing with dynamite. 

The American Angler's Book: Embracing the Natural History of Sporting Fish, and the Art of Taking Them.
by Thaddeus Norris.  

When did rugged individualist become elitist fly fishers? The first fly fishers who visited wrote for outdoor magazines popularized the notion of Rocky Mountains as a paradise for fly fishing.   One of these was Thaddeus Norris, “Uncle Thad” (1811-1877), who wrote The American Angler’s Book in 1864.   Fly fishing at the time was a luxury and a leisure pursuit of only the wealthy in the U.S. Also, according to Mordue (2009) “in practice, but wholly in terms of social class distinctions fly fishing in the USA retained a sense of masculine individualism but was a means of conspicuous consumption where the angling tourist exercised power over local land and people.”

This led to a second wave of western expansion by those who argued that fly fishing was more ethical than spearfishing methods used by native Americans and fishing with hook and line to feed the homesteader's family.  This second wave include many writers who wax poetic when it comes to fly fishing.  Some writers —who are also fly fishers — claim that “fly fishers are better people all around.” (Soos 1999, p 18). At some point the frontier trout fishermen noted declines in rich abundance of trout.  Methods other than hook and line for catching trout were outlawed in most states and territories by late 19th century. Barton Evermann (1891, 1894) and David Starr Jordan (1890) were among the early Ichthyologists who did surveys in the Rocky Mountain streams.  In his 1889 surveys, Jordan commented on the many trout entrained in irrigation ditches and “left to perish in the fields.”  He also commented on the many surveyed waters where eastern brook trout were introduced and doing well. Declines in numbers of trout were inevitable...due to many causes including fishing, mining, overgrazing, water diversion, dams, logging, and removal of large wood.  The irony of rugged individuals asking for government assistance in building federal and state trout hatcheries led to the next era.   

“God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.”

 Izaak Walton

Hatchery Era

Trout hatcheries were an American invention and the American Fish Culturists’ Association (now the American Fisheries Society was formed in 1870). The first federal fish hatchery, known as the Baird Hatchery, was established in 1872 on the McCloud River in California.  Soon it was shipping eggs of trout and salmon throughout the US and the world (Stone 1897). Other federal hatcheries were soon built in Leadville, Colorado (1889), Bozeman, Montana (1892), and Spearfish, South Dakota (1896) to stock Cutthroat Trout, Brook Trout, Rainbow Trout, and Brown Trout into waters.  The first fish hatchery in Virginia was constructed by the Virginia Fish Commission in 1879 at a spring on Tate's Run near Wytheville (Chitwood 1989).   

  

Baird Hatchery Station on McCloud River, California.  Mount Persephone in background.  Public Domain from Livingstone Stone (1897 )  Source

Many millions of trout are produced and stocked each year to meet the demand for trout fishing. Stocking catchable trout provides higher returns and angler satisfaction (Wiley et al. 1993). But it is an expensive undertaking and bio security and fish health concerns requires substantial infrastructure improvements as well as feed and personnel costs.  While fly fishers brought notions of fishing for sport, not subsistence, and concern for angler ethics, they lobbied for regulation changes that provided more waters for fly fishing.  But scientists investigating trout waters soon revealed the fallacy of hatchery solutions and we entered the Wild Trout Restoration Era.

Wild Trout Restoration Era

An emphasis on the hatchery strategy masked a long legacy of detrimental effects of mining, dewatering, overgrazing, and other forms of stream degradation. Trout Unlimited, the largest and certainly most prominent cold‐water fishery conservation association in the USA with more than 150,000 members were vocal advocates for habitat protection.   Yet, it took many years to convince fisheries managers to quit heavy stocking.  In 1974, after studies by Dick Vincent, Montana Fish and Game Commission Montana stunned anglers across the state and the nation and stopped stocking trout in streams and rivers that supported wild trout populations (Zacheim 2006). The new strategy was based on a concept of self-propagating fisheries rather than hatchery supplementation.  Pierce et al. (2019) chronicle the many projects to focus on habitat protection and restoration to restore wild trout to the Blackfoot River.  Roderick Haig-Brown preached earlier to “just protect the habitat, the rest will take care of itself" (Sloan and Prosek 2003, p 144). This admonition to "first protect" is the foundation of Trout Unlimited’s conservation approach. Numerous restoration methods are needed for trout stream restoration, including enhancing instream flows in trout-rearing areas, preventing fish loss in irrigation canals, reconstructing altered streams to naturalize channel form and function, and fencing livestock from riparian areas (Pierce et al. 2019).

The future of wild trout and wild trout fishing is threatened by a legacy of beaver extirpation, logging, wood removal, dams, irrigation withdrawals, and more. Popular game fish, such as Walleye and Northern Pike (McMahon and Bennett 1996), and nonnative trout (Dunham et al. 2002, 2004; Quist and Hubert 2004; Budy and Gaeta  2018) displace native trout in the Rocky Mountain region. Whirling disease introduced from infected trout has the potential to reduce wild trout populations. But the threat of climate change on wild trout, especially Bull Trout and Cutthroat Trout may be most difficult to mitigate because these species are already constrained to high elevations and latitudes (Kunkel et al. 2013; Isaak et al. 2015).   The era of wild trout restoration will dominate the actions of fisheries and land managers for the next generation.

Westslope Cutthroat Trout Onchorhynchus clarkii lewisi  (Richardson, 1836)
Photo by National Park Service.  Source.

References

Brown, J. C. 2015. Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West. Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. University of Washington Press.  248 pp.

Budy, P., and J.W. Gaeta. 2018. Brown Trout as an invader: A synthesis of problems and perspectives in North America. Pages 525-543 in Javier Lobón-Cerviá and Nuria Sanz, editors, Brown Trout: Biology, Ecology and Management, First Edition. John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Buzzi, S., M. Fiszbein, and M. Gebreskilasse. 2017. Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of “Rugged Individualism” in the United States.  NBER Working Paper No. 23997 76 pp. 

https://www.bu.edu/econ/files/2017/03/Frontier-Culture-The-Roots-and-Persistence-of-“Rugged-Individualism”-in-the-United-States-2.pdf

Chitwood, W. R. 1989. The Old Wytheville Fish Hatchery," The Mountain Laurel - The Journal of Mountain Life, September, 1989, http://mtnlaurel.com/mountain-memories/1576-the-old-wytheville-fish-hatchery.html

Dunham, J.B., S.B. Adams, R.E. Schroeter, and D.C. Novinger. 2002. Alien invasions in aquatic ecosystems: toward an understanding of brook trout invasions and potential impacts on inland cutthroat trout in western North America. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 12, 373–391.

Dunham, J.B., P.S. Pilliod, and M.K. Young. 2004. Assessing the consequences of nonnative trout in headwater ecosystems in western North America. Fisheries 29(6):18-26.

Haig-Brown, V. 1997. Deep Currents: Roderick and Ann Haig-Brown.  Orca Book Publishers, Victoria, B.C.

Evermann, B. W. 1891. A reconnaissance of the streams and lakes of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming. Fishery Bulletin 11(1):1-60

Evermann, B.W., and C. Ritter. 1894. The Fishes of the Colorado basin. fishery Bulletin 14(1):473-486.  

Isaak, D., M. Young, D. Nagel, D. Horan, and M. Groce. 2015. The cold-water climate shield: delineating refugia for preserving salmonid fishes through the 21st century. Global Change Biology 21:2540–2553.

Jordan, D. S. 1890. Report of Explorations in Colorado and Utah during the Summer of 1889, with an Account of the Fishes Found in Each of the River Basins Examined. N.d. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/BPshL0. Accessed 22 July 2019.

Kunkel, K.E., Stevens, L.E., Stevens, S.E., Sun, L., et al. 2013. Regional Climate Trends and Scenarios for the U.S. National Climate Assessment Part 5. NESDIS 142‐5, NOAA Technical Report.

Lessner, R. 2010. How Meriwether Lewis ‘s cutthroat trout sealed Custers fate at the Little Bighorn. American Fly Fisher 36(4) fall 2010 17

McMahon, T.E., and D.H. Bennett. 1996.  Walleye and Northern Pike: Boon or bane to Northwest Fisheries. Fisheries 21(8):6-13.

Monahan, P.  N.D.  Did native Americans invent fly fishing for bass? Midcurrent website.  Accessed July 23, 2019. https://midcurrent.com/history/did-native-americans-invent-fly-fishing-for-bass/d

Monnett, J.H. 1993. Mystery of the Bighorns: Did a fishing trip seal Custer’s fate? American Fly Fisher 19(4):2-5.

Mordue, T. 2009. Angling in modernity: A tour through society, nature and embodied passion. Current Issues in Tourism 12(5):529-552.

Owens, K. “While Custer Was Making His Last Stand: George Crook’s 1876 War on Trout in the Bighorn Country,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 52(2):58–61.

Quist, M.C. and W. A. Hubert. 2004. Bioinvasive species and the preservation of cutthroat trout in the western United States: ecological, social, and economic issues. Environmental Science and Policy 7:303-313.

Sloan, S., and J. Prosek. 2003.   Fly Fishing Is Spoken Here: The Most Prominent Anglers in the World Talk Tactics, Strategies, and Attitudes. Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut. 288 pp.

Soos, F. 1999. Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace.  University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia.  

Spence, M.D. 1999. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks.  Oxford University Press, New York.   190 pp.  

Stone, Livingston (1897) Artificial Propagation of Salmon on the Pacific Coast of the United States, with Notes on the Natural History of the Quinnat Salmon, Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, vol. 16, 1896, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 

Pierce, R., W.L. Knotek, C. Podner, and D. Peters.  2019. Blackfoot River restoration: a thirty-year review of a wild trout conservation endeavor.  Pages xxx-xxx in American Fisheries Symposium 91. Accessed  July 20, 2019 from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b4234523c3a53d2db20deb6/t/5cfd2509bb03dd000174a8da/1560094022564/Blackfoot+River+Restoration+-+a+30-year+wild+trout+conservatin+endeavor+6-3-2019.pdf

Wiley, R.W., R.A. Whaley, J.B. Satake, and M. Fowden. 1993. Assessment of stocking hatchery trout: a Wyoming perspective.  North American Journal of Fisheries Management 13:160-170.    

Zackheim, H. 2006. A history of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Fisheries Division, 1901–2005. Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, Helena. Accessed https://archive.org/details/historyofmontana2005zack