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 b