Backcasts: A Global History of Fly Fishing and Conservation

Backcasts

Backcasts

A Global History of Fly Fishing and Conservation

EDITED BY

SAMUEL SNYDER, BRYON BORGELT, ELIZABETH TOBEY

WITH A FOREWORD BY JEN CORRINNE BROWN AND AN EPILOGUE BY CHRIS WOOD

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

SAMUEL SNYDER is the Alaska Engagement Director of Trout Unlimited’s Alaska Program. BRYON BORGELT is principal of Saint Rose School in Perrysburg, Ohio. ELIZABETH TOBEY is an art historian and independent scholar affiliated with the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She lives in Greenbelt, MD. All three are avid anglers.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36657-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-36660-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226366609.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Snyder, Samuel, 1978– editor. | Borgelt, Bryon, editor. | Tobey, Elizabeth M., editor. | Brown, Jen Corrinne, 1980– writer of foreword. | Wood, Christopher A., writer of afterword.

Title: Backcasts : a global history of fly fishing and conservation / edited by Samuel Snyder, Bryon Borgelt, and Elizabeth Tobey ; with a foreword by Jen Corrinne Brown and epilogue by Chris Wood.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041742 | ISBN 9780226366579 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226366609 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Fly fishing. | Fly fishing—Environmental aspects. | Fishes—Conservation.

Classification: LCC SH456 .B245 2016 | DDC 799.12/4—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041742

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Foreword: Looking Downstream from A River

Jen Corrinne Brown

Acknowledgments

Introduction. A Historical View

Wading through the History of Angling’s Evolving Ethics

Samuel Snyder

PART ONE Historical Perspectives

1 Trout and Fly, Work and Play, in Medieval Europe

Richard C. Hoffmann

2 Piscatorial Protestants

Nineteenth-Century Angling and the New Christian Wilderness Ethic

Brent Lane

3 The Fly Fishing Engineer

George T. Dunbar, Jr., and the Conservation Ethic in Antebellum America

Greg O’Brien

PART TWO Geographies of Sport and Concern

4. Protecting a Northwest Icon

Fly Anglers and Their Efforts to Save Wild Steelhead

Jack W. Berryman

5 Conserving Ecology, Tradition, and History

Fly Fishing and Conservation in the Pocono and Catskill Mountains

Matthew Bruen

6 From Serpents to Fly Fishers: Changing Attitudes in Blackfeet Country toward Fish and Fishing

Ken Lokensgard

7 Thymallus tricolor

The Michigan Grayling

Bryon Borgelt

PART THREE Native Trout and Globalization

8 For Every Tail Taken, We Shall Put Ten Back

Fly Fishing and Salmonid Conservation in Finland

Mikko Saikku

9 Trout in South Africa

History, Economic Value, Environmental Impacts, and Management

Dean Impson

10 Holy Trout

New Zealand and South Africa

Malcolm Draper

11 A History of Angling, Fisheries Management, and Conservation in Japan

Masanori Horiuchi

PART FOUR Ethics and Practices of Conservation

12 For the Health of Water, Fish, and People

Women, Angling, and Conservation

Gretel Van Wieren

13 Crying in the Wilderness

Roderick Haig-Brown, Conservation, and Environmental Justice

Arn Keeling

14 The Origin, Decline, and Resurgence of Conservation as a Guiding Principle in the Federation of Fly Fishers

Rick Williams

15 It Takes a River

Trout Unlimited and Coldwater Conservation

John Ross

Conclusion: What the Future Holds

Conservation Challenges and the Future of Fly Fishing

Jack Williams and Austin Williams

Epilogue: Chris Wood, CEO, Trout Unlimited

Appendix. Research Resources: A List of Libraries, Museums, and Collections Covering Sporting History, Especially Fly Fishing

Contributors

Notes

Index

Foreword: Looking Downstream from A River

Jen Corrinne Brown

Forty years ago, the University of Chicago Press published a charming little volume called A River Runs Through It. Norman Maclean, the author and a retired English professor from the University of Chicago, wrote a deeply personal narrative about fly fishing and family in Montana. Reckoning with loss, Maclean’s lyrical voice told a touching and often hilarious story that quickly became a classic. It remains poignant even today, four decades later.

The anniversary of A River’s publication invites historical reflection. The beauty and obsession with fly fishing that Maclean so poetically documented in A River Runs Through It inspired fly fishers both before and after him to play a central role in protecting rivers and fish. That is essentially what Backcasts is about. This edited collection offers a unique examination of the history of fly fishing and coldwater conservation around the globe. Knowing the past enriches human comprehension of the world. The contributors of this edited collection have shared their histories, and the histories that have inspired them, in order to better understand the present and the future of trout, salmon, steelhead, and coldwater habitats. The supreme purpose of history, as one of the many angling presidents, Herbert Hoover, put it, is a better world.

Not only does this book provide histories of environmental protection, but also it has inherited a fine tradition of writing and thinking present in fly-fishing literature. In addition to family and fly fishing, Norman Maclean demonstrated to a broad audience that fly fishers can write pretty damn well. Backcasts is no exception. It adds to the significant literature on the sport. Fly fishers proudly consider their craft a contemplative man’s recreation, if I dare quote that bait-fishing Episcopalian Izaak Walton. A nice mix of historians, conservationists, ethicists, and activists have written the thoughtful pages that follow. Above all, they are anglers, ones who care deeply about the importance of the sport’s history and conserving resources for future generations. The musings and meditations that spring up in quiet nature are only disturbed by the sounds of water that have clearly made their way into the many chapters of this volume.

While enjoyable to read, Backcasts offers new insights into a growing scholarly body on trout, fly fishing, and conservation. Notable recent examples include Paul Schullery’s Cowboy Trout: Western Fly Fishing As If It Matters (Montana Historical Society, 2006), Anders Halverson’s An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World (Yale, 2010), Are Trout South African? Stories of People, Places and Fish (Picador Africa, 2013) by Duncan Brown, and my own Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West (Washington, 2015). Much of the new scholarship dwells on individual nations or regions. This book, however, boasts a geographical breadth missing in the literature, with topics ranging from across the United States to Finland, South Africa, Europe, Japan, and the Antipodes.

If the book’s global scope enriches the literature, so too does its sweep of topics. The authors share interesting histories. One recounts a time, however unimaginable, when fly fishing was work and not play. I suspect that Norman Maclean would have approved of the chapters that illustrate there is no clear line between religion and fly fishing history. Furthermore, the book is filled with characters. Women, reverends, engineers, Blackfeet, steelheaders, and many others become unlikely and previously unheard-of fly-fishing heroes. Some blazed trails for the nineteenth-century conservation movement while other grassroots conservationists made important gains later in the twentieth century. The mix of surprising and diverse chapters makes for a good read. You may read the book like you might approach a trout stream. Either start at the beginning and work your way upstream in a chronological manner or methodically pick and choose productive holes (chapters) and go in any order you would like. Regardless, you are ensured some solid fishing in print with fresh topics.

While it expands the scholarship as well as entertains readers, the most vital aspect of Backcasts is the essential information and context it provides on conservation. Quite a bit of uncertainty about the future of coldwater habitats and species exists in the modern world. To work for the future, the authors chronicle historic and present-day dangers to trout and how conservationists failed or succeeded in the face of these threats. Some chapters address why fly fishers have been on the forefront of conservation and how anglers worked on environmental issues both inside and outside official channels. Others cover the shifting meanings of conservation over time and place. Given the enormous area where trout now live around the world, many authors here focus on how nations and management agencies have recently struggled with nonnative species and on the different approaches they have taken.

The topic echoes themes present in A River Runs Through It, where Norman Maclean shared stories of fly fishing for nonnative rainbow trout and brown trout. Much of the meaning might have been lost on readers had his quarry been endemic western species. But, by the 1930s and later in Maclean’s imagination, rainbow trout reigned king in Montana. The presence of trout around the world ensured that readers recognized both Maclean’s prey and authority.

Other chapters in Backcasts go beyond invasive species problems. Climate change now puts fisheries around the world at risk. The conclusion expands on the problem in depth, providing details and recent scientific studies. In the end, though, the book celebrates the value of different perspectives, a concept that fly fishers can certainly appreciate. Fly fishers know that little changes in orientation can often yield big results, whether that is tying flies, measuring tippets, casting, or finding fish.

Therein lies the beauty of history and its ability to provide context, understand change over time, and recognize the roots of contemporary issues. As the Dutch writer Margriet de Moor understood: There’s history, and then there’s the future, too. In between the two is the fascinating moment when the world changes. The authors of this volume would agree. Backcasts concludes with a call to action for concerned anglers. The editors and authors have taken this call seriously and agreed that any royalties will help fund the First International Trout Congress, a gathering of scientists, conservationists, artists, writers, and educators from around the world. To be held in Bozeman, Montana, USA, from October 2 to 6, 2016, the congress is at once a celebration of trout as well as a practical way to create a vibrant international network of citizen-conservationists. For more information, see their website at http://troutcongress.org/.

When Norman Maclean hoped that a fish will rise, he informed readers that fly fishers have a cautious optimism. Armed with knowledge, connected to others dealing with similar environmental perils, and acting on a grassroots level, perhaps a bright future lies ahead for coldwater anglers. At any rate, enjoy the book, attend the Congress, act locally, and fish globally.

Jen Corrinne Brown is an assistant professor of environmental history at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. Her first book, Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2015. She is currently working on a book project about the history of animals and anthropomorphism.

Acknowledgments

As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the cold, clean waters of salmonids face deep threats. Bristol Bay, the most complex and abundant salmon ecosystem on the planet, is threatened by large-scale mining development, most notably the Pebble Mine. Anglers who flock to the historic Western waters of the United States face threats to access to rivers whose meaning extends well beyond simple sport. Climate change threatens native trout habitat throughout America. Yet, amidst these troubling developments, anglers in the Pacific Northwest are plotting the recovery of salmon and steelhead as plans to remove dams come to fruition. Elsewhere, anglers are working to secure the restoration of native cutthroat trout, in small, protected, and secure watersheds.

Whether working to fend off threats to coldwater ecosystems or restore those ecosystems previously damaged, these activities are inspired by a long history of angling, engagement with nature, and the construction of a shared community of concern based on shared passions for sport. In Bright Waters, Bright Fish, Roderick Haig-Brown noted that if the angler is at all serious about the sport, the angler should recognize problems, and his concern should always be to err on the side of generosity—the fish and to the resource as a whole. This book project is about the recognition of those problems and the role of fly fishing in responding to the side of generosity, of which Haig-Brown wrote so passionately throughout his life.

First and foremost, we must thank the National Sporting Library and Museum in Middleburg, Virginia (www.nsl.org). On November 21, 2009, the NSL&M hosted a symposium entitled A River Never Sleeps: Conservation, History, and the Fly Fishing River. This symposium brought us together, along with artist and author James Prosek and author and historian Hoagy Carmicheal. Paul Schullery, a historian of fly fishing and conservation, Nick Lyons, publisher and author of fly fishing books, and fly fishing instructor and guide Marcia Woolman deserve recognition for the help and advice they gave Elizabeth Tobey when she was planning and selecting speakers for the symposium. Further, lead editor Sam Snyder was a John Daniels Fellow at the library during the early spring of 2010, where he and Elizabeth Tobey hatched the plan to pursue this edited volume. We would like to acknowledge the Daniels family and other supporters of the fellowship program whose support cultivates important scholarship on field sports such as fly fishing. In addition to the NSL&M, we are grateful for all the museums, libraries, and historical collections, notably the American Museum of Fly Fishing, who work to keep the history of fly fishing alive as the sport evolves and grows into the future.

Of course, we must thank all the anglers, including those covered in this book, who have fished before us. Those anglers who have explored river, expanded the sport, and passed it down for generations. Most importantly, those anglers such as Roderick Haig-Brown, Joe Griffith, and Lee and Joan Wulff, who have not only devoted their lives to a sport but, more importantly, have dedicated their work to the difficult work of fish and coldwater conservation. Along with those leaders, we owe thanks to the thousands of anonymous anglers who have done that same work while never gaining fame or recognition. We walk and fish in your footsteps and they are big footsteps to fill.

As editors, we cannot ignore our authors. Thank you to each and every one of your for your efforts to help us tell this story. We also thank our respective families—parents, siblings, spouses, and children—for helping to see us through the long process of getting this book from idea to print. Many thanks go out to Christie Henry and the editorial team at the University of Chicago Press. Thank you for giving this book a chance, showing enthusiasm for this project, and helping us tell parts of this story. Thank you for your patience as we worked to make this book a reality.

Perhaps most importantly, thank you to all the anglers past and present who do more than just fish. Thank you for passing down the sport through generations. Thank you for recognizing the need for ethics and conservation practice. Thank you for speaking out and standing up for our waters. We can only hope that our work and our telling of these stories helps inspire future anglers to do the same, so the next generation can wet a line on coldwater streams, searching, hoping, and praying for that tug of a trout at the end of the line.

Regards and tight lines,

Sam, Bryon, and Liz

Proceeds from this book are being donated to the World Trout Congress, whose inaugural meeting is October 2016. For more information, see www.troutcongress.org.

INTRODUCTION

A Historical View:

Wading through the History of Angling’s Evolving Ethics

Samuel Snyder

Shams

During the summer of 2006, I sat in a Santa Fe, New Mexico, coffee shop interviewing local anglers involved in restoring dwindling populations of Rio Grande cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki virginalis), the native trout of the region. The topics ranged from why a person fly fishes and the values of native trout to the politics of river restoration. Karen Denison, a local fly fishing guide and Trout Unlimited chapter leader, whom I was interviewing at the time, spotted an old friend. To her friend she mused, Get this—this guy is doing his dissertation about fly fishing. She laughed. I think she called it a sham. Denison meant nothing rude in the comment. She took delight in the subject matter and that I was pursuing it as a dissertation topic. In light of her prodding, however, I had to remind her that not only did she get paid to fly fish but, more importantly, that my research was more than just about fly fishing. Of course, the vast history of fly fishing has never been just about fishing—at least that is what authors from Izaak Walton to Harry Middleton have argued.

FIGURE 0.1 Rio Grande cutthroat caught on the Rio Costilla in New Mexico’s Valle Vidal. Photo credit: Ben Casarez.

I have long been interested in the role of anglers in the history of conservation and movements rooted in fly fishing. I believe that fly fishing provides an important and unique lens through which to study the ways that Americans understand, relate to, and value the natural world. By thinking historically about fly fishing and coldwater conservation, this book as a whole aims to explore how experiences in nature shape values of nature and provide essential undercurrents to fly fishing’s contributions to coldwater conservation and the eventual restoration of native species. A love of sport, as Aldo Leopold argued, provides motivation for the conservation, preservation, and restoration of North American salmonids (trout, salmon, and char).¹ Conservation projects at times succeed and at other times fail—sometimes miserably, even with good intentions. In some cases, though, concerned citizens, through hard work, learned success by paying attention to earlier mistakes. They moved from overuse of hatcheries to focus their attention on the importance of intact habitats or the restoration of native species, watersheds, and ecosystems.

The journey has not always been easy; it has always had a subcurrent of self-interest with currents of unqualified elitism and snobbery, which has, at times, been debilitating, leading to conflict rather than collaboration. Other times, enlightenment has prevailed and led to local, regional, or federal policies that are in the best interest of ecosystems, not just anglers. Either way, the waters and ways of angling, particularly fly fishing, offer interesting cultural avenues through which to understand the role of values and culture within environmental politics. The values range from aesthetics to something resembling religious fervor, the culture can be exclusive or embracing, and the politics are always slightly turbulent. Through all of this, anglers have gradually expanded their gaze from self to watershed.

This book, wading through snippets of our history as a sport, culture, and evolving conservationists from around the world, then, follows that journey. Along the way, I realize I am talking about a select population of anglers; this does not apply to all anglers or all fly fishers, merely a small portion. Yet it is a portion who have had great influence on their sport, on conservation practice, and on fisheries policy. As the angling population expands, changes, and diversifies, and as impacts from development, human population, and climate change alter not only our fisheries but also the ways in which we engage those fisheries, it is important that we address both success and failure stories in our sport’s varied history. This introductory chapter, and the book as a whole, is much more of a celebration of successes and marking of milestones than an investigation into failures and errors. That said, as scholars examine the future of the sport, examining these trends and milestones will provide opportunities to understand how we might successfully confront future challenges caused by overuse, water disputes, or loss of habitat due to resource development or climate change.

Expanding the Gaze, Thinking Like a Watershed

Although not always considered a primary figure in the pantheon of angling authors, there is no doubt that Aldo Leopold—the great American forester, conservationist, sportsman, and father of American environmental ethics—was deeply shaped by fishing, particularly fly fishing. Leopold wrote exhaustively on a number of subjects, but we mostly remember him for teaching us that A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.² The famous land ethic of A Sand County Almanac is also a water ethic, and we anglers have been wrestling with that ethic throughout our haphazard history.

FIGURE 0.2 Aldo Leopold

Broadly speaking, I see four phases of environmental thought and action in American fly fishing, and these are mirrored in other global contexts. Through those evolutions in thought and practice, fly anglers have gotten a little bit closer to Leopold’s guiding vision of the land ethic, or gotten closer to thinking like a mountain—or, if you will, thinking like a watershed.³

Abundant fisheries and a mentality of manifest destiny among anglers, coupled with pollution from the industrial revolution that quickly led to declining fish populations, defined the first phase (1730–1880).⁴ Secondly, as fisheries declined by the mid- to late 1800s, fish hatcheries emerged as a supplement for fish stocks while anglers assessed in newly formed sporting periodicals the impact of pollution, population, deforestation, and the increasing rate of damming rivers (1880–1970). Third, by the mid-1970s, fisheries conservation turned its attention toward watershed conservation with a focus on protecting populations of wild trout instead of hatchery-reared fish (1970–2000). Toward the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, through organizations ranging from Trout Unlimited to the Wild Steelhead Coalition, anglers began leading initiatives to protect and restore populations of native trout, steelhead, and salmon (2000–present). Of course, these periods overlap. As we will see throughout this book, these phases emerge differently in different contexts around the world. None of these phases is without its controversy or lingering advocates, as the hatchery rearing of trout and salmon remains a popular management tool for sport fish stocks as much as for foodstuffs. Over time, however, new approaches for fisheries management, conservation, and policy have emerged and been guided by cultural values, coinciding with advances in the biological sciences and ecological understanding.

Following this timeline of angling’s evolving ethics, the spheres of concern have largely expanded, albeit with hiccups (sometimes serious) along the way. Anglers have moved from utilitarian self-interest toward biocentric, ecosystem-based conservation. Historical literacy is important for dealing with issues facing coldwater conservation today. I wonder how the analysis of historical trends can help move downstream into the future of fishing and conservation. Such an approach requires critique as much as, if not more than, caretaking of cultural ideas, mythologies, and traditions.

More than Play, More than Recreation

Angling, and particularly fly fishing, is for its practitioners considerably more than simply fishing. A survey of the culture reveals that fly fishing quite often powerfully affects the practitioner, through experiences of nature, methods of casting, or understanding of ecology. I have long been intrigued by the ways in which fly fishing is celebrated as something more than simply fishing. It affects people deeply, heals them, and provides pathways toward ecological awareness. In my field research I heard anglers continuously, and quite seriously, couch their practice in terms that reveal the affective dimensions of the sport, exhibit intense emotion when describing the power of fly fishing to heal (from cancer, for example), or inspire collective environmental action.⁵ In doing so, they often drew upon a long history of writing devoted to fly fishing, fish, and nature worship, a historical trajectory I have devoted considerable time to researching in the archives of places like the American Museum of Fly Fishing or the National Sporting Library and Museum. Understanding this history is crucial for comprehending how angling, as a recreation, creates certain aesthetic preferences that, along with science, have been influential in determining the management, conservation, or restoration of fisheries.

FIGURE 0.3 Egyptian angler

Thinking historically, then, evidence suggests that techniques of hook and line, common to definitions of angling, date back at least 50,000 years before the present.⁶ Early evidence of recreational fishing, that is, fishing not motivated by personal consumption, sale, or trade (in other words, fishing for fun), derives from an image displaying an Egyptian noble fishing and dates back 3,290 years.⁷ Richard Hoffmann details the overlap of sport and commercial fishing in Europe dating back to the thirteenth century. In doing so, he shows that at the heart of the intersect between work and play is an emergent traditional ecological knowledge, which included animal behavior, capture techniques, and the value of conservation measures, passed orally through generations of illiterate medieval fishers, while those contemporaries who possessed literate skills, mainly professional churchmen, saw little reason to apply them to such mundane matters.⁸

While anglers tout the likes of Juliana Berners, Izaak Walton, and Charles Cotton as fly fishing’s ancestors, fly fishing is first reported from Macedonia about 1,800 years ago.⁹ As for recreational fishing, broadly speaking, one of the earliest European texts devoted explicitly to recreational fishing was the Heidelberg fishing tract, or How to Catch Fish, first printed by Jacob Kobel (1493) and reprinted in Richard Hoffmann’s Fishers Craft and Lettered Art (1997).¹⁰ But yet an earlier, clear reference to angling as a distinct recreation is found over one hundred years earlier in The County Farm (1307), in which the author refers to angling equipment and the seasons and time of the year fittest for sport.¹¹

This reference to sport is crucial. The term sport derives from disport, which means to take one’s ease or to re-create the self. The concept here, in its origins, has clear psychological, affective, or aesthetic implications. After all, for generations anglers have celebrated fly fishing because it refreshes, restores, and recreates the soul. The sport, along these lines, has strong experiential values, which not only help restore the soul but can also potentially lead to the restoration of nature. It also has significant aesthetic implications, which have proven crucial in the evolution of fishing environmental ethics and management plans.¹²

Fly fishing situated within the realms of the aesthetic and affective is hardly new. Some have gone so far as to trace the sport to religion. After all, Hollywood took Norman Maclean’s famous line that in his family there was no clear line between fishing and religion and made it common well beyond fly fishing circles.¹³ But Maclean has hardly been the only one to address the fuzzy distinction between fishing and religion. Since Maclean, artist and author James Prosek took a religious pilgrimage as a part of his senior thesis project to follow the streams of fishing and the thought of fishing’s patron saint, Izaak Walton.¹⁴ In these contexts, the use of religious terminology is tricky and controversial, but what is important is understanding how fly fishing is described and understood culturally as unique, experiences of fly fishing as significant, and the sport as somehow special. These proclamations can wander onto touchy ground. In their slippery manifestations they can lead to elitism, snobbery, and idolatry, all of which we address over the course of this book. In order to understand the relation between sport and conservation, however, it is useful to investigate cultural proclamations of sport and nature-based experience as unique and special in the context of fly fishing. Such investigations allow us to understand the role of cultural values in social, economic, or ecological decision making. In short, I fully believe that the social, psychological, religious, and aesthetic values of fishing—and fly fishing—are paramount for comprehending the history of fisheries management and conservation.

Evolution of Angling Ethics

Before fly fishing developed environmental ethics, it was, and still is, a source of varied and interesting social ethics. These are also worthy of all sorts of historical scrutiny. Broadly speaking, however, one of the earliest environmental ethics articulated and enacted was that of catch and release fishing. The father of fish culture Seth Green and his son Chester touted catch and release fishing and the use of a barbless hook in a series of articles for Forest and Stream Magazine in the mid- to late 1870s.¹⁵ Today, the message of catch and release remains a prominent and primary platform for a variety of fisheries-related groups from the Federation of Fly Fishers and Trout Unlimited to the Professional Anglers Association, B.A.S.S., and many others. While pervasive, catch and release fishing is fraught with all sorts of debate in the terrain of ethics, philosophy, neuroscience, and more. Pages of fly fishing magazines continue to be devoted to the issue.

In North America, many tout Lee Wulff as the father of catch and release fishing, for his statement in 1939 that game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.¹⁶ Now, Wulff is by no means the originator of this practice. He just spoke about it in a way that stuck in people’s minds. One of the first references to releasing fish is in the fifteenth century Ploughman stories, and the famed yet potentially mythical Dame Juliana Berners (1496) argued for a conservative harvest to protect resources.¹⁷ The Game Act under Charles II (1671) set limits for the size and number of fish caught, establishing one of the first known examples of a bag limit.¹⁸

By 1828, Sir Humphrey Davy mused that every good angler, as soon as his fish is landed, either destroys his life immediately, if he is wanted for food, or returns him to the water.¹⁹ In the 1853, or fifth, edition of the Compleat Angler, Charles Cotton added this line: This is a diminutive gentleman, e’en throw him in again and let him grow till he be more worthy of your angle.²⁰ And in 1913 Frederick Halford noted that the sportsman is not only wiling to return any fish below legal limit to the water, but exercises great care both in extracting the hook and returning the fish to the water.²¹ Note the expansion of values here, the emergence of care for the fish. Today, fly tying guru Randall Kaufmann often cuts the hook off his flies, therefore engaging the fish through the rise but never more than the immediate tug.²² The tug of the trout is all he needs.

For Europeans seeking angling opportunities in their new North American homes and colonies, the rivers and fisheries seemed so abundant that the notion of releasing fish seemed irrelevant. Anglers responded to their abundance with an air of angling manifest destiny, catching their fill on waters that appeared limitless. However, in time, resource decline became apparent and anglers voiced their concern in early fishing and hunting publications such as American Turf Register, The Spirit of The Times, or Forest and Stream. Anglers lamented the game hogs who were catching hundreds of fish or started to point fingers toward the problems of pollution. At the time, however, the language and intent was largely self-interested. It was less about the fishery and more about opportunities for others to catch fish.

Conservation ideas in the American fishing and sporting world did not really emerge until the years following the Civil War when sportsmen’s organizations around the country began to (1) spring up in part because they saw outdoor recreation as a healing response to the war and (2) advocate for more responsible stream management as they watched conditions deteriorate.²³ At the time, however, the notion of conservation was new, amorphous, and hardly named. The magazine world was pivotal in setting that tone and hashing out an ethic, and many contributors mentioned some degree of catch and release, while more famed writers of the early to mid-1900s, such as Theodore Gordon, Zane Grey, Roderick Haig-Brown, and of course Lee Wulff, set the tone for the debate.

Today, catch and release fishing is only one small part of the story of trout, salmon, and fisheries conservation as driven by the realms of sport fishing. While important, it did not take long to realize that catch and release fishing was hardly a sufficient approach to fisheries management. Therefore, the second phase of fishing-driven fisheries conservation and management turned to fish culture and hatchery practices.

Evolution of Hatcheries and Transplanted Fish

Historically, fish introductions have always been a major part of sport fishing around the world, and salmonids are the most common candidates. They are, it seems, the most charismatic of the cold freshwater fishes. This charisma, based upon cultural values, aesthetics, and articulations of sacred experience in nature, is crucial for understanding the choices of fisheries management.²⁴

FIGURE 0.4 New Caledonia Fish Hatchery, author’s collection

While fish culture emerged as a primary tool for fisheries conservation in America by the mid-1800s, fish hatcheries have a much wider global story. Malcolm Draper, a contributor to this volume, demonstrates how, in the European context, cultural identity and trout were bound up in the colonial enterprise in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.²⁵ For European colonialists, trout were seen as a means for re-creating home, in the new colonial homelands. Trout were so important that they were included in the programs and plans of what were termed acclimatization societies, which sought to make settlers feel as much at home as possible by making their new homes much like their old homes. Transporting and transplanting trout was one primary program of these efforts. Introducing fish to colonial waters was one way to make and mark territory, so to speak—what environmental historian Alfred Crosby called ecological imperialism.²⁶

Frank Forester, Seth Green, and Fred Mather (in the 1840s) first touted fish propagation in America as a means to restore game fish to waters depleted by dams, pollution, and over fishing. Forester was quickly joined by voices such as Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Thaddeus Norris, George Dawson, and Genio Scott, along with countless anonymous anglers writing under pseudonyms in national sporting periodicals. As historian John Reiger noted, the volumes of periodicals are replete with protests against the dumping of sawdust, mine wastes, factory chemicals, and other pollutants into the country’s waterways; demands for fish ladders at dams so that migratory fishes could pass; and of course the restocking of fisheries.²⁷

There was such strong concern over the decline of trout through the nineteenth century that in 1879 Forest and Stream magazine suggested that This is probably the last generation of trout fishers.²⁸ Recently, famed angler Lefty Kreh made a similar claim.²⁹ Anglers keep making these pronouncements, but trout fishing continues to grow globally. Amidst this early growth of sport and decline of fisheries, hatcheries seemed a golden conservation opportunity. Little did early fish culturists know that mixing trout would later be understood as ecologically disastrous on many levels. This is in part due to the reality that early and modern fish culture and propagation has often been driven by anglers’ aesthetics and interest, but not by science. Or to look at it another way, the science of fish culture was driven by anglers while the scientific fields of conservation biology or fisheries ecology, as we know them, were still decades away. Yet these early efforts by anglers provided the foundations for the established scientific disciplines we know today.

In response to increasing alarm over deteriorating fisheries, the administration of Ulysses S. Grant established the United States Fish Commission in 1871. Its first project was to detail the declines of coastal and freshwater fishes. The second task was to remedy those declines, and fish hatcheries were put to work. In no time, brown trout were imported from Europe (1883) and rainbow trout were making headway in their own global journey at the hands of anglers and fish culturists.³⁰

These efforts continued to build over time, and in 1927 Herbert Hoover argued for more hatchery work in an address on April 9 to the Izaak Walton League in Chicago entitled A Remedy for Disappearing Game Fishes. He emphasized stocking America’s rivers with fish, so that there is less time between bites.³¹ Hoover certainly espoused religious perceptions of angling, as he argued elsewhere that next to prayer, fishing is the most personal relationship of man . . . . fishing is a chance to wash one’s soul with pure air, with the rush of the brook, or with the shimmer of the sun on the blue water.³² Clearly his most religious experiences, it seems, came from catching fish, not necessarily the time between bites, hence the need for a strong hatchery program.

By Hoover’s administration, the United States Fish Commission was well on its way stocking trout around the country. Much of this work was driven by and simultaneously helped drive a particular fish aesthetic, ultimately tethered to recreational fishing. Trout were superior game fish as many officials, fisheries scientists, and anglers believed. As early and leading figure in fish culture Livingston Stone noted in 1873 regarding brook trout, He surpasses all other fish in grace of form, in beauty of coloring, in gentleness of expression, in fascination of manner, in gameness of spirit, in sweetness and firmness of flesh, and in general personal attractiveness—clearly a charismatic species.³³

Based on these ideals, fisheries programs set about stocking brook, rainbow, and brown trout in a variety of rivers, lakes, and waters around the country. Some locations, particularly in the West, were originally fishless areas. However, angler-conservationists believed that they were improving the sporting nature of these wilderness areas by adding trout to them. Moreover, they were aiming to curtail declines of fish in popular rivers and watersheds. The intentions were certainly noble. They understood the economic benefit of maintaining (semi)healthy fisheries, but they also deeply believed in the psychological and even spiritual benefit of having places for Americans to fish regularly.

From Wild Fish to Native Fish

Even though the actions of introducing hatchery-raised fish into the wild were noble, the practice was certainly misguided: it operated on the assumption that a trout was a trout, so mixing trout in waters was not only okay but good for the ecology of the river and the genetic makeup of the native trout. We have learned, thanks to the insights and developments of conservation biology (and despite the continued dependence on hatcheries and fish-stocking programs), that these actions were, as Paul Schullery explained, more akin to throwing the reality of ecological integrity into a blender.³⁴ This news is not new; anglers and conservationists just rarely listened.

In 1918, the conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote a little known, rarely read article titled Mixing Trout in Western Waters. Here Leopold would signal his famous land ethic that was to come forty years later. As Leopold biographer Julianne Newton Warren explained, in this article Leopold expressed one of the earliest scientifically guided management proscriptions for trout that also reveals his admiration for native species and their place in the biotic system. But his views would be slow to catch on.³⁵

By the mid-1900s, a new phase was emerging in trout conservation, one in which wild trout became more valuable to anglers and fly fishers around the country.³⁶ This preference shifted attention toward maintaining populations of fish in streams, rather than simply putting more fish in the water. This was a step in the right direction, as the gaze began to expand to issues like stream and watershed health necessary for maintaining populations. This shift coincided with the emergence of mandatory catch and release rivers, fly fishing–only rivers, and seasons for fishing straddled around spawning.

This phase of wild trout also marked the emergence of trout-specific and fly fishing–specific conservation groups, such as Trout Unlimited, who were certainly responsible for some of the management regulations just noted. The earliest groups date back to after the Civil War, but those were more often clubs, not conservation-minded nonprofit organizations. Of course, some of these sportsmen’s organizations were certainly conservation minded—most notably the Boone and Crockett Club, founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. However, national trout- and fishing-centered organizations really did not catch on until the mid–1900s. Trout Unlimited, whose history is presented in this volume by John Ross, was born on the banks of the Au Sable River in 1959. Ironically, their focus was on conserving wild trout fishing in the Au Sable, not the native grayling, which originally made its home in Michigan’s water. Coeditor and author Bryon Borgelt traces the history of the grayling’s decline in this volume.

If, perhaps, the mid-1900s marked a phase of wild trout, anglers are finally moving into an era of native trout (and native fish) in these early years of the twenty-first century. In part, this comes from an awareness of the impacts of nonnative species on native ecosystems. The impacts of brown trout in Western waters extends beyond their outcompeting native cutthroat, also impacting salamanders, macroinvertebrates, or other smaller native fish like the darter, dace, or sucker. Currently the World Conservation Union ranks both brown trout and rainbow trout among 100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species.³⁷

Beyond science, however, the move from wild to native trout depends heavily upon aesthetics. As Schullery noted in Cowboy Trout, "Most recently, it wasn’t all that big a step from preferring wild fish to preferring wild native fish, which are now seen by many as providing a more authentic angling experience in nature. A fish that actually evolved over many millennia in the water has certain aesthetic advantages over a fish that only arrived a few decades ago."³⁸ Many anglers value native fish for aesthetic reasons, but angling has also taught them basic streamside ecology so that they understand the importance of native fish in native habitats, ecologically speaking. That said, there remain countless debates over restoration projects for native trout, as many anglers would prefer to continue catching wild browns or rainbows, which they might see as better sport.

Responding to these realities of science and aesthetics, groups like Trout Unlimited are funding programs such as Eastern Brook Trout Venture or Bring Back the Natives. Rick Williams provides a detailed history in this volume of a Federation of Fly Fishers program. The native fish policy seeks to restore native fish species, and their habitats as essential components for the continuation of fly fishing heritage and tradition, as well as the betterment of ecosystems.³⁹ In one (of many) grassroots example, the bylaws of New Mexico Trout state that the trout streams of New Mexico must be protected, not only because trout waters and their pristine surroundings offer nourishment, solitude, and comfort to the human spirit but also because native trout waters are a gift of nature to be understood, preserved, and protected.⁴⁰ We are only now beginning to come to terms with the value of native fish and native ecosystems; however, many restoration projects across the West remain hotly contested.

Wading toward Holistic Perspectives

Responding to the issues of hatchery fish, anglers have turned their gaze from trout to their salmon cousins. They are realizing that along with dams, introduced hatchery-reared fish significantly impact salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest. For example, after the deconstruction of the Elwha Dam in western Washington, wild fish advocates have fought against the use of hatcheries as a means of speeding up the recovery processes. Following a lawsuit from the Wild Fish Conservancy, a judge ruled in March 2014 that federal agencies violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in approving plans to release hatchery fish to the Elwha River.⁴¹ Suits like these are increasingly common, brought by anglers concerned with wild and native fish over hatchery–driven fisheries. These positions, also, are driven by a scientific understanding of the impacts hatchery fish have on wild and native fish stocks.

Attention to native fish has, in part, coincided with shifts in biology, or the emergence of the field of conservation biology, which insists upon systemic, rather than species-specific, approaches to conservation. Angler-conservationists have learned that watersheds must be defended and restored if the fish are to be conserved and protected. One cannot simply put more fish back in; one cannot, as Leopold said, mix trout in western, or any, waters. Anglers and fly fishers are gradually moving from a species perspective to a watershed