The rapidity with which news of success in trouting will travel through the various camps in one’s vicinity is somewhat singular, and is only equaled by the celerity with which the reports of the quantity captured is multiplied. Having more than we could consume, we gave some to our nearest neighbor, who came over to see our catch. We learned the next day that we had caught anywhere from twenty-five pounds to a hundred, and I am unable to say how many went exploring for trout on the day following. That some were unsuccessful I know, because several swore to me that there was not even a minnow in Williams’ Fork. There was one young gentleman in particular who appealed to me in a tone of remonstrance after a day spent in unsuccessful labor down the Grand. He was dressed in light drab pants, cheviot shirt, and a broad-brimmed felt hat, the band of which was stuck full of flies of all sizes and a multitude of colors. He had a fifty-dollar rod and a fifteen-dollar reel of wonderful combination; his eyes, emphatic with disgust, glaring through his glasses, he avowed there were no fish in the Park. He held up a crimson fly that would have driven crazy any fish except a sucker, and would have scared a sucker if sunk to his level, and wanted to know of me if I didn’t think it a fine fly. I told him I did. He said he had whipped five miles of water with that fly and could not get a rise. I told him that the trout was a queer fish, and that perhaps he had better try a blue flannel rag, and offered to give him a piece of my shirt, but he got mad, tore around, and threatened, in popular parlance, to take off the top of my head. Believing this to be a more painful operation than scalping, I apologized, and the difficulty was promptly adjusted. Then I gave him a gray hackle and told him that that was to the trout what bread was to civilized man, a staple article of which he seldom grew tired, or if he did, to try the brown hackle, which, still like the bread, was a wholesome change; that if he could get neither the gray nor the brown, then to take a grasshopper, pull off his legs and wings, and string it upon a number six Kirby; that such a hook would take a three ounce or a three pound trout with equal facility.
The next evening I saw my new acquaintance; his drab pants were ruined, his rod had been shivered into kindling wood, his reel lay in a pool of the Grand twenty feet deep. He had cast that gray hackle with a brown body into that pool; it had been seized upon by a trout something “near a yard long;” the angler had succeeded in landing its head upon the rocks, then his rod gave way and he fell on the fish, rolled into the river, lost the remains of his tackle and his hat with the flies, and some other tenderfoot who happened providentially that way, had pulled him out by the collar. He was happy, and said he would write to his mother, for which I commended him. This morning I saw him following a trail down the Grand; he had provided himself with some hackles and had a pole cut from a plum bush. I predicted for him success or a watery grave.
In tender consideration of the tyro in these waters, I may be permitted to make a few suggestions as to tackle, based upon my own experience. In the matter of lures the taste of the trout must be considered; as to all else you may consult your own. It is well to have in your fly-books a little of everything, but of gray and brown hackles, as already intimated, coachmen and professors, an abundance. The best reel is one that combines lightness and durability, and is incapable of fouling your line, no matter how negligent you may be; a click reel of hard rubber and metal, with a revolving disk, the handle fixed upon the outer edge, and weighing, with thirty yards of line, about five ounces, will answer well. For lines there is, to my mind, nothing equal to the braided and tapered water-proof silk (size F); being the best, they are the cheapest, easily managed, and less liable to snarl or call for a tax upon your patience. For a rod always select one of three joints; they hang more evenly and have a “better feel.” Ash butt and second joint, with lancewood tip; Greenheart or Bethabara; try any and all; break them on the least provocation, which means a ten-inch trout or less, but wreck two or three by the “yanking process,” or otherwise. Then, when you feel that you can handle a rod with the same deftness a mother her first-born, save up your money and buy a first-class split bamboo. When you get it have faith in it, for if properly made it will bend, if necessity demands, till the tip touches the butt, yet do not needlessly try that conclusion with it; neither must you attempt to lift your fish out of the water with it. When you have fairly exhausted your trout, take the line in your disengaged hand; there are moments between struggles when you can swing your catch safely to land, without a movement on his part; when he will came out as straight as the plumb line Amos saw. If in his struggles his troutship should clear the water, something I never saw a trout do, bow the rod to him, of course, as he returns, so that he may not get his unsupported weight upon the beautiful toy. Keep a taut line upon your prey – by this I do not mean that you should give him no line, but let the strain be steady, giving only when you must. After the first few rushes, you may generally with safety press your thumb upon the line, and let him feel the spring of your rod; that will kill him quickly. The climax in the poem of trouting is the spring of the split bamboo. In striking, remember you have not a plum bush sapling and that it is not incumbent upon you to bail the stream with an artificial fly; let it be done with a quick motion of the wrist; a motion which, if you should miss the game, would move your fly but a little way. If your catch is too large to lift out as I have suggested, in the absence of a landing net, you can generally find a place, always down stream, where you can safely, if you go about it gently, snake him out, or get your finger under his gills. Much more might be written, and what I have said is by no means new, but the purpose is to put you in the way merely of avoiding the calamity that befell the tackle of my acquaintance in the drab pants. Have a taste for the sport, “let your own discretion be your tutor,” and you will work out your own salvation more surely than by a library of directions, remembering this for an axiom, that: The true sportsman does not go down stream and afield for the mere love of killing something.
BLACK LAKE IN 1878
Two or three years since, a couple of divines, imbued, doubtless, with a spirit of adventure, found their way up one of the tributaries of the Blue. They discovered a lake nestled away in the grand old hills, and in about the last place one would think of looking for a lake. They called it Black Lake, very appropriately, and when they made known their discovery there were found some of those disagreeable two-legged animals who are never surprised at anything, and who knew, of course, that “the lake