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Nebraska

Nebraska was a Train Stop

The first eastern track for the transcontinental railroad was laid near Omaha in 1863, during the Civil War. Starting a major construction project in the middle of a war isn’t the most obvious thing, but before his election Lincoln was a railroad lawyer, he believed in the future of railroads, and he wanted to keep California, newly acquired and separated from the East by the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Great American Desert, from leaving the Union. He could have just sent the Californians candlesticks. Candlesticks are always a nice gift.

Currier & Ives, “Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way,” lithograph, 1869.

The railroad was constructed by the Western Pacific, Central Pacific, and Union Pacific Railroads, at a cost in current dollars of $3.5 billion. Construction was funded by stock sales, federal and state bonds, and federal land grants. The railroad wasn’t actually transcontinental. It didn’t go from, say, Baltimore to San Francisco, but there was already a network of trains in the East. The Transcontinental linked the existing eastern network to the West Coast through the largely unsettled West.

Serious talk of a transcontinental railroad began in the 1850s, and there were actually three proposed routes. A proposed northern route went through Montana to Oregon, a Southern route went through Texas, New Mexico, and modern Arizona,1 and the central route went through what would be Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Severe cold presented too many technological problems for the northern route, and the supporters of the southern route kinda lost their influence after secession. You snooze, you lose.

Omaha is now Nebraska’s largest city because of the political maneuvers of Council Bluffs, Iowa. In 1854 the acting Nebraska territorial governor–acting because the appointed territorial governor got to Nebraska and promptly died–figured that if the train took the central route, then it would certainly go through Nebraska’s capital, wherever that might be. Council Bluffs wanted to be the train’s starting point, and Council Bluffians were developing Omaha directly across the Missouri River. The acting Nebraska governor, an Iowa boy, declared Omaha the territorial capital. I’m guessing lot prices skyrocketed, and Omaha and Council Bluffs got the train.

In 1867 when Nebraska became a state, every other Nebraskan wanted to punish Omaha for its hubris, so they moved the capital. Lincoln was chosen as the new site. To defeat the move, Omahaians loaded the proposed move with stuff they thought would kill it. If the capital moved, then the state prison would also be in Lincoln, and the new state University would be in Lincoln. Omaha was betting that if it loaded Lincoln with all the good things the move would fail and Omaha could keep the capital. It didn’t fail. The University of Nebraska is in Lincoln. The Nebraska State Penitentiary is in Lincoln.

Omaha still had the train, and it also has the College Baseball World Series.

Geography

At about 77,200 square miles, Nebraska is the 16th largest state by area, and with a population of about 2 million, it’s the 38th most populous state. That gives folk plenty of elbow room.

It is largely treeless prairie that divides into two sections. To the right of the 98th meridian Eastern Nebraska is part of the Dissected Til Plains. Western Nebraska is part of the Great Plains. As a child of the Great Plains, if I had stood in the front yard and looked due north, only Kansas, Oklahoma, and a bit of Texas would have kept me from walking over to Nebraska, and it’s perfectly possible that there were no trees to hinder my path.2 Of course if it had been February we’d like as not have been sharing a Canadian arctic blast, and in April we’d have shared a dust storm or two and some tornadoes. In summer we would have shared dry heat, wheat, and cattle.

From https://www.freeworldmaps.net/united-states/nebraska/nebraska-rivers-map.jpg

The Dissected Til Plains don’t make it as far south as Texas. They basically run from Minnesota down to Kansas, centered on the Missouri/Iowa state line. If you have a yen to grow corn, look to the Til Plains, young man. This is Green Acres country, and it’s the place to be. It was formed by glaciers, and as they retreated the glaciers left plenty of flatness and plenty of rich soil.

It’s a mildly humid region, defined under the Koppen system as a Humid Continental Climate, with four distinct seasons and big shifts in seasonal temperatures. That means in summer, eastern Nebraska gets mighty hot. In winter it gets mighty cold. It would be a great place to see the leaves change, if only there were any leaves. It is not humid like New Orleans, but it’s the last breath of mildly moist air before the Great Plains. Most of Nebraska’s population and its largest cities, Omaha and Lincoln, are in the Dissected Til.

https://unitedstatesmaps.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rainfall-maps-of-us-1536×979.jpg

The Great Plains (and the American West) begin at the 98th meridian, roughly on a line north from Fort Worth, as decreed by Walter Prescott Webb. It is a semi-arid region unique not because of topography or geology but because of the lack of rainfall. Looking north along the 98th, to the right it rains at least 20 inches a year. To the left, stretching to the Rocky Mountains, it rains less than 20 inches a year. It is the beginning of the cultural West, and Webb, who loved the cowboy, says it is the land of barbed wire (bob war, if you want to talk like a native), windmills, and the revolver. It was also the land of the Plains tribes and the great buffalo herds. And the Dust Bowl.

The Missouri River borders Nebraska on the east, and continues north through the Dakotas into Montana, where it and its drainage is one of the great fly fishing destinations.3 The Republican River swerves through southern Nebraska from Colorado and on into Kansas.4 In central Nebraska the North and South Platte descend from Colorado to form the plain ol’ Platte, which then joins the Missouri between Omaha and Lincoln. North Nebraska has the Loup River,5 then the Niobara. We’ll be fishing in the far western Niobara region, just below the South Dakota Black Hills and above and to the left of the Nebraska Sandhills.

Population

As of 2024, the estimated population of Nebraska is 2,005,465. That’s less than the population of any of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, or Houston. It is a smaller population than the 35 most populous metropolitan statistical areas. It’s smaller than the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro SMA, but larger than San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland SMSA.

More than 76.2% of the population is Anglo, 5.5% Black alone, and 12.9% Hispanic. Native Americans are 1.7% of the population.6 As already mentioned, it’s a big state without a lot of people, and there are only 25.5 people per square mile. New Jersey, the densest state, has 1,263 people per square mile. Nebraska has fewer people per square mile than Nevada (29) and more than Idaho (24).

Wikimedia Commons

Nebraska’s population is concentrated in the east. Omaha on the eastern border with Iowa has a population of 483,335, Lincoln, just a bit south and west, is 294,757. The Omaha and Lincon SMSAs contain more than half the state’s population. Of Nebraska’s 93 counties, 66 have populations of less than 10,000, and 11 have populations of less than 1,000. Of the smallest ten counties by population, all are located central to west, well west of Omaha.

Farm in Custer County, Nebraska, 1886, Nebraska State Historical Society.

In a European sort of way, Nebraska is ethnically diverse. More than 40% of the population identifies its heritage as German. That’s presumably a combination of railroads advertising Nebraska settlement in Germany in the late 19th century, European economic depression, and available land. There are also sizable populations of English and Eastern European settlers, and I’m certain there’s at least a smattering of Swedes.7

Nebraska is a meat-packing state, and it has a history of foreign-born and African American immigration to man the meat plants. Attitudes toward non-European immigration have been decidedly ambivalent, and from time to time, in the 1930s and the 2000s, immigration of recruited Mexican workers was followed by repatriation campaigns. There really is nothing new under the sun.

Politics

Nebraska gained statehood in 1867, before it had the required population. Presumably statehood was pushed through the Republican Congress to support the 14th Amendment. The same thing happened with Nevada during the Civil War, though there was also silver involved. Nebraska had its own connection to silver, with William Jennings Bryan, a Nebraska boy, electrifying the nation with his Cross of Gold speech at the 1897 Democratic national presidential convention.8

William Jennings Bryan, Grant hamilton, 1896, Judge magazine, New York City.

Nebraska was (and is) an agricultural state, and Nebraska politics were central to the rise and fall of the Populist Party in the 1890s. The Populists were a Southern and Midwestern farmer’s party with mildly socialist leanings, and by 1890 Populists controlled the Nebraska legislature. They passed a bunch of progressive legislation, including secret ballots, mandatory education, free textbooks, an eight-hour day (10 hours for farms), and railroad rate regulation. They pushed for public ownership of the railroads. Bryan coopted Populism, and as the new leader of the national Democratic Party folded the Populists into the Democrats.

From 1894 to 1900, Nebraska elected Populist governors. After 1900 there was a mishmash of Democrats and Republicans, leaning Republican. Since 1994, all of Nebraska’s governors have been Republican.

Nebraska voters now pretty much vote Republican. Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral legislature, and in the current legislature there are 33 Republicans, 15 Democrats, and one independent. There are no Populists. Probably leftover from its Populist days, it seems like every statewide office in Nebraska is elected, from Governor down to the university board of regents. A bunch of the elections are non-partisan, but all of the partisan statewide positions are held by Republicans.

Nebraska and Maine are the only states that allocate their electoral votes by Congressional District, which actually makes a lot of sense to me, so while Donald Trump carried 59.32% of Nebraska’s statewide popular vote in 2024, Kamala Harris carried Omaha and Lincoln, and Democrats received one of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes.

Wikipedia, 2024 Nebraska presidential results by county.

Nebraska Pride

I have the sense that no state instills more pride in its children than Nebraska. It’s generally admirable, but it was insufferable when the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers had better college football teams than the University of Texas.

In addition to a unicameral legislature, the University of Nebraska is also unicameral, having rolled both its land grant agricultural college and state university into one campus. Such thrift seems uniquely Nebraskan.

The University of Texas has gone to Omaha for the College World Series 38 times, which is the record. The University of Southern California holds the record for titles, with 12.

  1. And just a wee bit of Mexico, which led to the Gadsden Purchase. In 1854, planning for the southern railroad route, the US gave Mexico ten million dollars and received Tucson, Yuma, and the lefthand side of southern New Mexico. Ten million dollars went a lot further in 1854 than it does today. You couldn’t buy Greenland for that now. ↩︎
  2. This is gross exaggeration. There are often trees on the plains where there’s water, and in shelter belts. In Texas there were mesquites (though they were invasive from South Texas because of over-grazing). ↩︎
  3. I haven’t fished the Missouri in Montana, but I have in North Dakota. I didn’t catch anything. Together with the Mississippi and the Ohio, the Missouri forms the world’s fourth largest river system at over 3,900 miles. I haven’t fished the Ohio, either, or for that matter the Mississippi. ↩︎
  4. The Republican River Flood of 1935 was one of the Nebraska’s worst natural disasters, resulting in 113 deaths. Before the Europeans, the Pawnee farmed beans, corn, and pumpkin along the Republican River with the occasional jaunts afield for buffalo. In Kansas, the Republican joins the Missouri before the Missouri joins the Mississippi at St. Louis. ↩︎
  5. Loup is French for wolf, so French fur traders must have made it to Nebraska. ↩︎
  6. Native Americans in Nebraska included the Sioux, the Pawnee, the Sac and Fox, and the Omaha. Much of the indigenous population was displaced south to Oklahoma. There are eight remaining reservations in Nebraska, for the Ogallala and Santee Sioux, the Omaha, the Oto, the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Sac and Fox, and the Winnebago. ↩︎
  7. This is because my friend Clark, whose family is Swedish, is from Nebraska. I was surprised when at least half of Nebraska’s population wasn’t originally from Sweden. ↩︎
  8. The amount of dollars in circulation was limited by the value of the gold owned by the federal government. Western and Southern farmers wanted silver coinage to increase the money supply, spur inflation, and make their existing debts easier to repay. Bankers didn’t. ↩︎

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Massachusetts Packing List

Gear

I don’t write reviews of gear. Years ago, I gave Kris a new fly rod, an Orvis Helios 3 five-weight–what else does a girl want for Christmas?–and I wrote a review of the rod. I’ve been embarrassed ever since. I think I said that it cast well. Our Massachusetts guide brought along an Orvis Helios 4 nymphing rod, the new top-of-the-line rods from Orvis, and I was excited about fishing with it, but you won’t get a review from me, except that it looks good and it cast as well as I could cast it.

My opinions about fishing gear aren’t worth much. I tend to fish the same brands over and over, so I don’t really have much basis for comparison. From time to time I catch rod fever, or convince myself that I need a new reel to replace a perfectly good reel that I hardly ever use. Some days you just need to go to the store. But my opinions? You don’t need my opinions on fishing gear, or probably anything else.

So be warned: I’m going to share my opinions on fly rods:

  • Most modern rods can outfish me. I have never tested a rod’s limits.
  • If I lose a fish, it’s not the rod.
  • You can’t have too many fly rods in a closet back home.
  • For trout, I fish Winston rods because they’re pretty. Fly rods can always cast better than I do, so they might as well be pretty.
  • I usually decide that I need a new fly rod when I haven’t gone fishing in a while.
  • Someday I’m going to fish that Tenkara rod again. Someday I’m going to fish that Euro nymphing rod again. Someday I’m going to fish that Winston 3-weight again. Someday I’m going to fish that Sage 12-weight.
  • I think I need a new 10-weight. The new Orvis Helios 4s seem really nice. Maybe Kris needs a new 10-weight? Too bad Mother’s Day is past.
  • When I pick a rod for a day’s fishing, I always pick a rod that’s reasonably heavy. It’s like the start of the baseball season: this isn’t a time for pessimism. Picking a heavy rod affirms my certainty that I will catch a bigger, stronger fish than I can otherwise handle. I won’t, and deep in my heart I know I won’t, but there’s plenty enough opportunities in this life for sad outcomes.

We took two 5-weight rods with floating lines to Massachusetts–hers was the Helios 3 I’d gifted those many years ago, and mine was a Winston. I didn’t take the Tenkara, nor the 12-weight.

Palmer, Massachusetts

We’ve been to Massachusetts before, so we fished two days, spent three nights, and then came home. Otherwise, we didn’t do anything but eat. It’s just as well because Palmer is not a tourist Mecca. We ate at an Italian place with huge portions of red sauce, a sushi joint that’s pretty good, and a railroad-themed restaurant in the old train station. I think that if I lived in Palmer, I’d eat at the sushi joint a lot. I think if we’d spent four nights, we’d have eaten at the sushi joint twice.

We stayed at the Trainmasters Inn, a railroad-themed bed-and-breakfast owned by the people who own the railroad-themed restaurant. It was nice, there was hot water, and I liked looking at all the train bric-a-brac. The railroad-themed restaurant gave us free bread pudding because we stayed at their railroad-themed inn. At the bed-and-breakfast, the breakfast was always a berry muffin left by unseen hands on a cake plate in the self-service coffee room. They were good muffins, but by the third morning I would have liked some variety.

There was a railroad hobby shop next to the Italian place, but it was never open. That’s too bad. If my life had taken a slightly different path this could be a blog about toy trains. What guy doesn’t love toy trains?

I didn’t see any running toy trains at the railroad-themed restaurant, which seems to me a real oversight.

Donuts

By statute, the only donuts allowed in Massachusetts are Dunkin’s. Does anyone really like Dunkin’ Donuts? The answer to that is yes, Massachusans. I suspect they eat Dunkin’ Donuts three meals a day, 365 days a year. On Thanksgiving and Christmas they have turkey, but they also have Dunkin’ Donut dressing on the side.

I counted six Dunkin’ Donut shops in the Hartford airport, and if I were the Governor of Connecticut I’d call out the national guard to protect the border from illegal immigration.

See that line of cars in the parking lot? That’s the line of cars for the Palmer Dunkin’s takeout window. It was at the back of the building, so that line of car loops around the building.

I made Kris go to Dunkin’ Donuts twice, and in the interest of science I tried several. I thought the Boston creme was the best of the lot, but Kris refused to try it. It did look pretty goopy. The blueberry donuts were ok, and so were the chocolate glazed. I suspect that the plain glazed had never seen hot fat. The donuts were passable, but none of them explained the Massachusetts obsession.

Where We Didn’t Go

We’d been to Fenway a couple of times, and have had good visits to Boston. We’ve been to Nantucket. We didn’t fish there though, and we haven’t fished Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod for stripers. Stripers would be an excellent choice for Massachusetts, but April was a bit early in the season.

We didn’t visit the Emily Dickinson house, which was just up the road in Amherst, and we didn’t visit Walden Pond.

Snow

It snowed the second morning we were there, and on the third day it was still snowing when we reached the airport. As far as I know it snows every day in Palmer, and Massachusettians spend their days standing at the plate glass window at the Dunkin’s watching the snow.

Playlist

Massachusetts makes for a good playlist. You could actually do a great playlist of music by Berklee College of Music graduates, though I didn’t. The first song I put on the list was “Dirty Water” by the Standells, which was a favorite song of my childhood. Apparently the band’s sound engineer wrote it after he was mugged visiting Boston, and the Standells were from LA, but Bostonians made it their own.

On my Massachusetts Playlist, there’s James Taylor, Joan Baez, the Cars, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Aerosmith, J. Geils Band, Marky Mark, Donna Summer (did you know that there’s a 17 minute version of “Love to Love You Baby” that includes at least 15 minutes of heavy breathing?), Boston, the Pixies, and the strangest baseball song ever written, Warren Zevon’s “Bill Lee.” None of it is magnificent (except maybe Jonathan Richman), but it’s mostly good, and none of it is unlistenable (at least in short doses–that heavy breathing goes on a bit too long). Most of it is pretty sophisticated stuff. There’s also New Kids on the Block . OK, some of it is pretty unlistenable.

Bill Lee, From Boston Baseball History, https://bostonbaseballhistory.com/new-bill-lee-remembers-1975/

Guitar

I took a guitar to Massachusetts, but I never took it out of the case.

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Rainbows! Brookies! Pickerel! Pickerel? The Wild Swift River, Massachusetts, April 10-11, 2025 (45)

The lower Swift River is a tailwater, so it has some advantages over wild rivers. The upper forks were dammed in the 1930s for Quabbin Reservoir, and the part of the Swift that we fished flows out of the dam below the lake. Flows are reasonably constant and uniformly cold, which encourages lots of healthy trout. Whether it’s the middle of winter or the middle of August, the water temperatures near the dam on the Swift are likely to be somewhere below 60° and above 30°,1 and the flow will be moderate. If you combine that cold water and steady flow with lots of bugs, it’s trout heaven.

Below Quabbin Reservoir the Swift is only 24 miles long.2 It runs down from Winsor Dam to join the Chicopee River, which then joins the Connecticut,3 which then flows to the Atlantic. Quabbin Reservoir provides drinking water supply, not electricity generation, so water releases don’t increase when Boston turns on its lights.

At least theoretically, free-flowing rivers are wilder, more natural, more authentic, but some of my best days fishing were on tailwaters, and when I’m trying to land a fish it’s hard to focus on the difference. In the South and the Southwest, most well-known trout rivers are tailwaters. South of the Mason-Dixon, only tailwaters are usually cold enough for trout. The Green in Utah is a tailwater. The White in Arkansas, the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry,4 the San Juan in New Mexico, and the Holston in Tennessee are all tailwaters. We’ve also fished for trout in tailwaters in Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Constant cold water, with lots of bugs, that’s the ticket. In all of those places there may be great fishing on free-flowing rivers, but it’s likely not for trout.

Currently there’s a backlash against dams. It’s impossible to build a major new dam, and there’s been a rash of much-heralded dam removals in recent years. Dams can cost more to maintain than the value of any electricity produced, they reduce access to historic spawning grounds for Pacific and Atlantic salmon and other less glamorous fish, and water evaporates and impoundments silt up so that reservoirs fail at their task of water storage. Neglected dams are also dangerous for folks down-river.

Non-native fish pose similar emotional qualms as tailwaters, whether the fish were last stocked one week or 100 years ago. In the Swift, there are brook trout, rainbow trout, and brown trout, but only the brook trout are native to New England. One of the reasons for the Swift’s popularity in Massachusetts–and it’s the most popular freshwater fly-fishing water in Massachusetts–is that it produces large native brook trout, and large brook trout are no longer easy to come by in their native range. Most places the brookies have been pushed out by non-native rainbows and browns. The rainbows are descendants of California stocks, the browns were brought over from Europe, and in the Swift both naturally reproduce and are still being stocked.

For me there is a resonance to catching a native brookie in Massachusetts that’s not there with an introduced rainbow, or a native cutthroat in New Mexico versus an introduced rainbow or brown. One supposes that catching a brown in Scotland feels more authentic than catching an Arkansas brown, and if anybody would like to fly me to Scotland I’d like to find out. Are there native browns in Greenland, or only arctic char? Is that why we want to annex Greenland, so that we’ll have someplace American to catch native browns?

I was thinking about this stuff on the Swift because for most knowledgeable fly fishers native fish in free-flowing rivers in wild places is the ideal. Getting ready for Massachusetts, I re-read Walden, in part because it’s an essential Massachusetts book and in part because I was looking for hints as to why the notion of wildness matters.5 The apparent threats to public land by the current Washington administration also had me thinking about wild places, and, weirdly enough, I was contemplating my own human frailty. I likely won’t be able to traipse off into wild places much longer, so to me their value increases as my opportunities decrease.

There are about 111.7 million acres of designated wilderness on American public land. That’s roughly the size of California, and more than half of our wilderness is in Alaska. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as land where the earth is “untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor . . .” Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society and the namesake of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, defined wilderness as a region “which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means[,] and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.”6

But rivers and saltwater and lakes are a little different than big tracts of wilderness. There are few big rivers that you can’t travel with a jetboat, and a lot of perfectly fishable rivers flow down by the golf course and then under the bridge. They are fishable when suburban and even urban. In rivers, though, you can capture a bit of wildness in the most mundane places. Fishing has taken me to plenty of truly wild places. I have flown into high mountain rivers, boated miles up rivers where there was no other mechanical access, ridden horses to mountain lakes in Argentina, fished in national parks in Cuba and the Everglades, and all of it with the weak and wholly unnecessary excuse that I wanted to catch fish. I have also now parked at an industrial park to walk down the improved running path to look for trout in the Swift River in Massachusetts, and I’ve done similar walks in thousands of other places. Was one experience better than the other? Was one more pure?

Well yeah, probably, but the water on the Swift is clear and clean. The approaches take a bit of effort, at least for an old man. The fish are beautiful, strong, and fat. When I’m playing a fish, I don’t really consider that I’m fishing behind a dam and not hundreds of miles from the nearest pavement.

Marshall wrote that we receive physical and psychological benefits from visiting wilderness: physical health from wilderness travel, mental independence from the challenge, satisfaction of an innate craving for adventure, and an opportunity for contemplation and repose not present in the daily business of busy lives.

We also receive intangible esthetic benefits. There is, he says, “the undisputed beauty of the primeval.” This is a constant theme of American writing, whether it’s about the magnificence of a great white whale or the quietly contemplative beauty of finning trout beneath a bridge. Emerson, a Massachusetts guy, suggests that it is in nature that we can strip away the distractions of our mundane world to fully engage with beauty.7

That other Concord, Massachusettian,8 Henry David Thoreau, does his mentor and friend Emerson proud. At different times I’ve thought that Walden was a mechanic’s discussion of housing costs, a gardener’s discussion on how to grow beans, or a surveyor’s discussion of the depth of a pond, but in his sidling way Thoreau suggests something more subtle, that only if we from time to time reduce to essentials can we we truly engage with what’s important.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Thoreau published Walden in Massachusetts in 1854, and that Charles F. Orvis opened his store in Vermont in 1856. One didn’t lead to the other, as far as I know Charles F. didn’t sell copies of Walden next to the dog beds, but they were, I think, a part of the same impulse. 1850s America was one of our most fractious times, loaded with national disputes verging on violence, not unlike today. Parts of the Northeast and New England were changing fast, from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, and both Walden and Orvis evidence a yearning for the natural world that was being lost. Bob Marshall (or John Muir, or Aldo Leopold, or Wendell Berry, or Gary Snyder) was still addressing that yearning for Eden well into the next century. The rest of us are still buying fly rods.

We fished two days on the Swift. It was a quick trip, one day flying to Hartford, Connecticut, then driving 50 miles to Palmer, Massachusetts, two days fishing, and then one day home. We fished with Matt Tempesta of Tempco Flyfishing, an Orvis-endorsed guide, and it was a joy. Matt is former career infantry, and he has that easy, confident, genial bearing that the best of ex-military have. He’s still a very young man, at least as I measure these things. He loves the Swift, and he seemed proud and delighted to show it to us.

The first day we waded and walked, and from the bank Matt would study water looking for fish. In a lot of the upper river the fish were apparently hanging out in places where we weren’t. Much of our first day we walked the upper mile of the river, isolated from development by a wildlife management area, looking for fish more than fishing. It’s a fine way to fish, and a better way to get introduced to water, though I will note that they have ups and downs in Massachusetts that we don’t have on the Southeast Texas Coastal Plain. There were times during the day when it seemed to me that notwithstanding Bob Marshall, some mechanical uphill conveyance would be the very thing.

Kris outfished me again, and on the first day she caught a couple of rainbows at the Y–the famous Y–immediately below the dam.9 I caught nothing. For one reason or another I hadn’t cast a fly rod in months, and my cast, which is usually pretty good, was trash. Matt kept complimenting Kris’s cast and making suggestions for mine. I hate fly rods.

That night it snowed. It was April and it snowed. At home in Houston my tomatoes were well-along to producing fruit.

We fished the next day out of Matt’s raft in the lower river. I fished either a single nymph under an indicator or small streamers, but I never caught anything on a streamer. One of the remarkable things about the Swift is that over its short distance it continually changes, so that the narrow sections near the dam broaden and allow drift fishing. In some sense the Swift is several different rivers held together by the same water. I had better luck fishing from the boat, and on the second day caught a fine native brookie and a rainbow. Kris got the prize though, catching an unexpected pickerel. I had never seen one, and notwithstanding what Mr. Thoreau said,10 it’s an ugly fish, primeval and vicious, the smaller cousin of pike and muskie, a predator.

Matt had brought us a beer to end the day, and we stood by the launch and drank a bit. As I recall the scene, Matt was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, working on his tan. Kris and I were huddled together shivering. After a day in the wind on Massachusetts’ water, we were way out of our comfort zone. It would snow even more that night, and us poor Houstonians weren’t up for more cold. We left the last of the beer in the can, piled into the car, and turned on the heat. Then we turned up the heat. That was plenty enough wilderness for one day.

  1. The water is cold because it’s released from deep in the lake. The water temperature isn’t affected by air temperature. ↩︎
  2. Or 7. Or 31. Or 25. I’ve never found a consistent number for the length of the Swift below the dam. Somebody surely knows it, but I don’t. It’s short. The first mile below the dam is fly-fishing only. Or maybe it’s the first two miles. ↩︎
  3. 460 miles. For comparison, the Mississippi is 2,340 miles. The longest river that flows through Texas, the Rio Grande, is 1,896 miles. ↩︎
  4. The Glen Canyon Dam at Lee’s Ferry is the largest dam to ever be proposed for removal. It’s a stupid dam that loses about 6% of the Colorado River’s water to evaporation, and has always been controversial. It is great for recreation, and below the dam there’s a fine tailwater fishery. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang revolves around a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. It’s not going to get taken out any time soon, either through official channels or by The Monkey Wrench Gang, so you’ve still got plenty of time to go fish there. ↩︎
  5. (1854) I feel like I need to say that Walden is by Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago in an adult Spanish class I made a joke about Walden and the Louisianan sitting next to me didn’t know what it was. They do things different in Louisiana, and he clearly had never had Pat Miller for American Literature. He was a very handsome young man, and he was learning Spanish for his trips to bars in Mexico, but I thought he should also spend some time reading Walden. For some reason he was very proud that he’d never read Romeo and Juliet, and never would. ↩︎
  6. Bob Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness”, Scientific Monthly 30 (2), February 1930. ↩︎
  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836). I have read some Emerson, but find him archaic and almost unreadable. He always baffles me, so I may be making this up. ↩︎
  8. Massachusetter? Massachusatonian? ↩︎
  9. Fish stack up at the Y, but so do anglers. We fished there about an hour. We were there early on a Thursday work-day morning, and two people arrived while we fished and two more were arriving when we were leaving. The usual notions of fishing etiquette don’t work at the Y, and the anglers closely line the prime water without the usual regard for distance. That’s ok. I didn’t hook anybody. ↩︎
  10. Thoreau loved to fish, and he loved pickerel. I quoted Thoreau on pickerel before, but it bears repeating:
    “Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.” Walden, The Pond in Winter. I still reckon that they’re kinda ugly, but then I’ve never caught one. ↩︎

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Massachusetts

Tariffs

Massachusetts was not the first state settled by Europeans. The first was Florida, then New Mexico, then Virginia. 1 When the Mayflower finally arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, Jamestown was already celebrating its 13th anniversary.

Currier & Ives, Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass., 1878, Library of Congress.

Massachusetts was, however, the first state to industrialize. Before industrialization, it had some other North American firsts. It had the first college, first newspaper, first witch hunt, first tea party . . . But industrialization was something different. Before the 1830s Massachusetts was pretty homogenous. It was white.2 It was English. It was Protestant. There were artisan craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and the extraction of lumber, quarried stone, and fish, but there wasn’t industry. Before the 19th century the principal Massachusetts manufactured good was rum.3

Beginning in the 1820s everything changed in Massachusetts. Wealthy Bostonians figured out that owning the means of production was better than not, and they invested heavily in factories and mills. Massachusetts became the nation’s principal producer of textiles–especially cotton cloth–and shoes, but everything was made there: buttons, rifles, musical instruments, candy, perfume . . . Farm laborers moved off the farm to factory towns like Lawrence and Lowell and Worcester. By 1865 only 13% of the labor force still worked in agriculture. And the jobs offered by industry brought immigrants from Europe and Canada. The Irish, the Italians, French Canadians, and Eastern Europeans, including large numbers of Jewish Eastern Europeans, came for the work.

Irish Immigrants at Constitution Wharf, Boston, Ballous Pictorial, October 31, 1857.

While things may have been worse back home, those manufacturing jobs weren’t the cat’s pajamas either. Pay was low, living conditions were squalid, hours were long. Children worked. If demand slowed–and from time to time demand slowed–workers were fired.

By the 1900s, Massachusetts was no longer principally English Protestant, and more than 100,000 new immigrants arrived each year. At the same time, industries started deserting Massachusetts. Textiles moved South. Shoemakers closed. You think the Great Depression was bad at your house? You shoulda been in Massachusetts. In 1933, the national rate of unemployment was 24.9%. Estimated unemployment in Massachusetts in 1932 was 34.8%.4

Later, led by technology, defense, and finance, the Massachusetts economy would revive. At $120,011 per annum, Massachusetts now has the second highest median household income by state. 5 Shoemaking, however, never recovered.6

Daniel Webster (1851), John C. Calhoun (1845) (portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy).

What has this got to do with tariffs? Beginning in the 1830s Massachusetts pushed tariffs as a means of protecting the state’s manufacturing. Daniel Webster, now largely remembered for his support of the Compromise of 1850,7 was also a shill for tariffs, and the first important sectional Constitutional crisis,8 the Nullification Crisis of 1832, was brought about because Massachusetts manufacturers were pitted against South Carolina planters. The South Carolinians wanted European goods, and they didn’t want to pay more for them to support factories in the North. Led by John C. Calhoun,9 South Carolinians decided that a state legislature had the right to nullify any federal law that they didn’t like, and South Carolinians proceeded to nullify the federally imposed tariffs. The then-President, Andrew Jackson, saved the union with a combination of threats and reduced tariffs.

I’m not certain how the tariffs affected the stock market.

Geography

Massachusetts Geography is simple. Everything west of Worcester is Western Massachusetts. Everything Worcester and east is the town you’re standing in. Nantucket sits out in the ocean, and everything further East is the Atlantic, at least until you get to England. 

Now the first of December was covered with snow
So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Now the Berkshires seemed dreamlike
On account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

James Taylor, Sweet Baby James, 1970.

When I was 14, two things happened. I was raising pigs in Texas in FFA,10 and James Taylor released Sweet Baby James. These two things may seem unrelated, but in FFA I had to memorize the breeds of pigs–Hampshires, Durocs, Chester Whites, and, of course, Berkshires. Until post-college I thought Taylor was singing about frosted dreamlike pigs, not a hilly region in Western Mass. Since I found out he wasn’t, I’ve sworn off learning any more about Massachusetts geography. I really liked the notion of frosted dreamlike pigs.

Dreamlike Berkshire pig, from Brett’s Colonists’ Guide, 1883, Auckland, New Zealand.

Dreamlike Berkshire Mountains, from Wikipedia, 2013.

Population

Massachusetts is the 16th most populous state at 7,001,399, which is roughly stable since the 2020 census population of 7,136,171. The non-Hispanic White population is 68.8%, Black is 9.6%, and Asians are 7.9%. Hispanics are 13.5% of the total. Boston is the largest city with a population of 653,833, and nine other cities have populations greater than 100,000.

Massachusetts urbanized early, right along with industrialization and immigration. By the end of the 19th century, more than 76% of its population lived in cities. As of 2024, the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area had a population of 4,919,179, so slightly more than 70% of the Massachusetts population. Providence-Warwick is another 581,841 people, and Worcester 866,866. By population density, Massachusetts ranks third, with 899 people per square mile, but the population density of the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area is 2,075 people per square mile. That’s dense.

Luckily they’ve got all those colleges and universities to keep things elevated. Otherwise they’d likely sink to the center of the earth.

In the first census of 1790, with a population of 378,787, Massachusetts was the fourth most populous state after Virginia (691,937), Pennsylvania (434,373), and North Carolina (393,751). By 1860, with a population of 1,231,066, Massachusetts trailed New York (3,880,735), Pennsylvania (2,906,215), Ohio (2,339,511), Illinois (1,711,951), and Indiana (1,350,428). At 10,554 square miles, it was also substantially smaller than the next smallest state, Indiana–with 36,419 square miles–so there was substantially less area to stack all those people. And states like Ohio were receiving substantial immigrants from Massachusetts.

Spenser

The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker taught me everything I know about living in Massachusetts, and we re-listened to the first two novels in the series, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973) and God Save the Child (1974), while we were driving around looking for fish. They hold up well.

I was also very fond of The Scarlet Letter and Walden, and the Pequod sails from Nantucket. Massachusetts probably rivals Mississippi for important books per square mile, but The Scarlet Letter and Walden are probably a bit less informative about modern Massachusetts than the Spenser novels. For that matter, they’re probably less informative than Absalom, Absalom! remains about modern Mississippi.

Mary Hallock Foote, Hester Prynne before the stocks, 1878, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston.

Politics

Governors in antebellum Massachusetts were elected from time to time from various parties, including Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig, but after the Whigs fell apart over abolition Massachusetts became predominately Republican and remained Republican from the Civil War until the 1930s. The Democrats made inroads by building coalitions with the Italians and Irish, and the first Irish mayors in Boston were Democrats. Patronage matters.11

Everything changed with Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression. Since the 1930s, Massachusetts has been predominately Democratic. The current governor is Democratic, though Republicans are well-represented among recent governors, including a long period from 1991 to 2007. Even with the diverse governors, Democrats predominated. Currently both U.S. senators and all of the congressional delegation are Democrats. The Massachusetts General Court–their quaint name for their state (quaintly called the commonwealth) legislature (quaintly called the general court)–is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump 61.22% to 36.02%. Trump carried no Massachusetts counties.

From Wikipedia.

Fish

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, The Pond in Winter.

Planning for Massachusetts, I thought seriously about trying to fish Walden Pond. There are apparently black bass and sunfish, and of course there are pickerel. But to fish Walden I would have needed to have a canoe delivered from Boston. It was complicated, so I gave it up. Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!

We could also have fished the coast. There is famous striped bass fishing in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and even Boston Harbor, but we’d fished for stripers and blues in Rhode Island, and there’s never a guarantee of me catching coastal fish. I had visited Massachusetts several times before, and I did not want to return just to fish. Over a couple of days, I can usually come up with one trout in decent trout water, and our friend Jim Litrum had emailed that the Swift River in southwest Massachusetts was his favorite place to fish. We followed Jim’s advice and fished the Swift.

The Swift is a tailwater, with fairly constant water flows and temperatures. It’s stocked with browns and rainbows, and has a native population of brook trout. To get to the Swift, it’s an easy 50-mile drive from the Hartford-Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. And of course, I thought, Southwestern Massachusetts should fish warmer in April than fishing for stripers on a boat off the coast. I wanted Massachusetts done, and I also wanted to be reasonably warm.

Pickerel (Lucius reticulus), From a Pond in Massachusetts, First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, 1896, facing p. 124, Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., New York, New York, from the University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

  1. St. Augustine (1565), Jamestown (1607), Santa Fe (1610), These are more or less permanent settlements, so I’m ignoring Taos (the settlement of which seemed to come and go), and also ignoring the abandonment of Santa Fe during the Pueblo Rebellion. This is my footnote, so I get to do what I want. ↩︎
  2. This is not completely true. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first English colony in North America to legalize slavery–another first! Enslaved Africans were landed in Jamestown earlier, in 1619, but their status as slaves was not clear, and there were African slaves in St. Augustine even earlier. The Dutch brought slaves to New Netherland by 1626. African slavery was a global trade, and it’s enough to say that Massachusetts played its part, both as owners and particularly as slavers. by the 18th century Massachusetts’ African population was as much as 12% of its total, mostly used in rum production. ↩︎
  3. I think that’s right, but I haven’t double-checked. If it’s not right it should be. New England was the rum stop on the triangular trade that ran Molasses from the West Indies, rum from North America, and slaves from Africa. ↩︎
  4. Michigan had the highest unemployment in the nation, at 45.9%. Weirdly, in the 1930s there were no unemployment statistics kept by state, and state statistics were estimated much later by the Social Security Administration. ↩︎
  5. New Jersey is first at $124,487. Mississippi is last at $70,821. ↩︎
  6. Alden and some New Balance shoes are still made in Massachusetts. ↩︎
  7. The Compromise of 1850 prescribed how slavery would be decided in the new territories acquired from Mexico, and allowed slavery to spread beyond the existing slave states. It included stringent fugitive slave laws that required the return of fugitive slaves from free states. Webster’s reputation in his home state of Massachusetts was substantially damaged by his support of the Compromise. ↩︎
  8. A sectional crisis is a crisis pitting the interests of one section of the nation against another. The Civil War, for instance, was also an important sectional Constitutional crisis. Our current Constitutional crisis is not particularly sectional. ↩︎
  9. At the time, Calhoun was vice president, which seems to me like a conflict of interest. Calhoun was a hero of the South, and we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, Calhoun County, Texas. ↩︎
  10. Future Farmers of America. ↩︎
  11. Allegedly among the important public jobs created by Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of J.F.K., were watchmen to watch watchmen, tree climbers, and city watering crew inspectors. ↩︎