I looked at the Native Fish Society website, and they were what I had been looking for: a Pacific Northwest conservation organization for the protection of salmon, steelhead, and trout. They need to work on how easy they are to find on search engines, at least by random folk like me. I sent them some money, and they promised to send me a ball cap. I am now a member of the Adipossessed Society of the Native Fish Society, clipping of the adipose fin being the marker for hatchery fish. Adipossessed. Cute.
If I had been willing to donate $5,000, the Society would have sent me a C.F. Burkheimer custom spey rod inscribed with “Native Fish Society Lifetime Member.” That seems like a pretty reasonable price for a Burkheimer Spey rod, but alas, I have no current need.
I can always use another ball cap.
From the 2016 Native Fish Society Annual Report.
Meanwhile in Houston it’s the prettiest time of year, which could only be better if the Astros were in the World Series. This morning I went out early to hand out push cards for a neighbor who’s running for Congress–his mother had called and asked if I’d work the polls for early voting, and how can you turn down someone’s mother? It was in the mid-50s, and clear and bright and excellent people watching. By the afternoon it was in the 80s and I went out and fished for largemouth at Damon’s. Lately I’ve started each bass trip with whatever fly was successful the last time (unless it was lost in the trees) and then moving on if that’s not working. Today I moved on to a dark blue and black Clouser, which never works. Today it worked, I think because the water was clear with the cooler weather and in the bright sun the dark color was the thing, maybe. In any case, what’s more fun than casting to a particular fish then watching it take, whatever the fish?
The state fish of Oklahoma is the white bass, also known as sand bass or sandies (Morone chrysops). There’s wide distribution of white bass among states west of the Rockies, both native and introduced, so I assume it’s a fish most people are familiar with. It’s common in the Midwest and the ArkLaOklaTex.
It’s not a big fish. The IGFA world record, shared by Louisiana and Virginia, is 6 lbs, 13 oz. That’s probably about four pounds heavier than the largest white bass anyone should ever expect to see. The Oklahoma record is 4 lbs, 9 oz. There’s not a record for white bass on the fly, either international or Oklahoman.
White bass are a freshwater fish, but their closest relative is the saltwater striped bass (Morone saxatilis). Striped bass have been introduced into midwestern and Southern lakes, and thrive if they’re restocked from year to year. The Oklahoma striper record is 47 pounds, 8 ounces, and Lake Texoma is supposed to be the very place for stripers. There’s at least one fly guide on Texoma guiding for stripers.
There is a white bass/striped bass hybrid that’s also stocked into lakes. The common name for the hybrids, wipers, is unfortunate, at least as bad as pikeminnow, but it has the advantage of description once you figure it out. The Oklahoma record striped hybrid is 23 lbs, 4 ounces. That’s about 19 pounds heavier than the largest white bass anyone should ever expect to see.
White bass are probably the right color of fish for Oklahoma, but there’s a problem fishing for white bass. Eleven months of the year white bass are most reliably lake fish, which requires a boat and some local knowledge, and more uncertainty than I want in Oklahoma. They aren’t a typical fly target. They chase minnows, they eat worms, they eat crustaceans, they chase more minnows. They school, and a white bass frenzy is a sight to behold. When they pound minnows on the surface it’s easy to tell they’re striper kinfolk.
And they’re anadromous. Ok, I’m lying again. They never make it to salt water, but in the spring they run into the feeder rivers and streams to spawn. When water temperatures reach the high 50s, sometime between February and May in most of their range, it’s quite the thing to catch the run. The smaller males move out of the lakes first, and then the bigger females follow. It’s a bit of a meat market, both for the fish and anglers. Conventional anglers pull out fish to the limits, and the limits are high–none in Oklahoma. This isn’t catch and release fishing. It’s freezer stocking.
The white bass feed right up to the spawn, and will hit anything that looks like a minnow. I’ve only fly fished for them once on the spawn, and then the trick was to get the fly deep enough. The big females weren’t in the river yet, and I only caught a few small males.
So to catch Oklahoma white bass at the right time I’d have to try to hit the spawn in the right place in one of the the right rivers in a fairly short window of time. That’s still more uncertainty than I want in Oklahoma. I’m guessing I’m not patient enough to wait until spring, and I’ll fish the Mountain Home tailwater sometime before Christmas.
Kris caught a northern pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus oregonensis) in Oregon. Pikeminnows are the largest member of the minnow family, Cyprinidae. It’s a native of Oregon and of the Columbia drainage. It’s nativity is right there in the species name: oregonensis.
The current world record pikeminnow weighed over 13 pounds, and Kris’s fish was small, no more than half a pound. Other than being caught, the fish was in no way remarkable. It’s apparently common to catch big pikeminnows, as long or longer than 24 inches and weighing more than three pounds. They can live longer than 15 years, and they reach sexual maturity from three to eight years. They spawn in the spring, and females can release up to 30,000 eggs.
Even though they’re not an invasive species, they are a fish of “ecological concern.” They are voracious piscivores, thrive in the dammed Columbia drainage, and are hell on smolt salmon. Hell and dam. They’re ugly, with their ragged scales and harsh jaw. They’re not considered edible, though somebody surely eats them. Anglers hate them. If ever there was a trash fish, it’s the pikeminnow.
Before the northern pikeminnow was the northern pikeminnow it was the northern squawfish. It was renamed by the Names of Fishes Committee of the American Fisheries Society. A bit later the same Committee renamed the Jewfish as the goliath grouper. Goliath grouper is a pretty good name, certainly a better name than Jewfish, but if I were a pikeminnow I’d feel slighted.
Florida goliath grouper, Jordan, David Starr (1907) Fishes, New York City, NY: Henry Holt and Company
The fish is also known as the Columbia River dace, and Columbia River dace would have been a pretty cool name. But no. Pikeminnow.
“Squawfish” may have originally derived from squawkfish, from the noise a pikeminnow makes when caught. Apparently American Indian names for the fish are often onomatopoeic. That’s not the name that caught on though. “Squaw” is probably derived from a Massachusett language word for woman, but it is considered particularly derisive, connoting subordinate status, sexual availability, stupidity, and squalor. Nobody needs that around.
Columbia River dace, Evermann, Barton W. (1893) Reconnaissance of the streams and lakes of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming, Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, vol. 11, 1891, Government Printing Office
In addition to the fish, there are plenty of geographic references to squaw, most notably Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California, and the Names of Fishes Committee may not get around to those any time soon. Of course there’s plenty of uses of Indian identity that are generally considered offensive: the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo, and the Atlanta Braves’ tomahawk chop just to name three. I’m personally offended by the tomahawk chop, though it’s probably because I saw it so often when the Astros and the Braves were in the same league. The Braves had Smoltz, Glavine, and Maddux. We could have used some pikeminnow for Smoltz.
Based on the published reports of her DNA testing, Senator Warren’s genetic claims are remote, but they are there. Senator Warren could claim she likely had ancestors who were Cherokee, just as I could claim to have likely had ancestors who were French. It would be overdone for me to claim to be French, but growing up in a culture, Oklahoma, where that heritage was peculiarly valued, the claim is common, even among those (unlike Senator Warren), who don’t have Senator Warren’s genetics. That for whatever reason is Oklahoman.
Kris is a big fan of Senator Warren, having had her as a law school professor long before the Senator’s Harvard days. Kris thought her brilliant, passionate, and an excellent teacher. I never had her as a teacher, don’t have strong opinions about her, and only note that the Senator’s Oklahomanness will follow her into 2020.
After I first posted this I came back and rewrote it because of Kris’s fondness for Senator Warren. My original tone was unnecessarily glib and dismissive, and didn’t really say what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was that white and black Oklahoma has a history that is so intertwined with American Indian Oklahoma that they believe, true or no, that they are fundamentally, at their literal roots, a part of it.
“Senator Warren has demonstrated her respect for tribal sovereignty and is an ally of the Eastern Band. As such, we support her and other allies — regardless of party — who promote tribal sovereignty, tribal self-determination, and protection of Cherokee women.”
Meanwhile there is a bounty paid by the Bonneville Power Authority on pikeminnows caught in the Columbia River. As I said, they are not a sport fish, so the bounty is to encourage anglers to target and remove large numbers of fish. One to 25 fish pays $5 per fish, 26 to 200 fish pays $6 per fish, 201 fish and up pays $8 per fish. A tagged fish is worth $500. There are stories of fisher folk making a living on the pikeminnow bounty. Tempting.
That novel about Oklahomans got it wrong. The Joads left their home near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, two-and-a-half hours east of Oklahoma City, to escape the Dust Bowl. It was the middle of the Great Depression, sure, but our last great ecological disaster was in the Panhandle of Oklahoma (and the Panhandle of Texas, and parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and New Mexico). The Dust Bowl wasn’t Sallisaw’s disaster, because Sallisaw is in the eastern part of the state. The coming great ecological disaster may be more widespread, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’ll get here on its own time
Rothstein, Arthur, 1915-1985, Son of farmer in dust bowl area. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
Oklahoma geography is mostly some timber and hilly stuff then variations on plains. Moving from east to west, first come the Ozarks and the Ouachitas, then plains, including a lot of rolling prairie. Finally there are the High Plains in the Panhandle, the Dust Bowl land, the flat mostly treeless land that was once grassland, then wheat, then dust.
Oklahoma was first seen by Spanish explorers, then French traders, and was finally purchased by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. It’s an extractive industry state, oil and gas, gas and oil. There are some odd bits of small mountains in the state, the Ozarks, the Ouachitas, the Arbuckles, and the Wichitas. Small accidental ranges pop up out of the prairie and the Cross Timbers. Because of the granite in the bits of mountain it’s a great place to buy a tombstone.
Stereographic Card, Fancy “roping” at a cowboys’ camp, Oklahoma, C. 1905, Underwood & Underwood, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
It’s beautiful but subject to tornadoes. The wind really does come roaring down the plains.
I grew up 19 miles south of the Red River, about as close as you can get to a place and not be there. I know Oklahoma as well as anywhere that’s not Texas. We shared tornadoes. I had some great grandparents and great-great grandparents who made it to Oklahoma, and my grandparents, Arthur and Eva, were married in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1908, a year after statehood. They apparently got there after the Indian Territory opened to white settlement in 1898, so they weren’t Sooners, but pretty soons. When my grandparents married he was 22, she was 17. They returned to Texas to farm dry-land cotton in the west, just outside the territory covered by the Dust Bowl, just outside the area that would have made us Texas Joads.
National Photo Company, Quanah Parker, Comanche Indian Chief, 1909, Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology, Library of Congress
If Oklahoma was late to white settlement, it had plenty of previous traffic. In addition to the Spanish explorers and French traders, there were indigenous people. After California, Oklahoma has the largest American Indian population of the states, 9.2 percent of the total population of 3.7 million. There are 39 different recognized tribal headquarters in the state. Some of the tribes, the Wichita, Kiowa, Osage, Caddo, and Comanche, are considered indigenous. Most tribes came from throughout the South and Midwest, displaced into Oklahoma. Oklahoma was the end-point of the Trail of Tears. Tribal names are the place names of eastern and central Oklahoma.
Indians and cowboys, cowboys and Indians. A cousin in Oklahoma, my mother’s second cousin, was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Fort Worth for founding the American Paint Horse Association. My mother said she won the Nobel Prize for Animal Husbandry, and maybe she said it first as a joke but as she aged she thought it was true. When I was 10, I shook Roy Rogers’ hand at the American Indian Exposition in Anadarko. Then it was called the Oklahoma Indian Pow Wow.
Even where I grew up on the correct side of the border there were names that came from the tribes: Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Quanah, Nocona, Comanche . . . My high school yearbook was the Yamparika, named after a a band of the Comanche. Nocona’s wife (and Quanah’s mother), Cynthia Anne Parker, was recaptured 40 miles west of my home at the Battle of Pease River. His father, Peta Nocona, was killed there, or was probably killed there anyway. The manager of Tri-State Lumber was known as Quanah Parker Jr. and was rumored to be one of Quanah Sr’s descendants. Quanah Sr., handsome, charismatic, and the last Comanche war chief, was a bit of a polygamist, with numerous wives, children, and grandchildren, so maybe the descendant part was true.
Meanwhile Oklahoma voted for Trump in the 2016 election. It is a deeply conservative state, religious, middle class, tied to oil and gas, but not as white-alone as one would think: in the 2010 census the white-alone population (which excludes Hispanics) was only about 67 percent of the total. Hispanics are the next largest population group, with 10.6 percent, more than double the 5.2 percent Hispanic population counted in the 2000 census. Trump carried the state by 65 percent. Oklahoma is reddest in the Dust Bowl counties, but also the least populated. It’s pinkest–no place is blue–in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City/Norman areas. I don’t know how Trump fared with Native Americans, though I could see how Make America Great Again would have a certain appeal. I doubt it would mean the same thing though.
Lee, Russell, 1903-1986, Roughnecks leaning on the wrench to tighten the joint in the pipe, oil well, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.
