Tag: Baseball

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Michigan and Ohio Packing List

I’m lumping these two states together. It’s hard to do them together, but it’s even harder to do them apart, and they do sit next to each other. So they’re lumped.

Gear

Our guides in both states wanted us to use their rods, which helps them because they can come to the launch with the rods rigged. We didn’t take rods at all. Lance in Michigan fished with 4-weight Winston rods, which meant that I was fishing with slightly lighter versions of what I would have lugged to Michigan anyway. Katie in Ohio fished with 7-weight G Loomis NRX or Sage rods, so I was fishing with different brands of the 7-weight that I would have lugged to Ohio.

In Michigan we used floating lines, same for Ohio except for a wee bit of sinking line fishing. I can’t imagine that anybody actually likes to fish with sinking lines. To cast with floating lines you just have to pick the line up off the top of the water. Now mind, that’s no easy task, and a good line pick-up is the heart of the cast, well, that and about a half-dozen other things that are also the heart of the cast, but with sinking lines you have to get the line to the top of the water before you can even begin to pick it up, and sinking lines are not known for casting easily anyway. The whole process is fraught with peril for everyone standing near me.

We also fished out of boats in both states, so in addition to not packing rods and reels we didn’t pack waders or boots. No waders, no boots, no rods, no reels . . . I did take some flies, and used a couple, but the guides had those too. It was the easiest packing ever.

Detroit

Detroit was a joy. Parts of it are still beat up, but I’ve never been in a town where people were prouder of their city. The first night at dinner at Alpino we asked our waiter if there was something in particular we should see, and he wrote out a page-long list of places for us. He recommended places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He listed don’t-miss destinations and neighborhoods just to drive through. It was good advice, too. We spent parts of three days in Detroit, and could easily have spent three more, and we didn’t deviate much from our waiter’s advice.

The one place recommended by everyone we asked was the Detroit Institute of Art. We spent three hours there before we left for Grayling, and could have spent another four. We barely got off the third floor, which is the smallest floor. As museums go, it’s about as good as anywhere, and should be on everyone’s list of American art museums. I even fished while I was there.

Greek fish dish, between 340 and 330 BCE; Roman fish mosaic, 4th century A.D.; Detroit Institute of Art.

Detroit has a large Middle Eastern population, with estimates of over 300,000 people. Apparently the growth was a combination of the growth of the auto industry and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which is pretty serendipitous if you ponder it, and was then spurred by the lifting of restrictions on Arabic and Asian immigration by the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. The signage in Dearborn, for instance, is doubled in Arabic. We went to Dearborn for afternoon baked stuff at Shatila Bakery. No donuts, but a good bakery anyway.

Our Alpino waiter had suggested lunch at the Yemen Cafe, which was a diner in a fairly beat-up neighborhood. The cafe was busy with African Americans from the neighborhood and Yemenis in fairly traditional dress, including one guy wearing a jambiya dagger, the dagger that Peter O’Toole wears in Laurence of Arabia. Open carry.

Our waiter brought us free glasses of Yemeni tea to try. We ordered slabs of hot Yemeni bread, chicken gallaba with hummus, and lamb fasah. We were taking the advice of our Alpino waiter and didn’t know exactly what we were ordering, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Detroit was at it’s peak of wealth and industrial might in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Deco buildings from its heyday are magnificent. Our Alpino waiter suggested the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which have been preserved in fine form. It’s kinda like visiting the Sistine Chapel. You don’t so much comprehend it as just stand around and gawk. There were great mosaics in the Fisher Building, though I saw no fish.

Guardian Building, 1929

Fisher Building, 1928

The first morning I went for a run along the Detroit River, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and sprawled, customs officers offered me a bottle of water. The guy running in front of me came back to make sure I was ok. Detroiters are not only proud of their city, they’re friendly.

We took the Detroit Windsor Tunnel to Canada, and no matter what you may have heard I didn’t go there to buy Cuban cigars. Windsor looks like a good place to go if you’re in the market for cannabis, or a tattoo, or Cuban cigars. Cigars are heavily taxed and expensive in Canada, not that I would know.

We didn’t get to see the Tigers play because they were on the road, and I’m kinda glad. it gives me an excuse to revisit Detroit.

The first night we picked Alpino for dinner because it was the kind of Germanic high cuisine that we don’t really get in Houston. Alpino serves food from the Alps, which is German tinged with Swiss tinged with Italian, which makes for a nice combination. The food was good, our tour guide/waiter was great.

Our second night in Detroit we ate at Buddy’s Pizza, which first served Detroit-style pizza. Buddy’s was a Detroit bar, a former speakeasy, and it started serving pizza as a bar snack in the 40s. Square pizza is Sicilian, and the first pizzas were baked in liberated drip pans from the plants. I like to think of the pans as liberated anyway, though in truth they were apparently purchased from auto suppliers. Liberated drip pans just has a nice ring to it.

There are now multiple Buddy’s in the Detroit area, and I’m sure they’re all fine, but the original location reeks of authenticity. On the way in we asked an employee standing near the back door which pizza we should get. He told us his favorite was the Detroiter. Well of course it was.

He was a waiter but not our waiter, but before we left he went out of his way to visit our table and make sure we liked the pizza. Like I said, everyone was proud of their city, and who wouldn’t be? We really liked Detroit.

Cincinatti

After a day’s fishing in Ohio we spent two nights in Cincinatti. We went to a Reds game. We visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I ate a hot dog with Skyline Chili and cheese, and we sat on a nice downtown square and listened to a lively band during Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest. We ate dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant, then we ate dinner the next night at another completely forgettable restaurant. We went to Graeter’s Ice Cream, and visited in line with two American Airlines flight attendants flying out of Dallas. It was nice enough, but it suffered in comparison to Detroit.

Skyline Chili, by the way, is actually a Greek ragu sauce usually served on spaghetti. It was dubbed as chili during the nationwide chili craze in the early part of the last century. It is not chili, and for Texans, calling it chili is heresy. It has cinnamon in it, and chocolate. I’ll just note that the Cincinnati Reds in recent years have consistently beaten my Astros, so eating Skyline Chili was debasement in hopes of appeasing the baseball gods. It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy Cincinnati as much as Detroit.

Of course Detroit then knocked my Astros out of the wild card round of the playoffs. Did I mention that I hate Detroit?

Hotels

In Detroit we stayed downtown in the Shinola Hotel. The room had lots of Shinola accessories, there was a Shinola watch store, and the downtown location made getting around Detroit easy. We walked to dinner at Alpino, and had the Tigers been in town we could have walked to the stadium.

In Cincinnati we stayed downtown at the 21C Museum Hotel, and were able to walk to the Reds game. There was plenty to do downtown, and we didn’t take the car out until we drove to the airport our last morning.

In Grayling we stayed at the Gates Au Sable Lodge, which sits on the bank of the Au Sable River, has a good fly shop and guide service, and has a good restaurant where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every meal. The Lodge has also collected all of the possible trout fishing bibelots produced in its 50-year history to adorn every available decorative niche, as if it had hired an interior decorator from the classified ads at the back of an old copy of Field and Stream. There were rod racks on the wall above the bed, and wader hangers by the door to each room. There were framed flies and fish prints and mounted fish, and Au Sable boat-shaped light fixtures. I was especially fond of our room’s trout fishing carpet.

Playlists

There are a lot of similarities between my Ohio and Michigan playlists. They seem balanced, as if the two states took turns producing songsters, and they share a kind of rock and roll grit that you just don’t always find in other states. In Ohio there are the Black Keys, in Michigan Jack White. In Ohio there is Josh Ritter, Marc Cohn, and The National, in Detroit there’s MC5 and Fountains of Wayne. Of course it’s hard to top Detroit’s Motown. With Motown you get Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 . . . Ohio does have the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players, but Motown is Motown.

In Detroit there was Motown music playing everywhere. Well of course there was. It was like Hawaiian music in Hawaii. These people love their city.

The Supremes, The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS Television, 1966.

They really are good playlists, amazing playlists. Devo, Madonna, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth and Grand Funk Railroad. Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, and Nine Inch Nails. Tracy Chapman and Doris Day. The Foo Fighters. They are great lists full of great music, and I won’t report you if you skip Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes. No one has to listen to Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes when they can listen instead to Stevie Wonder. Or Roy Rogers.

I had vowed I’d hum Baby Love every day in Michigan, and I did.

Guitar

I took the Kohno. I worked on Bach.

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati.

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Smallmouth Bass, Tuscarawas River, Ohio, September 20, 2024 (43)

We fished until noon on Michigan’s Au Sable, then drove eight hours south from Grayling, Michigan, population 1,917, to Coshocton, Ohio, population 11,016. Our drive required two hamburgers, two fill-ups, a shopping spree at a Krogers for our next day’s lunch, a shopping spree at a Walgreens for reasons I can’t remember, and finally two more hamburgers. In case you’re curious, at the Krogers we bought cheese, crackers, cookies, and a pear.

The drive started out in the Michigan Northwoods, then moved into flat plains, and finally at dusk we were in some of the prettiest, most bucolic, hilliest farmland I’ve seen. Then it got dark and we drove another hour. The area around Coshocton seemed well-supplied with streams, cornfields, pastures, and handsome two-lane country roads. There were lots of busy small towns and barns. We saw no Haitians, but in Ohio I figure they were immigrating everywhere, just lined up to eat our fish and irk J.D. Vance.

The next day we fished the Tuscarawas River with Katie Johnstone. We had hired Katie through Mad River Outfitters in Columbus, Ohio, after we had decided that we would fish for smallmouth. Smallmouth are a good river fish, they’re native to Ohio, and it’s not a fish we see a lot of in Texas. Also, the Cincinnati Reds were in Cincinnati, so if we fished near Columbus we could drive a bit further and see a baseball game on Saturday. The Reds beat the Pirates. I kept a scorecard.

I also vowed to taste Skyline Chili in Cincinnati. I did. Since I’m a generous spirit, I won’t say more.

Sometime in the recent past, Orvis ads pushed 50/50 on the Water for fly-fishing gender parity. If there was ever an old white guy sport, it’s fly fishing, and most fly-fishing excursions are jam-packed to the gills with old white guys. Orvis’s 50/50 on the Water was intended to expand the universe of fly fishers by tapping into the half of the population who traditionally didn’t. One could cynically wonder if 50/50 wasn’t intended to expand Orvis’s customer base, but I try to ascribe the best motives to people and institutions. I do make exceptions, especially for Skyline Chili, but 50/50 on the Water always seemed to me well-intentioned.

Our guides in Michigan and in Ohio shared a similar biography. Both were closer to 30 than 70, and had become obsessed with fly fishing as young adults. They both started guiding after giving up other jobs–one in photography and one in graphics. They had each guided full time for three years. Both tied flies, fished Midwestern rivers, and were socially skilled enough to act amused when we told stories.

The difference between the guides, of course, was that Lance in Michigan was a big-ish, guy-ish guy with a beard and a Y-chromosome, who guided from a drift boat. Katie was a petite pretty young woman with her hair in a blonde plait. She was good at wrestling her river raft. She was Y-chromosome deficient.

They were both excellent guides.

Fishing with Katie after fishing with Lance made me ponder why more women don’t fly fish. There’s nothing about fly fishing that seems particularly masculine. It’s an elegant sport, and I’ve always fished with women–my mother (and father) fished, though neither fly fished. Kris fly fishes, so I’m almost always 50/50 on the water, and while I wouldn’t admit it, Kris often as not out-fishes me. I cast better, really I do, and I tie better knots. I tie flies. Still, on any given trip she’s apt to catch more fish, not that I would ever admit it. On those trips I will only acknowledge that we caught exactly the same number of fish. On every other trip I catch more fish.

Kris claims she only fishes because I do, but when we went to Portugal, when I vowed we’d return to the States and catch a fish on the fly in every state, it was Kris who kept complaining that we weren’t fishing. I was perfectly happy drinking port and eating endless Pastels de Nata. Of course she probably saved my life. If she hadn’t distracted me with fishing I’d probably weigh 300 pounds and have no liver.

In Ohio, thanks to Katie we caught a lot of smallmouth. Katie rowed the raft, told us where to cast, switched out flies when the fishing slowed, and retrieved hung-up flies from the bankside brush. It was a pretty little river, lined with trees and tinged green. It wasn’t weedy, which is always a good thing, though drought had spurred an incipient algae bloom.

Katie fished streamers differently from the way I fish them. Hers were bigger, and she had us retrieve with short irregular strips and pauses. I would have just chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved . . . Her method actually took some concentration, and with irregular strips and pauses I concentrated some. I used her retrieve for largemouth after we got home, and it worked well.

I no longer fish for trout during August in the Lower 48. Pre-global warming, August was an ok month to fish, but the major rivers in trout country are warming, and it seems that in August most rivers will now reach at least 70 degrees by early afternoon. When a river reaches 70 degrees, trout still feed, but they have trouble surviving being caught. Cold water is oxygenated water, and recovering trout need oxygen. Fifty degree water is the optimal temperature for trout fishing, and even then an angler will kill some fish from stress and mishandling. Higher temperatures pretty much guarantee death.

Hence smallmouth. Smallmouth are better suited for hotter water and will survive what trout can’t. Now instead of pushing 50/50 on the Water, companies like Orvis are encouraging anglers to go fish for smallmouth in August. Meanwhile warmer water is allowing smallmouth to push trout out of traditional trout waters. At least smallmouth are fun to catch.

It wasn’t August, but it was a hot September, even in the far northern climes of Ohio, and the Tuscarawas River was pretty, quiet, and thanks to Katie we caught and released a bunch of smallmouth. I’m pretty sure Kris and I each caught exactly the same number of fish. Meanwhile Katie was great at telling us how to fish the river, and the river was a joy to fish. It’s the kind of river I wish I lived next to. At least we got to visit.

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Michigan

The best thing ever written about fishing, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, is set in Michigan. There are two paragraphs at the start of the story that I re-read often. Do high school students still read Big Two-Hearted River, or is it dated, something for old men to remember from when they were young? I loved it 50 years ago in high school, I’ve loved it when I’ve read it since, though when I first read it I suspect I was more interested in how the tarp was pitched than in Nick Adams’s post-war trauma.

Nick looked at the burned-out stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

I understood though, even at 16, why fishing the swamp would be left for another day. It’s not a difficult story, it’s simple and direct, but it’s very beautiful.

So because of a short story I’ve saved Michigan until close to the end of our project. In Michigan I want to find a bridge and look down into the river. I want to look for fish holding in the current. If I’m lucky enough to see any trout I want to watch as they feed.

Geography and Grayling

The lower Michigan peninsula is shaped like a mitten, which everybody knows, but that’s not the amazing thing about Michigan geography. The amazing thing about Michigan geography is that it’s mostly bordered by freshwater, by four of the five great lakes, from left to right, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. It has the longest freshwater boundary of any state, and has the highest percentage of area covered by water of all of the states. It is second only to Alaska for total water area.

Waterways and lakes of Michigan, https://gisgeography.com/michigan-lakes-rivers-map/.

The upper Michigan peninsula, the U.P., juts out into Lakes Superior and Michigan from northeast Wisconsin, and is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the narrow strait of Mackinac. If life were fair and rational the U.P. would be part of Wisconsin, but Michigan got it because of its southern border. Do you see that protrusion in the south? Michigan claims that its southern border should have been drawn further south. When Ohio became a state in 1803, Michigan was still a territory with no votes in Congress, and by political fiat Congress gave Toledo to Ohio over Michigan’s objections. Relations got pretty testy between inhabitants of the two states, and to calm things down Congress gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula. Michigan didn’t like it, but, honestly, it got the better deal.

I don’t think Wisconsin got anything, but it still ended up with all the good cheese.

Northern Michigan is heavily forested, and early Michigan fortunes were made in timber. The native fish of Northern Michigan was the grayling, a char that needs cold clean water and can be found now in Canada and Alaska. Logging killed off Michigan’s native grayling. It also damaged the native brook trout populations, which were the trout that Hemingway likely described. Streams were restocked with browns and rainbow trout from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and with more brook trout. We’ll fish near the City of Grayling, population 1,917, in the center of the Lower Peninsula. In Grayling there are no longer any grayling.

Arctic Grayling, Evermann, Barton W., and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska (1907), Washington D.C., Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Fisheries.

We’ll fish the Au Sable River. There is a different Au Sable River in New York, which is also a fly fishing river. They are pronounced differently, but according to any random Frenchman, both American pronunciations are wrong. I can’t remember how to pronounce the name of either the Michigan or the New York river, but in French it would be pronounced something like oh Sah-bleh. That’s the only one I’m reasonably sure of.

As logging slowed, Michigan’s south was already selling Fords and Olds and Cadillacs. With mass production of cars, Michigan changed how we do everything, and by the 1920s, Detroit was the center of the automobile universe. It was the fourth largest U.S. city (and home of one of my favorite baseball players, Hank Greenberg). Grayling was visited by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but to fish, not to cut timber.

Frank Lyeria, Hank Greenberg, the Hebrew Hammer, 1946, The Sporting News archives.

Michigan geology divides more or less into two parts, the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula. There are the Huron Mountains in the far northwest U.P., the highest peak of which, Mount Arvon, is 1,979 feet. It’s the highest peak in Michigan. Other than the Hurons, Michigan is pretty flat. Actually, even with the Hurons it’s pretty flat.

Both peninsulas are mostly bedrock covered with glacial drift. Apparently there are different ages of bedrock, and the older it gets the better it is for mining, and the oldest and the best mining is in the U.P., so take that, Toledo. The glacial remains have a good bit of variation, but regardless one typically doesn’t go to Michigan to see the rocks. When comparing topography shaped by glaciers and topography shaped by continental plate collisions, go for the collisions every time. That means if you want to look at rocks, go to Utah not Michigan.

Politics

In 2016, with 63% turnout, Donald Trump carried Michigan by about 9,000 votes, 2,279,543 to 2,268,839. In 2020, with 73% turnout, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 150,000 votes, 2,804,040 to 2,649,852. It’s about 60 days until the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, current polling averages show Kamala Harris leading in Michigan 48% to 47%, and that’s almost certainly well within the margins of error for the underlying polls. If Harris carries Michigan and Wisconsin (where polling is running about the same), she would likely need only one additional marginal state, North Carolina, Georgia, or Pennsylvania, to carry the election. On the flip side, if Trump manages to carry Michigan, then like as not Harris has lost.

It’ll be kinda fun to be out of Texas and into a state where there’s actual electioneering going on.

From Wikipedia, Michigan State Legislature.

I check the polling about every three minutes, so if anything changes I’ll let you know.

Michigan’s governor is Democratic, as are both of its senators, seven of its 13 members of congress, and both houses of its state legislature (in each case by two-vote margins). It’s a tight squeeze for the Democrats. Its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris.

There is also a U.S. Senate race in progress in Michigan, where the incumbent, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, is unexpectedly retiring. According to polling, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, leads the Republican Mike Rogers in the polls.

Population

There are 10,077,331 people in Michigan as of the 2020 census. About 18% of population claims German ancestry, 11% English. About 62% of the population is Anglo, 12.4% Black alone, 18.7% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of the population reports as two or more races. The population is heavily concentrated in the south.

Michigan was part of the Ohio Territory and was admitted as a state in 1837. It didn’t grow as early or as quickly as neighboring Ohio, but once it did start adding population, it piled it on. In 1870, the population was 1,184,059. By 1910 it was 2,810,173, so in 40 years its population more than doubled. Between 1910 and 1920, Michigan grew by 30.5%, to 3,668,412, and between 1920 and 1930 it grew another 32%, to 4,842,325. You can almost see the cars pour into America out of Detroit and Flint.

Then Michigan growth slowed. Because of the loss of industrial jobs, Detroit went from the nation’s fourth largest city to a cautionary tale of white flight, high crime, and unemployment. In 1967 there were the Detroit riots. In 1971, there were more than 600 homicides in Detroit. Between 1971 and 1973, there were 84 killings by police. It was the Wild West. When I came to Houston in the 1980s, there was constant patter about the number of Michigan license plates on the streets. It was the age of Robocop and Roger & Me. Detroit was declining. Houston was on a tear.

In the 2010 census Michigan actually lost population.

Phil Cherner, Detroit, Michigan, 1967, www.philcherner.com, by permission. Thanks Phil.

By 2013, Detroit’s population had dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000. Detroit was broke, violent, unemployed, bleeding all but its poorest population, and in 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

As late as 2018 Detroit had the fourth highest murder rate among major cities, but it’s improved in recent years. In 2023 Detroit had its lowest number of homicides since 1966, with 252. Houston had 348. It’s finances seem under control, and it has invested in its central city. Violent crime is still high, with 2,028 violent crimes–murder, rape, robbery, assault–per 100,000 people, compared to a national average in 2023 of 369 per 100,000. Based on its violent crime rate, Detroit remains the second most dangerous city in the U.S., second only to Memphis and ahead of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Little Rock? Really? I love Memphis, but I always think of Little Rock as nigh onto rural. I did once spend an interesting afternoon there in a tornado.

I’m excited to see Detroit. We’re staying downtown in the new Shinola Hotel. The downtown architecture is terrific, and the Institute of Art is supposed to be among the world’s best museums. Municipal services like street lights and garbage pick-up have been restored, plus the Tigers have always had the classiest uniforms in baseball.

Where We Won’t Go

We won’t see Mackinac Island, or Traverse City. We won’t visit the U.P. , or drive through the U.P. to Wisconsin. We won’t visit Holland, Michigan, where my parents bought my sister a pair of wooden shoes when I was one. The shoes were very uncomfortable, and I learned early that I was not cut out to be Dutch.

We won’t see the Detroit Tigers play, because they’ll be on the road. We will not make it to the Motown Museum because it’s closed on the days we’ll be in Detroit. I do promise, however, to hum “Baby Love” at least once an hour, and largely because of Motown my Michigan music playlist is magnificent.

Chris Butcher, Hitsville USA, 2006, public domain.

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Missouri

On Monday we decided that on Friday we’d drive to Missouri, to Branson. That’s a short turnaround, but I’ve been to Missouri plenty. My Grandmother Eva–not that Grandmother Eva, the other Grandmother Eva–was born in Missouri, in Osgood near the Iowa border, in 1890. When I was five or six, circa 1963, we took her home from Texas to see her siblings. We stayed with one of her sisters, and while the house may have had electricity, it didn’t have indoor plumbing. There was a pump in the yard for water and an outhouse for other sundry stuff. It was on a gravel country road, and at night I saw fireflies for the first time. It was wonderful.

I’ve been to Missouri some since, enough to know that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is as pretty as MLB stadiums get (though I don’t recommend it in August), and that the riverfront town of Hannibal has seen better days. I’ve been to Missouri enough to know that while any Texan would tell you that Missouri barbecue is mediocre stuff, the sandwiches at Gioia’s Deli on The Hill are worth the effort. On The Hill you can still imagine Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra as children in the neighborhood’s heyday. Not so much Mark Twain and Hannibal.

Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City, 2015.

There are good fishing rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, and if we were being intellectually honest we would target native Missouri smallmouth, but we haven’t fished for trout in a while, and there are plenty of Missouri rivers stocked at one time or another with trout. In Branson there is the Ozarks’ White River at the Taneycomo Lake dam. One Missouri spring creek near Branson, Crane Creek, claims the purest strain of McCloud River redband trout in the world. They were stocked in the 1880s from eggs imported from California and supposedly dumped off a bridge by railroaders.

Records are a bit sketchy, but Crane Creek has been stocked no more recently than the 1920s. Because it was the site of the second national fish hatchery, the McCloud River redband was the original source of most of the stocked rainbow in the world. Only in Crane Creek does the original strain remain unmixed with other rainbow subspecies.

By all reports the Crane Creek trout are small, skittish, and hard to catch. The stream is narrow and overgrown, and there’s poison ivy and water moccasins. Of course that last is likely overblown, and there are more likely a lot of non-venomous northern water snakes and maybe some moccasins. It is a herpetologist’s truism that everybody thinks that every water snake is a vicious, vindictive, or aggressive cottonmouth, but they aren’t more vicious, vindictive, and aggressive than most of us, and most of the snakes you see in the water aren’t moccasins.

Anyway, it sounds like we have to fish Crane Creek.

I’ve been looking at Missouri rivers for a while, thinking we would avoid Branson. We could do it, but Branson is convenient. It’s a strange place, a tourist destination that is a distant cousin to Nashville. It is a vacation destination for devout Southern and Midwestern protestants, seemingly devoted to clean living, family entertainment, golf, lakeside condos, and fatty foods. There is fishing though, and a good fly shop. It’s about a 10-hour drive from Houston. We can take the dogs, and coming home we can spend the night in Bentonville, Arkansas. Branson eateries tend towards family entertainment and national chains. Bentonville, as the business hub of Walmart, has better places to eat.

A short note on pronunciation

Apparently there’s no correct pronunciation of Missouri. The most common pronunciations are either Missour-ee or Missour-uh, but neither is incorrect, and they aren’t even the only ones. I grew up with Missour-uh, and long assumed that since I had some Missour-uh ancestry my pronunciation must be correct, but no. Still, it’s not wrong either. Oddly, how you say Missouri isn’t governed by education, wealth, race, or even geography. It’s not a South versus Midwest thing. It’s just the luck of the draw or maybe personal taste. Some Missourans say Missour-uh, some Missour-ee, and some go back and forth between them. All things should be so accommodating.

The Missouri Compromise

The U.S. acquired Missouri in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and St. Louis became the jumping-off point for a big part of western expansion. In 1821 it became a state under the Missouri Compromise: to maintain political balance, Maine entered the Union as a Free State, while Missouri entered as a Slave State. After the admission of Missouri, no new territory north of the 36°30′ parallel could enter the Union as a slave state.

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Julio Reis, Map of the United States c. 1849 (modern state borders), with the parallel 36°30′ north, Wikipedia, 2009.

The state lines in the map above are mostly modern boundaries. West Virginia wouldn’t exist until the Civil War. None of the grey states existed, except California. It’s the green line, the extension of the Mason-Dixon Line along 36°30′ that purportedly controlled American expansion for the next 30 years. See that far north border of Texas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle? The Oklahoma Panhandle was originally claimed by Texas, but when Texas entered the Union in 1845, that northern bit was above the line. To preserve the Missouri Compromise, it was cut off and left as part of the Indian Territory.

After the Missouri Compromise, there was a push among Southern slaveholding states to annex Cuba as a Slave State, to maintain Southern legislative power. It wasn’t going to happen. Cuba was valuable to Spain, and there was no real interest in annexation among most Cubans, but it’s amusing to guess whether Governor Fidel would have been a Republican or a Democrat.

The Missouri Compromise lasted until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 provided that Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as slave or free based on the votes of Kansas or Nebraska settlers. The seemingly sensible resolution threw the now-raging national slave debate into armed war. Abolitionists came to Kansas from the north, and pro-slavery Border Ruffians raided into Kansas from Missouri, and all of them brought convictions, guns, and knives. John Brown got his bones in Bloody Kansas. Kansas finally voted to enter the Union as a free state, but allowing popular local vote to determine only made the Civil War inevitable.

In 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court determined that African Americans could not be citizens, that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in its territories, and for good measure that the already superseded Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

Reynolds's Political Map of the United States 1856.jpg

New York: Wm. C. Reynolds and J. C. Jones – “Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States” (1856) from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Population and Demographics

In 1820, the 66,586 population of Missouri was .6% of the nation’s total population. By 1920, Missouri’s 3,404,055 population was a biggly 3% of the total. St. Louis was the 6th largest city in the U.S., and had two major league baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles). Kansas City was 19th. By 2020, the St. Louis metropolitan statistical area, with a population of 2,820,253, was ranked 21st. Kansas City, with 2,192,035, was 31st.

In 2020, the total Missouri population of 6,154,913 was .1% of the total U.S. population of 329.5 million. It had gone from .6% in 1820, to 3% in 1920, to .1% in 1920. Missouri still had two major league baseball teams, though one was now the Kansas City Royals. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2020. They won again this year.

Missouri’s national importance was driven in part by Mississippi River trade and Westward Expansion, and with the decline of both, the its national importance also declined. Still, Missouri is where the South and the Midwest meet, in the same way that Texas is where the South and the Southwest meet. It is a black/white population, with heavy emphasis on white. Approximately 82% of Missourians are white, with less than 5% of that population Hispanic.

About 12% of the Missouri population is black, mostly centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, and in a stretch of southeastern counties along the Mississippi River, an apparent extension of the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. That delta population is likely a remnant of slavery, and the population growth in St. Louis and Kansas City was fueled by the Great Migration, both from the South and from less populated areas in Missouri. Hannibal, for instance was 14.5% black in 1900, but only 6.1% by 2020. Conversely, St. Louis was 6.1% black in 1900, but by 2020 the greater St Louis area was 17% black.

Satchel Paige, Untitled Photo, between 1935 and 1942, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

It’s worth noting that Kansas City became an African American cultural Mecca, being, along with New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, a major jazz hub. Count Basie was from Kansas City. So was Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, and Charlie Parker. It was also the home of the Kansas City Monarchs, perhaps one of the greatest baseball conglomerations ever. Jackie Robinson jumped from the Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige played for the Monarchs, and so did Cool Papa Bell, Turkey Stearns, Wilbur Rogan, and Buck O’Neil.

Lester Young by Ojon Mili. Time Inc. – Life magazine, Volume 17, Number 13 (page 40), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44359804

The American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and are worth a special trip. And did I mention that Kauffman Stadium is one of the finest stadiums in Major League Baseball? It’s just too bad that Kansas City Barbecue isn’t better.

Of course Mark Twain is from Missouri, and T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou.

Politics

Both U.S. Senators from Missouri and four of the six Representatives are Republican. All of the six statewide elected officials, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer, and attorney general, are Republican, and there are sizable Republican majorities in the state senate and house of representatives.

In 2020, Donald Trump carried the state by 56.80% of the vote, compared to Joe Biden’s 41.41%. Biden carried only Boone, Jackson, and St. Louis Counties. Jackson is Kansas City, St. Louis is, well, St. Louis, and Boone, in the middle of the state, is Columbia, home of the University of Missouri. Like other states, less-populated areas vote Republican, urban centers and college towns vote Democratic.

2020 presidential election, Missouri, By KyleReese64 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95975673

Geography

Missouri is divided into three major geographic regions, the Ozark Highlands, the Northern Plains, and the Coastal Alluvial Plain. No mysteries here. The Northern Plains are rolling, and you can grow corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn, and corn. There are lots of streams. It’s Iowa just a wee bit south of Iowa.

The smallest region, the southeast Coastal Alluvial Plain, is an extension of the Arkansas Delta, which is just like the Mississippi Delta but west of the Mississippi. It’s flat, wet, and a good place to grow rice, and cotton. Of course cotton.

The Ozarks are the Ozarks. They extend into Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s a dome, cut into topography by erosion, faults, bluffs, rivers, and streams. It’s beautiful, dramatic country.

On the state’s eastern border there’s the Mississippi River. Cutting across the center of the state, roughly along the line that divides the Plains and the Ozarks, is the Missouri River. The Missouri meets the Mississippi at St. Louis.

Mark Twain’s Confederate Service

Mark Twain served as a Confederate militia lieutenant in Missouri, and he deserted after two weeks. Twain scholars have suggested that his desertion didn’t evidence opposition to the Confederacy, as much as concern as to the likely outcome of militia service in what was substantially Union-controlled territory. It’s pretty likely that Twain was dedicated to the South, and that his later reevaluation of the South and its cause was a principal source of his satirical brilliance. It’s hard to imagine Huck Finn written by someone who didn’t distrust most people’s pronouncements, including from time to time his own.

Osgood, Missouri, 2021.