Tag: Books

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Yellowstone: The Firehole River, Gibbon River, and Nez Perce Creek, September 21, 2025

Immediately after our weeklong Montana road trip, Kris and I made our second trip of the summer to Wyoming, this time into Yellowstone National Park. It was my third trip to Yellowstone, Kris’s second, and for me this trip was meant to take care of two bits of unfinished business: I wanted to stay at the Old Faithful Inn, and I had never caught a fish in Yellowstone.

When I first visited Yellowstone, circa 1961, I was five, and was probably better qualified as bait than a fisherman. Other than some state capitols and the Mormon Tabernacle, the Old Faithful Inn was likely the largest building I’d ever seen. It was certainly the most magnificent. We didn’t stay there.

I saw it again circa 1994 when our children were small, after having seen a lot more of the world, but it was still one of the most magnificent buildings I’d ever seen. We didn’t stay there that time either.

This time we spent the night, two nights actually. It was a bit more than $600 a night for a cramped room with a good shower and a cranky, sticking dresser. I hurt my hand when I tried to close the dresser drawer with a good whack. My hand didn’t take kindly to the whacking and the drawer remained stuck. Forcefulness is probably not one of my strong points.

I tell you the cost because of how disproportionate it was to the service. For $600 a night no one made our bed the second day, and there was nary a chocolate on the pillow. Towels dropped on the floor stayed on the floor. Still, after all the busloads of tourists were gone, you could walk into the Old Faithful Inn lobby and sit in a chair and have the view all your own, well, all your own along with a few dozens of others, but that was nothing like the hundreds of others packed into the lobby during the day. The next morning walking out of the hotel at seven I got to see Old Faithful serendipitously erupt. That stuff made the stay worth the money. Once.

Back to fishing.

At age 40 I had a midlife crisis and started tying flies. Over the long haul, going ahead and buying a Ferrari would probably have been cheaper, but of course I thought by tying my own flies I would save money. At least if I’d bought the car it would have been paid for by now.

I also started reading everything I could find about fly fishing. I read whole volumes with titles like Caddis! and Reading a Trout Stream! This was before the internet, when there were still books and magazines. The local Orvis store had shelves of fly-fishing books for sale. None of that reading taught me how to cast, or even how to cast better, but it did give me a good geography lesson as to where I was supposed to fish.

For most anglers then fly fishing was still principally about trout, with some salmon thrown in for exotica, and while Trout by Ray Bergman isn’t mentioned much now, it was then considered holy writ. It was first published in 1931, revised in 1951, and is allegedly one of the best-selling sports books ever published. It was not only impossibly long, 482 pages in the current edition, it was also dense, and even after I waded through I had poor notions of what Mr. Bergman was talking about.

I remember three things about the book. First, I was stupidly proud of finishing it, even though to me it was incomprehensible. I suppose I hoped finishing it would make me a better angler. It didn’t. I got a lot more angling advice out of the second half of War and Peace, though probably a bit less out of Heidegger’s Being and Time. They were both incomprehensible too, so there could well have been angling advice.

Second, illustrated color plates of flies are very pretty, and I can study them for hours. I mostly remember Trout for the pictures. Trout has a lot of mighty fine colored engraved plates, 17 or 18, and because Bergman was a completest, they included plates of pretty trout lures for conventional tackle. They didn’t include plates of cheese balls or salmon eggs.

Third, after finishing Trout, I really wanted to fish the Firehole River. The one substantive thing I took from Trout was that Bergman had fished the park when fishing the park was probably more exotic than fishing the Seychelles is now, and his descriptions of fishing park rivers were thrilling, almost religious experiences, or at least they caught a lot of fish. And the Firehole was his favorite and the most exotic of the lot.

So on this trip we fished the Firehole, and then we fished the Gibbon and then Nez Perce Creek. We didn’t catch much. It sounds rushed, cramming three rivers into a single day, but it wasn’t. The three rivers are reasonably close together, and we drove some, walked some, and then fished each for a couple of hours. I caught two tiny trout, one non-native brook trout and one non-native brown, not much for all the effort and nothing of any size. Kris didn’t catch anything, but she would have fished the same river bend on the Firehole all day if it hadn’t been for an intrusive buffalo.

Away from the parking areas there were no other anglers, though we did keep seeing buffalo.

We had just spent five days fishing with Montana Anglers in Montana’s Madison River area, so we were both fishing pretty well. For Yellowstone we also hired a guide from Montana Anglers, Will Kyle. Boats aren’t allowed on Yellowstone Park rivers, so you have to wade, and on our pre-trip telephone call, Will asked us if we could hike a bit. I didn’t know what to tell him. I’m in reasonably good shape for an old guy, and Kris is tougher than me, but if Will was going to hike us ten miles into the backcountry we probably wouldn’t come home happy. Will was considerate though, and it wasn’t ten miles. It was a comfortable bit, way less than a mile, but once we walked away from the cars Yellowstone was a different place. There was nobody there but me, Kris, Will, and the buffalo.

This was as close as Kris would get to the buffalo. I made sure I stood behind her.

We fished two dry flies all day, with a size 14 or so Parachute Adams trailing a larger indicator fly that looked to me like a size 10 or so Parachute Adams. You can’t go wrong with a Parachute Adams.

It’s rare any more to fish dry flies for a day, flies that float on the surface of the water. It’s not that it’s really harder to fish dry flies (though on the surface it’s easier to see your mistakes), but they are usually not so sure of catching fish. Fish take most of their meals underwater, not on the surface, and dragging a couple of nymphs underwater will more likely catch fish than floating a fly on the surface.

That said, dry flies are more fun to fish. They’re prettier, and seeing a trout break the surface and take a fly is as good as fly fishing gets. We were wading. We were fishing dry flies. We were seeing some fish. We were also in one of the world’s most beautiful places.

You always remember best the fish that you don’t land, and there was a moment when Will and I were standing on a bank above a dark pool watching my flies and saw a tiny bright trout — tiny? it was a monster! — shoot out of the dark, grab at my fly, and then disappear again without taking. We both laughed — shoot, I likely squealed with delight like a wee bairn. It was absolutely better that the fish was never hooked.

The Firehole flows through active geyser basins, and it gets its name from the steam rising from geysers and hot pots along the banks of the river. There are apocryphal stories about anglers catching a Firehole trout and then cooking it on the hook in a neighboring hot pot. Of course now the Firehole is all catch and release, so don’t do that.

The second river we fished was the Gibbon. The Gibbon was named after a member of the 1872 Yellowstone survey expedition, and it joins the Firehole and forms the Madison River at Madison Junction. The third stream, Nez Perce Creek, is named because in 1877 the Nez Perce led by Chief Joseph cut through the newly designated park on their run from the US Cavalry.

Sometimes in these late days I feel just a hint of what the Nez Perce must have felt when they took off from Oregon towards Canada. For the first time in my life I wonder from time to time why I stay in Texas, where we seem to be constantly striving for more than our allocated quota of meanness. I have always believed Texans to be inclined toward kindness and generosity and friendliness, but these days I’m not so sure.

And after seeing all 50 states, I’m more confused by us Americans than when Kris and I started. Still, having wandered for a day in Yellowstone, just watching the water with no greater aim than catching a fish, I do know this: We as a people did right with Yellowstone. We can have unalloyed pride in our absolute rightness when we formed the park.

I’m sure that someone could point out to me many times we as a people have done pretty good with other stuff, but I suspect that the times when we were absolutely right are not that common. There’s Yellowstone, the Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, the First and Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Clean Water Act, and maybe the Declaration of Independence. In those things we were as right as anyone anywhere has ever been.

Mostly though we muddle through, just like our ancestors muddled through, and when we do the right thing with the right will and humility in the midst of the muddle it should be celebrated and revered. Yellowstone is one of those places for celebration and reverence.

And maybe we catch fish, maybe not, but there is no better place to stand in North America than in the Firehole River, away from the crowds, watching tiny trout slap at flies floating on pure waters.

And now I’ve caught my Yellowstone fish. I surely hope that Caldera don’t blow before I get to go back there.

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Montana

The 1920s begin modern times. We used electric power for lights and for new gadgets like refrigerators and Hoover vacuum cleaners. There were cars on the streets, moving pictures in the cinemas, jazz on the radio, and telephones in the home. There were airplanes in the sky. Information and people moved in new ways. 1920 looked a lot more like 2020 than it looked like 1820, or even 1890.

You can’t have electricity without copper, lots of copper. Montana had some gold, some silver–oro y plata is the state motto–and when the world began to turn on the lights, Montana brought us Anaconda Copper of Butte, Montana. Anaconda mined and smelted the copper for our copper wire, and we turned on the lights. By the 1920s, Anaconda had eaten up the other copper companies in Montana, and Anaconda Copper was not only the largest mining company in Montana, but one of the largest in the world.

Miners brought with them from Wales and Italy and Germany not only mining skills, but a history of labor organizing and unrest. Cowboys didn’t organize. Shepherds didn’t organize. Farmers did organize briefly under the Populist movement, but the Democrats coopted prairie populism with Free Silver.1 By 1900 Montana miners were unionized, and the unions were strong.

In Butte in 1914 unions in Montana began a swift decline, partly because Anacaonda ate up its competition–the union had a lot less power negotiating with a single powerful employer instead of several divided employers–and partly because of the miners’ own damned fault. The Western Federation of Miners (the “WFM”) had split from the Industrial Workers of the World (the “IWW”, the Wobblies). Insurgent miners formed the Butte Mine Workers Union as a counter to the WFM, which they believed to be in Anaconda’s pocket. While not formally affiliated, most of the leaders of the Butte Mine Workers Union were Wobblies. Anaconda Copper was pitted against the miners, who were pitted both against Anaconda and against each other.

There were gunfights in the streets of Butte. The WFM union hall was dynamited, an Anaconda Copper office was dynamited, and the governor declared martial law. By the end of the clash, the power of Butte miners’ unions was broken, and Butte, which had been a WFM shop, had become an open shop.

Union Hall of the Western Federation of Miners, Butte, Montana, June 1914, International Socialist Review, Aug. 1914, vol. 15 at 89.

It wasn’t a soft landing. In 1917, an IWW organizer, Frank Little, was lynched, at least in part because of the anti-war stance of the Wobblies. In August 1920, the Wobblies and the Metal Mine Workers called for a general strike for higher wages and an 8-hour day. The strikers shut down all of Butte’s mines. Anaconda mine guards opened fire on strikers and shot 16, killing one.2 Federal troops were brought in, union officials were arrested, and the strike fizzled. It was the last major labor conflict in Butte until 1934, when the miners reorganized under New Deal protections.

Lowe, Jet, Butte Mineyards, Berkeley Pit, documentation compiled after 1968, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Along with the end of the union conflicts, other things changed in Montana as well. In 1918 Montanans voted for statewide prohibition, two years before national prohibition. Legal operations of Butte’s red-light district, Venus Alley, were shut down–during the teens there had been as many as 1000 prostitutes licensed by Butte. Hard-rock mining is still a significant sector of Montana’s economy.3 At least three new copper mines are currently proposed, though likely Venus Alley is gone for good.

The last active mine near Butte closed in 1980. In 1982 the last madam of the Dumas Brothel, the longest operating brothel in the US, was convicted of tax evasion, and the Dumas, the last remnant of Venus Alley, closed. The EPA designated the mining area surrounding Butte as a Superfund site, the nation’s largest. The Dumas reportedly was at closing listed in the National Register of Historic Places, though it isn’t now.

Geography and Population

Montana is the fourth largest state by area, after Alaska, Texas, and California, with 147,040 square miles. Its 2024 estimated population was 1,137,233, increased by more than 14% from it’s 2010 population. Montana is growing, probably faster than its residents really want.

It’s still not very big. Its population is slightly smaller than Dallas, and slightly larger than Fort Worth. Puerto Rico has more than 2 million more people, but two fewer senators. Montana is the 43rd largest state by population, smaller than Maine but larger than Rhode Island.

Anglos make up 84.5% of Montana’s population, Blacks alone are 0.5%, Native Americans 6.2%, Asian .8%, Hispanic 4.2%, and two or more races 6.6%.

Population Density in Montana, US Census Bureau.

Montana has a population of 7.73 people per square mile, compared to 1,259 per square mile in New Jersey. Only one city, Billings, has a population greater than 100,000. Three other cities, Missoula, Great Falls, and Bozeman, have populations over 50,000. The towns (and the largest population concentration) spread north-south along the west of the state, along the front range of the Rockies. If you check the maps below, population concentrations pretty much correspond to the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, the the major trout fisheries, and the counties carried by Kamala Harris. The oddest exception for voting in Montana is in Glacier County, population 13,778, where Glacier National Park is located. Park employees and hangers on presumably vote the interest of the Park, or at least their own interest, and Harris carried Glacier County.4

Montana is one of the eight Rocky Mountain states.5 Like New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, about 60% of Montana, the area east of the Continental Divide, is prairie, part of the Great Plains. The principal mountain ranges are in Western Montana, along the Idaho border. There are more than 100 named mountain ranges in Montana, so Montana is probably a pretty good name for the state.

USGS Relief Map of Montana.

Since the last glaciation, most of Montana’s rivers flow into the Missouri, which in turn flows to the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico. Before the last glaciers, rivers in Montana flowed to the Red River of the North and on to Hudson Bay. Times change.

Montana rivers are among the best-known trout rivers in the world. The Yellowstone begins at Yellowstone Lake in the Park, and flows Northwest into South Dakota to join the Missouri. The Big Hole, Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin are northwest of the Park, and that’s where we’re going. The Missouri begins where the Jefferson meets the Madison, and we’ll fish both the Jefferson and the Madison.

There’s also the Bighorn and Powder, the Bitterroot, Clark Fork, and Blackfoot, and somewhere in there is the Smith. The Flathead, which I’ve spent a pleasant day fishing, is generally considered in fly-fishing literature to be a second-rate fishery. Anywhere else it would be a destination.

There was good reason to leave Montana until last. For fly fishing in the US, only Alaska has a reputation to match. It’s too bad our planning got knocked out of whack by that whole New Jersey thing.6

Montana Natural Resource Information System, Mountain Ranges and Major Rivers.

Trout

The online Montana state field guide to native and non-native trout provides a good identification photo of native and non-native Montana trout, the trout’s current range, their native range (which is often very different), and whether the fish’s survival in Montana is threatened. Arctic grayling, bull trout, Rocky Mountain cutthroats, westslope cutthroats, and lake trout are all native, and are all species of concern in their native Montana habitat. Westslope cutthroats are the most widely distributed native trout in the Northwest, from the West Slope of Montana across the Rockies into Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, all the way to the Pacific.

Brown trout and brook trout are non-native, though both are widely distributed throughout Montana. Rainbow trout (including Columbia River redband trout), are native to a tiny section of far northwest Montana, in the Kootenay drainage. Instead of draining east to the Gulf, the Kootenay drains west to the Pacific, so rainbows native to the Pacific Coast make it to the Kootenay. In addition to the Kootenay rainbows, rainbow trout have been introduced throughout the state.

The state of Montana has led other states to end hatchery stocking programs where there are healthy populations of wild fish, so even where fish caught are non-native browns or rainbows, they are almost certainly wild.

Because it is such an important destination fishery, when something does happen to Montana fish, it makes national news among fly fishers, even people like me who rarely go to Montana. There was the introduction of whirling disease back in the 90s, and in the past years there are reported declines of large trout in the Madison River system. Crowding on Montana rivers is also a big issue, probably because of people like me going to Montana. If it’s any consolation, most of the places I fish here in Texas are also pretty crowded.

Politics.

When the Montana Territory was formed in 1864, the state was oddly populated by unregenerate Confederate sympathizers. The first name proposed for Virginia City, Montana, was Verina, named after the wife of Jefferson Davis. A judge refused to register the name, and named it Virginia City instead. Well into statehood,7 Montana politics would be dominated first by the state’s Democrats–aligned with Southern interests–and then by Anaconda Copper.

2024 Montana election results by county, Wikipedia.

Its recent history has been a mixed bag of Democratic and Republican leadership, though currently the state is dominated by Republicans. The State has had a Democratic Governor as recently as 2021, and John Tester was a Democratic US senator until defeated in 2024.

Donald Trump carried 58.39% of the Montana vote in the 2024 presidential election, an increase from 56.92% in 2020 and 56.17% in 2016. As noted above, voting patterns tended to follow population concentrations, and even in population sparse Montana the larger the population the more likely the area is to vote Democratic.

A River Runs Through It

Every fly fisher knows “A River Runs Through It,” and if not the novella then at least the movie. The 1976 story by Norman Maclean is mostly set in Missoula, Montana, and on the Blackfoot River. The movie was produced and directed by Robert Redford and released in 1992, and it made fly fishing great again. The movie is true to the book, and both are based on the lives of Norman Maclean and his brother, Paul. The movie’s popularity probably wasn’t hurt by Brad Pitt as Paul in one of his first major roles.

He looks so young.

Generally people say that the book is extraordinarily well-written, and the blurb on the cover of my current copy–from a review in the Chicago Tribune–says that the book is as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway. I suspect that the reviewer, whoever it may have been, is suggesting that the book is excellent nature writing, but Thoreau most of the time and Hemingway at his best are American transcendentalists, and are writing about the power of nature to move the observer into a better place. Hemingway’s characters are always closest to tranquility when they’re on a river, and we should all aspire to receiving from nature like Thoreau.

Maclean on the other hand is focused not on the landscape but on his characters, and while they inhabit the natural setting (and the movie has the advantage of the book by showing the rivers au natural), there’s nothing spiritually or psychologically transcendent in it. The closest Maclean gets is when Norman describes younger brother Paul as an artist with the fly rod. There is a long interior dialogue early in the book where Norman plans his cast, and it is all about how he will approach the fish. Hemingway at his best would have described the finning of the fish, the darkness of the water, the light on the angler. Thoreau might have described the beauty of the fish and how it belongs in the natural world.

Maclean doesn’t really tell us much about the fish, or the water. There are bigger fish and smaller fish, fish caught on dry flies and fish caught with bait. What Maclean describes are Norman’s inner thoughts and preparations to make a difficult cast. Nothing wrong with that, and I suspect lots of fly fishers love the book because it is repleat with tales of roll casts and Bunyon Bug Nos. 2. It’s also easy to read, but what it is best at is not describing the Blackfoot River but the characters of Paul and Norman. It has a natural setting, sholy, but–and this is an important difference–the setting is background, a happy accident, not an agent.

Of course plenty of the book’s readers would tell me I’m spouting nonsense.

I will, however, not budge in my argument that there is nothing good about the fly cast in the movie poster. If I ever actually made that cast (and I don’t think it’s physically possible), it would immediately tumble from the sky onto my head and shoulders. Come to think of it, I must have made that exact cast from time to time, and I immediately wore the result. `

It didn’t need the help, but “A River Runs Through It” certainly reminded fly fishers that the trout fishing was great in Montana.

  1. Just like 2025, in the 1890s cheap money was seen as a cure to financial ills. Then it was increasing the money supply by adding silver, not it’s increasing money availability with low interest rates. Or maybe BitCoin. ↩︎
  2. It’s always mentioned that the Anaconda guards fired on fleeing strikers, and the miners were shot in the back. ↩︎
  3. Butte’s population peaked in 1920 at 60,000, and may have been as high as 100,000. The current population estimate is 36,134. At its height, from 1904 to 1917, Butte’s redlight district is estimated to have been second in size only to San Francisco. Licensed prostitution continued in Deer Lodge for a while after Butte was shut down, but it didn’t last long. The economy of Deer Lodge is said to have never recovered. Deer Lodge is the site of the Montana State Prison, and those two enterprises are probably both somehow related to mining. ↩︎
  4. As did Biden and Clinton before her. ↩︎
  5. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. ↩︎
  6. We still have not fished in New Jersey. ↩︎
  7. 1889. ↩︎
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Road Trip Part Two, Wyoming to South Dakota, June 15-18, 2025 (47)

It’s 346 miles from Thermopolis, Wyoming, to Rapid City, South Dakota, with detours for the Crazy Horse Monument and Mount Rushmore, and also for cheese enchiladas in Gillette, Wyoming.

The cheese enchiladas were at Los Compadres Mexican Restaurant, and they were perfectly decent Tex-Mex, that glorious bastardization of borderland Texas and Mexico that is a Texan’s comfort and joy and Diana Kennedy’s horror.1 It’s a commonplace that you should never trust Tex-Mex north of Dallas, which is actually too far north for my taste, but I liked the Los Compadres enchiladas, even as far north as Wyoming, and there was a patio where Roo could stand guard while we ate. I even got to practice my Spanish, at least as far as buen día.2

In South Dakota we fished two days in the Black Hills on Rapid Creek. We fished with David Gamet of Dakota Angler in Rapid City. David was great to fish with, younger than us, but not young enough that we felt like we were being bossed around by our children. He had grown up in the Black Hills, and there was no doubt about his bona fides.

There were rainbow trout and brown trout, but unlike in Wyoming, the browns and rainbows didn’t displace native cutthroat. One of the peculiarities of the Black Hills is their geographic isolation, with the prairies of South Dakota to the right and the prairies of Wyoming to the left, and without connecting trout rivers for trout to migrate. Illegal European immigrants3 had to bring in the trout, and before that there were none.

There are now trout in New Zealand and South Africa, India, Tasmania, and Australia, none of which held trout until the English came with their craze for trout fishing. All of those trout were invasive species brought along as part of the English diaspora–I’m thinking that anyone of English heritage (or Scots or Irish) shouldn’t complain too loudly about immigration. Just follow the trout. And the pheasants. And you can add South Dakota to the list of places where neither trout nor pheasants were but now are.

Having myself inherited the English craze for fly fishing, the Black Hills are a delightful place to fish for trout. The water is too small for drift boats, so you have to work a bit, but for small water the trout seemed uniformly decent-sized–not as big as Wyoming, but close enough, and in memory growing ever larger. Rapid Creek is shallow riffles punctuated by deep holes, and the challenge is to find water deep enough to hold fish, and then cast from a place where the trout can’t see you.

But you need to see the trout. We would sneak up on the deeper, greener water, peer into the pool while David said there, there, look there . . . And then if I was lucky I would see a fish, and then another, and then another, no more than a darker space in the deeper water, holding in place while I watched until it would gently drift a few inches to one side or the other to feed.

Looking at the photos, I’m surprised again at how shallow the water was. In the deepest pools it might have been waste deep. It made the discovery of such good fish so startling. Honestly though, even without the excuse of a fly rod, it was fun just to walk into the water. There is something so childlike about it, like petting a dog, riding a bicycle, watching a cloud . . . In the movie, A River Runs Through It, in the last scene, the old man is on the river threading a fly onto the leader, and you know exactly what he is thinking–this is me, after all that history, I am still the child whose father believed in the Presbyterian God and fly fishing, and it’s not memory, at least not merely memory. While standing in the water that old man knows that at least somewhere inside he is still that child.

Because David knew the water so well fishing with him felt like cheating–he knew where the holes were already, and would lead us from place to place, often circling around the stream to approach as stealthily as possible. It’s another commonplace that if you can see the trout they can see you, too, and that seeing you will put them down. David picked our flies, of course–what do we know of trout flies?–but it was basically the same trico nymph formulation that we had used in Wyoming. Like Wyoming, we were told the bigger surface hatches of larger mayflies happened in May, not June, and that May was when we could expect to successfully fish dry flies. Now mind, I’m still not convinced that hatches exist, and that they’re not a ruse to dupe gullible Texans, but I would love to fish dry flies with David during a Black Hills mayfly hatch. I might even catch a fish.

We fished a full day the first day and a half day the second. The second day we considered fishing Spearfish Creek in Spearfish Canyon, but stuck to a different part of Rapid Creek because it was a long drive to Spearfish. We were fishing through the morning into the heart of the day both days, but on our full day we quit early because of the water temperature. It’s hard to catch fish once the water approaches 70°, and the lower oxygenation of warm water makes it hard for the trout to survive if they’re caught. This was June, and I had planned the trip for when I thought the water would still be cold. Maybe we’re just more conscious of water temperatures than we used to be, or maybe water keeps getting warmer earlier and earlier.

One of our favorite discoveries was the Driftless Region, the geological anomaly where Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin come together, and where for some reason the glaciers failed to flatten the landscape. The Driftless is on roughly the same longitude as the Black Hills, and a few hundred miles east. It’s surrounded by farmland, not mountains. Like the Black Hills, the trout streams are small, and both places involve walking and wading, not boats. The fish that we caught in the Driftless were smaller.

But both places, the Driftless and the Black Hills, have pretty, manageable water. They are similar sized regions open for exploration, and both have trout. I am not much of a trout fisherman, but trout are such great fish for a fly rod. While we fished in South Dakota, I kept comparing the Driftless and the Black Hills, and I finally decided that I liked fishing in South Dakota and the Driftless as much as any of the places I’ve fished.

I will say that while the scenery probably has the edge in the Black Hills, the cheese is better in Wisconsin.

  1. Diana Kennedy (1923-2022) was the leading authority writing in English on interior Mexican food, and wrote nine cookbooks which are as much anthropology as cookery. She famously despised Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex as foreign goop, but later writers properly consider them authentic borderland cuisines of greater Mexico. After his success with the Gulf of Mexico, President Trump will presumably redesignate Tex-Mex as Tex-American, and Ms. Kennedy will smile from heaven. ↩︎
  2. Writing this, I finally looked up the difference between buen día (which is singular, but that’s not the difference), and buenos días (which is plural, but that’s not the difference). “Buen día” is more formal and means “good day.” It can be used any time during the morning, afternoon, or evening. “Buenos días” literally means “good days,” but is used as “good morning.” It’s more common than buen día, but is only used in the morning. Buenos días for the morning, buenas tardes for the afternoon, and buenas noches for the evening and night. Buen día is for any occassion when the sun shines. ↩︎
  3. See the description of South Dakota. The US violated its 1868 treaty with the Sioux in 1874 by sending Custer to explore the Black Hills. After reports of gold leaked from the Custer expedition, the Black Hills were illegally flooded by prospectors with gold fever. The US then wrongfully took possession of the area in violation of its earlier treaty. See United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980). ↩︎

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South Dakota

The Black Hills

The United States ceded South Dakota’s Black Hills to the Sioux in 1868, in the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The government intended that the Fort Laramie Treaty would settle the disposition of rights between the US, the Sioux, and the Arapaho, but what the government got was a mess. The Ponca, for instance, were not invited to Fort Laramie, but the reservation that the government had already ceded to the Ponca by treaty in 1858 was re-ceded to the Lakota without Ponca consent. Ultimately the US forcibly removed the Ponca to a new reservation in Oklahoma. It’s estimated that one in four of the Ponca died during the removal.

Photograph of General William T. Sherman and Commissioners in Council with Indian Chiefs at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, 1868, National Archives and Records Administration.

The Lakota1 didn’t actually live in the Black Hills. That was holy ground, and their claims to the Black Hills were relatively recent. Until the late 16th century the Lakota were concentrated in the upper Mississippi Valley–eastern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa–but were pushed west by the Anishnaabe and Cree, who in turn were being pushed west by Europeans. The Lakota took the Black Hills from the Cheyenne in 1776.

The geology of the Black Hills is complex. There’s some volcanic stuff, and some sedimentary stuff, and some metamorphosis going on, and layers of rock were deposited horizontallly beginning about 1.8 billion years ago. Beginning about 80 million years ago there was a period of North American uplift, known helpfully as the Laramide Orogeny.2 The uplift raised portions of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico, and also raised the Black Hills (which are a kinda Rockies’ distant cousin) so that all those horizontal layers were now tilted upwards. What we’ve all seen of the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, is carved from the oldest granite core.

The granite core of the Black Hills.

The highest peak in the Black Hills, Black Elk Peak, is 7,242 feet, which is pretty tall, but not above tree line, and roughly half the height of the tallest peak in the Rockies.3 It’s a smidgeon taller than the highest peak in the Applachians, Clingman’s Dome, at 6,643 feet.

In the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty the US gave the Lakota the Black Hills forever. The Lakota naively thought that “forever” meant forever. They didn’t know that the US were Indian givers.

Kmusser, Great Sioux Reservation as established in 1868 by the Fort Laramie Treaty, from Wikipedia.

In 1873 the US and Europe suffered a major economic depression. Before the Civil War, the US was principally a farming economy, and economic downturns weren’t so hard on localized farm economies. By 1873 railroads were booming, and they were the nation’s second largest employer. Railroad speculation was rampant, and then the railroad speculation economy crashed. It’s estimated that following the crash unemployment in New York City reached as high as 25%.

The 1873 Panic was caused in part by the conversion from a silver and gold monetary standard to a gold standard, which resulted in less money in circulation and higher interest rates.4 Suddenly there was no money to invest and railroads began to fail. Gold was rumored in the Black Hills, and President Grant believed that exploration for gold in South Dakota could both put the unemployed to work and increase the government’s gold supplies, resulting in more money in circulation and lower interest rates. In 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led an expedition of somewhere north of 1000 men, including the 7th Cavalry, geologists, biologists, photographers, and journalists, into the Black Hills to, among other things, explore the possibility of mining for gold.

View of General Custer’s Camp, Black Hills, S.D., postcard printed 1947, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pcrd-1d06527.

It’s unclear if the Custer expedition found any significant gold, but true or not rumors of gold finds leaked. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty prospectors poured into the Black Hills. The flood of Americans annoyed the Lakota greatly, because they had those silly notions about forever. The US offered to buy the Black Hills, but not for what the Lakota thought it was worth, so the US took the hills without payment. The Lakota learned that in the context of the Black Hills, “forever” meant less than ten years. The Lakota went to war, and Custer was one of the big losers. The Lakota were also one of the big losers.5

Charles M. Russell, The Custer Fight, 1903, Library of Congress.

Population and Geography

South Dakota, with a 2024 population of 924,669, is the fifth-least populous state. At 77,116 square miles, it is the 16th largest state by area, and with 12 people per square mile it’s the fifth-least densely populated state.

With seven Sioux Reservations spread across the state, about 8.5% of the South Dakota population is Native American. Anglos are the largest group, at 80.5%. Hispanics are 5.1%, Blacks 2.6%.

File:National-atlas-indian-reservations-south-dakota.gif

Sioux Falls in the state’s southeast, roughly where Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota meet, is South Dakota’s largest city, at 209,289. Rapid City in the Black Hills has a population of 79,894. There are no other South Dakota cities with populations greater than 50,000. Pierre, the state capitol, has a population of 13,788. Pierre isn’t on an interstate highway.

The Black Hills are South Dakota’s only mountains, and they’re an isolated range in the state’s far west.6 Tourism has replaced mining as the Black Hills’ principal industry, and towns like Deadwood, Custer, and Keystone are tourist destinations.

Badlands National Park, parts of which are in the Pine Ridge Reservation, is located south and west of the Black Hills. The badlands are the product of deposition of horizontal layers of soft sedimentary sandstones, siltstones, limestones, shale, and other stuff that are eroded by wind and water into magnificent layered displays of time. The oldest formations are from the Western Interior Seaway and date from 75-69 million years ago. The most recent formation includes a layer of volcanic ash from volcanoes in Utah and Nevada, and are 34-30 million years old.

South Dakota is divided roughly in half by the north-south Missouri River. The east of the state is plains: the Dissected Till Plans (which also covers parts of Iowa and Nebraska, and which is an excellent place to grow corn), the Couteau des Prairies (which also covers parts of Minnesota and Iowa and is an excellent place to grow corn), and the James River Basin which cuts eastern South Dakota north to south.

Other than the Black Hills, South Dakota west of the Missouri River is arid, and is part of the Great Plains.

In addition to the Missouri River, the James and the Big Sioux Rivers cut the eastern half of the state north-south and meet the Missouri at the Nebraska state line. The east-west Grand, Moreau, Cheyenne, Belle Fourche, Bad, and White Rivers are spaced fairly evenly through the western half of the state, and they also feed the Missouri. All of the state’s best-known trout streams, Rapid Creek, Castle Creek, and Spearfish Creek, are small, relatively isolated creeks fed from springs and runoff in the Black Hills.

Black Hills Fish

The Black Hills are not only geologically isolated, they are biologically isolated as well. During Custer’s expedition, William Ludlow, the chief engineer for the Corps of Engineers’ Department of the Dakotas (and an angler), declared that there were no more suitable streams for trout anywhere than those of the Black Hills. He also noted that, in fact, there were no trout. He was right on both counts. There were the important game species of chub, suckers, and dace,7 but no trout.

We have spread more trout to more places than any other species of fish. I can now fish for trout in Texas, Chile, New Zealand, and Costa Rica. I have fished for non-native trout in non-native habitat from Argentina to Utah, and have fished for non-native species of rainbow or brown or brook trout just about everywhere. We love to move the various species of trout around, and they often thrive with changes in scenery.8 By the 1880s we were introducing trout into the Black Hills.

The Black Hills trout streams are now managed with reproducing wild fish supplemented by stocking, but none of the trout are native.

Politics

All of South Dakota’s state officials, from Governor on down, are Republicans. Even Kristi Noem’s dog was a Republican, for all the good it did her.

South Dakota has only a single member of Congress,9 and he’s Republican. Both US Senators are Republican.

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump received 63.43% of the South Dakota vote. The \counties that didn’t vote for Trump were either Clay County, where the University of South Dakota is located, or majority Native American.

Wikipedia, 2024 South Dakota presidential election results by county.

Kristi Noem’s Dog

The character of some places is forever shaded by a single moment: the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, David Crockett died at the Alamo, Charleston fired on Fort Sumter, North Dakota fracked . . . In South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem shot her dog. Then she bragged about it.

If you have a German wirehaired pointer and it has messed up your pheasant hunt, you don’t have to shoot it. There is a national rescue just for GWPs. I don’t think Kristi Noem is on the board. For a good discussion of what went wrong with Kristi Noem’s dog, All Things Outdoors did a nice job.

German Wirehaired Pointer, the State Gun Dog of South Dakota. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
  1. Lakota is one of two closely related Siouan language groups, Dakota and Lakota. The Dakota are further divided into the Eastern Dakota (the Santee) and the Western Dakota (the Yankton and the Yanktonai). The Lakota people are also known as the Teton Sioux. ↩︎
  2. Sarcasm. Geologists can be baffling unintelligible when they name things. I might bet that orogeny means the process by which mountains originate, but I wouldn’t give my odds at better than 50-50. ↩︎
  3. Mount Elbert, Colorado, 14,440 feet. ↩︎
  4. It’s often said that Nevada silver had paid for the Civil War, but banks far preferred a gold-based currency. The conversion from a silver/gold currency to a gold currency was also happening in the newly united Germany. Germany pretty much mirrored the US during the depression. ↩︎
  5. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980), the Supreme Court awarded the Lakota a $108 million judgment against the US for the uncompensated taking of the Black Hills. The Lakota refused to accept the judgment, wanting not compensation but return of the Black Hills. The damages were set aside in an interest bearing trust, and are now valued at close to two billion dollars. Seems like a lot, but I’d guess that buying the Black Hills would cost more. ↩︎
  6. There’s also a sliver of the Black Hills in Wyoming. ↩︎
  7. Sarcasm. Chub, suckers, and dace, whatever their excellent personalities and ability to dance well, are not considered important gamefish. ↩︎
  8. The only game animal we’ve moved around as much as trout may be the pheasant. Pheasant hunts in South Dakota may be common, but they ain’t natural. Pheasants originate in Asia. ↩︎
  9. There are currently seven states represented by a single congress member, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. ↩︎