Tag: Redfish

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Andrew Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864, “The war in Tennessee: Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864, New York, New York Public Library.

It’s no accident that two of our most violent predecessors, Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) and Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), were both from Tennessee. I had saved reading an Andrew Jackson biography for this trip, though I’d been thinking about it since President Trump’s election. President Trump compared himself then to President Jackson, and they were both arguably Men of the People, or at least some people anyway. There were also differences. Jackson was a man of great personal bravery, a brilliant general, devoted husband, and from all indications he didn’t really want to be President. Jackson ended up on the $20 bill, though to our modern sensibilities his presence is something of an affront. He was scheduled to be replaced by Harriet Tubman until President Trump’s election.

Hammatt Billings, The Battle of New Orleans January 8, 1815, Abbot’s Lives of the Presidents, engraved print, 1882, Library of Congress.

As a child Andrew Jackson was poor, even by 18th Century standards. He was poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, a slave trader, a commander in wars against the Creek and Seminole, and an under-qualified justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court (though to be fair no one else was probably qualified either). He married a married woman, gambled big time on horse racing, and was an uncompromising and violent general, the sort of general who during the Creek War (1814-15) stood in front of potential deserters and told them that if they tried to leave he would order the canon at their back to fire. Of course he was also in front of the canon. To modern sensibilities his greatest sin was the forced removal of the Southeastern tribes to Oklahoma, and the deaths of thousands in that removal.

As a Tennessee congressman David Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian policies. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Crockett was in Mississippi when a third Tennessean (and Jackson protege), Sam Houston, got in trouble in Texas. Crockett went there to help, leaving us with his immortal line, “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

Whatever his failings, Jackson was a true believer in democracy in its broadest sense, and the great unionist of his age. The reason Jackson is on the $20 bill is that Lincoln needed Jackson. As President, Jackson had first faced down South Carolina’s threatened secession in the 1832 Nullification Crisis, receiving Congressional authorization to send troops to South Carolina to enforce Federal law. It wasn’t over slavery, it was over tariffs, but it was North-South, and Jackson gave Lincoln his precedent for a military response to preserve the Union. It didn’t hurt Lincoln either that Jackson was Southern. Hence Jackson enters the American pantheon, not merely as a man of action, but as a man central to an idea, the Union, and it was an idea that Jackson revered, both as a general and as President. It’s no accident that his Texas protege, Governor Sam Houston, resigned when Texas voted to secede.

Pierre Langlume, General Andrew Jackson, lithograph, c. 1824, Library of Congress.

***

In his study of slavery, Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis suggests a number of conditions for slavery to exist, but one of his suggestions, and here I’m paraphrasing, is that we simply have no clue how hard and violent the lives of these people were. They were surrounded by death (50% of infants never reached adulthood), cruelty (corporal punishment of soldiers and sailors wasn’t that different than corporal punishment of slaves), privation, and violence to both man and beast.

I have a family story that I ponder when I think about these people. One of my 16 fourth great-grandfathers (along with 16 fourth great-grandmothers, nature being demanding that way), one Andrew Davidson, was born in 1768 in Rocky Gap, Virginia, and died in 1853 in Bedford, Tennessee. I don’t know much about Davidson, but he is famous enough to have a historical marker in West Virginia:

Even with a historical marker, Davidson isn’t famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there are plenty of descriptions of what happened to Mrs. Davidson. Mrs. Davidson, a Rebecca Burke, was pregnant, and she gave birth shortly after her abduction. The raiders drowned the newborn. Two of her other children were murdered and one was taken from her and subsequently died by accident. At some later date she was sold to a white family in Canada. All of her children, the newborn, two daughters, and one son, were dead. Lord only knows what she endured.

Davidson, to his credit, went looking, and it took about three years for him to find her in Canada. He brought her home, and then she died. She was 28. I think about that story when I try to imagine the outlook of these people, the level of violence that must have been, if not exactly their norm, at least not uncommon, certainly not as uncommon as it would be for us. The violence of Jackson and Forrest would not have been alien to Andrew Davidson. Andrew Davidson would probably have admired them both without reservation.

Davidson, by the way, remarried (this time to one of my 16 fourth great grandmothers) and had more children, for which I am grateful.

***

I read H.W. Brands’ biography of Jackson. There were others, including at least one newer, but Brands’ seemed to have the best reviews. Then I read some stuff about Shiloh, and after went on to read Jack Hurst’s biography of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Hurst starts out saying that he isn’t a Forrest apologist, but I suspect it’s impossible to write a biography without empathy for the subject, even if the subject is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Notwithstanding his disclaimer Hurst is a bit of an apologist.

After the Civil War, Forrest considered a plan to invade Mexico. He said he had been promised 20,000 muskets. It’s not clear who made the promise, or whether they were able to deliver, but it’s not unusual for a lack of clarity to surround Forrest and his deeds. This was during the 1867 elections when Forrest was almost certainly the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forest is often reported as the founder of the Klan, but he wasn’t; it had been around a bit before he joined. There’s considerable speculation about Forest’s role in the Klan, but during its first incarnation, first as a social club born in Nashville and later as a violent means of suppressing black and white Republican votes, he was the Grand Wizard. He was almost certainly integral to its post-1868 election violence. The sheets, by the way, were to give the Klansmen the appearance of Confederate ghosts.

The Klan died out in Tennessee by 1871, in part because of Federal suppression, but also because it had accomplished what it wanted: suffrage for former Confederates and suppression of Southern Republican voters, black and white. Some of the credit for the first death of the Klan probably goes to Forrest, who for whatever reasons seems to have ordered it disbanded. It would next rise in Georgia in 1915, in part because of the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brady-Handy Collection, 1862-1865, Library of Congress.

Forrest shares a lot with Jackson. He was poor as a child, poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, and a slave trader. Forrest made a fortune before the War trading slaves, while Jackson seems only to have dabbled and to have made his fortune as a planter. Forrest was never an Indian fighter, the Southeastern tribes having been removed during Jackson’s presidency. As a boy he did once shoot at a man over an ox, after he’d shot the ox. He gambled at cards, and was an uncompromising and violent field commander. During the war he was shot four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him, and claimed personally to have killed as many Federal troops as he had lost horses. He didn’t drink. He was devoted to his wife and children.

Forrest is considered to be one of the great cavalry commanders, not just of the American Civil War but of any war, with an extraordinary sense of field tactics and leadership. Of all the Confederate generals of the Civil War, he was probably the most consistently successful. Forrest was born to fight in the violent West, the western theater lacking the patina of gentility present in the east, and part of Sherman’s strategy on his March to the Sea was to keep just enough troops in Tennessee and Mississippi to keep Forrest busy and out of his hair.

During his lifetime, Forrest was most notorious for the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Western Tennessee. Forrest always denied that he had ordered the massacre, but 300 Union forces, many of them African-American, were murdered after the fort’s surrender. It is probably the greatest battlefield atrocity of our most atrocious war, and at the time was widely known, now largely forgotten. Instead of Fort Pillow being Forrest’s legacy, his legacy is the Klan.

At the end of his life, Forrest seems to have found religion and was, perhaps, one of the few Southern voices for reconciliation, not only between North-South, but between whites and blacks. Maybe it was too little too late. Like Jackson and Lincoln he’d come to view the Union as the most important thing, the only economic path forward for the destroyed South, and I suppose he deserves some credit for it. Of course that’s not why there are public (and private) statues of Forrest in Tennessee.

Brent Moore, photographer, Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on private land on I-65 in Nashville, 2006. While there are plenty of moral sensibilities that could be offended by a statue of Forrest, I’m not sure that the moral offense isn’t matched by the aesthetic offense of this particular statue. It would deserve to come down even if it wasn’t a statue of General Forrest. That is one ugly piece of fiberglass.

***

Meantime the fishing near Houston, both for bass and redfish, has been outstanding. I had maybe my best day fishing for redfish ever, not so much in the landing, but in the seeing, and Kris did almost all of the day’s poling. The next day I sat in my canoe and watched what must have been a four-pound bass come out of the water to eye level after dragon flies. I never caught that bass, but I caught plenty of other stuff. And sometimes the seeing is the best part.

Now if I’d just remember to get my hand out of the way of the fish photo.

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Biloxi Marsh

I caught my Louisiana red.  It was three or four pounds, a decent fish for Texas but nothing special for Louisiana where redfish are larger.  It’s caught though, and Louisiana is done.

We fished the Biloxi Marsh Wildlife Management Area, a  36,644 acre estuary 40 miles east of New Orleans, owned by the Biloxi Marsh Lands Corporation and leased to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, subject to mineral rights. The Biloxi Marsh Lands Corporation was founded in the 30s to own the marsh and lease land for oil and gas exploration.  I suspect it was a transfer of public lands to private parties for the benefit of Huey P. Long, his friends, and his family. It was probably formed after oil had been discovered but before state lands were leased.  If that’s not the case, if the land was always private and it was all on the up and up, I’d be pleasantly surprised, but it wouldn’t change my opinion of Huey P. Long. If he didn’t run that scam in the Biloxi Marsh he ran it somewhere.

On a Saturday in August the Marsh was mostly empty.

The marsh looks like how a marsh is supposed to look: flat and watery and grassy. It’s shallow, but it’s no Caribbean flat, and it’s too far north for mangroves. There’s no clear water or sandy bottom.  It’s muck, mostly, muck and oysters, and not a  place for wading. When the pole went deep in the mud black ooze came up with the pole.

We launched out of Campo’s Marina in Yscloskey.  Yscloskey was originally settled by Spanish Canary Islanders in the late 18th century, and in 1900 was still a Canary Islander descendent fishing village. That Campo surname probably isn’t random.

Yscloskey was destroyed by Katrina–the New York Times reported there was nothing left intact but a single light bulb and a garden hose–but it looks well enough now.  It was busy on Saturday for the blessing of the fleet at the start of the shrimp season. The shrimp boats as often as not flew Confederate battle flags, along with plenty of pennants, the Louisiana state flag, the American flag, and some other flags I didn’t recognize. There was lots of red, white, and blue and purple and gold.

*  *  *

You’re never very far from a discussion about Katrina in New Orleans. It’s not the same city, literally. What held people in New Orleans before Katrina was extended family networks and the Ignatius J. Reilly state of being: if you were born in New Orleans and lived in New Orleans you as likely as not never went anyplace else unless it was 90 miles to LSU.  Katrina forced people to leave, and after Katrina the family networks were damaged.  Cousins who left for Houston or Dallas or Atlanta got new jobs and better houses and schools and never came back. Twelve years later in the Treme near Willie Mae’s Scotch House there are still boarded houses.

*  *  *

Kris caught two reds. She hooked a big red, at least 20 pounds, but got distracted and the fish broke off.  You can’t multi-task when landing a 20 pound fish. Lesson learned. I learned a lesson too.  Fishing the second day with a New Orleans hangover isn’t that much fun. I really didn’t need that final Sazerac even if it was the Sazerac Bar, and I didn’t need the Abita with the oysters at Felix Oyster House to start the evening, and I certainly didn’t need what came in between. Lesson learned. Also, take insect repellent, and use the insect repellent you take.

Our guide, Bailey Short, used big heavy flies, 10 weight rods, and 20-pound leaders.  It was big stuff, much bigger than I’d expected.

He polled slow. There was no hurry to get anyplace because we were already there. Thorough, he said, you gotta get to the spot and be thorough. There were fish where we were, and we needed to take our time and spot them. Sooner or later we did, even if we didn’t catch them.

We talked to Bailey about the fall and winter months, the supposedly best months, but he said that the fish were just as big in the summer and that everybody now had heard about the big winter reds. There was so much winter pressure with interloper guides rolling in from Florida and Texas that July and August were in some ways better. He showed us lots of fish and we got lots of shots. Bailey did great, and was great company, but the fish didn’t cooperate. It certainly wasn’t my hungover casting. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

When we left Yskloskey for the airport Kris said she wanted a burger but I said po’boy and at the turn on to the highway Yelp! told us that the Last Stop Grocery and Deli sold po’boys. We sat out under the awning in the Gulf breeze and listened to the insect sounds and watched the jungle green on the side of the road. It was the perfect last moment in Louisiana.  Good fried shrimp po’boys too.

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Transgender Redfish Romance

Stevenson, Charles Hugh, Report on the Coast Fisheries of Texas, Report of the Commissioner (United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries), 1889-1891. From Wikimedia Commons.

The fishiest class warfare in Texas was fought in the 80s over redfish. Redfish had gone from trash fish to prom queen, and wild redfish were depleted. The war was fought in the Texas Legislature, which has since moved on to crucial issues like transgender bathroom use. Unlike, say, global warming or education or medicaid expansion, transgender bathroom use in Texas is a big problem.  We’ll fix it though. After the legislature gets done those transgender folk will just have to cross their legs and wiggle. No more peeing for them.

The Redfish Bill was H.B. 1000, and proponents of a commercial fishing ban were portrayed as wealthy sport fishers, which in fact they kinda were. The opponents were portrayed as working class commercial fishermen who were losing their livelihood, which if that includes seafood distributers and restaurant owners they also probably were. Texas passed the Redfish Bill and banned commercial harvesting of redfish and speckled trout.  There were other reasons for the redfish decline in Texas and around the Coast:  no size and take limits, loss of habitat, and damage to water quality certainly had as much or more to do with stock declines as inshore commercial fishers. Really, what happened on the Gulf Coast in the 70s was pretty much what happened to stripers in the Chesapeake in the 70s.

Notwithstanding predictions, after passage of the Redfish Bill redfish didn’t disappear from restaurants.  Farming has boosted supply, and if anything table redfish are more popular now than ever.  My favorite way to cook redfish is on the half shell. Filet the fish but leave the scales so the skin and scales hold the filet together. Season and then throw the filets on a medium grill for 12 minutes or so.  The scales aren’t much fun if you accidentally eat one, but at their best it’s like eating the ocean, better even than oysters.

The Commerce Department finally imposed a gill net ban in federal Gulf waters in 1986 after the annual redfish harvest had risen 800% in five years. States in addition to Texas imposed reasonable size and take limits on sport fishers. Water quality and habitat also improved. It’s now a healthy fish population, and in 2015 redfish were rated of least concern on the IUCN Red List.

Redfish live inshore and near-shore, in both brackish and saltwater, and range in largish numbers south from the Chesapeake, around Florida, through the Gulf, and south into Mexico. Redfish get romantic when the water temperature hits about 65°. They spawn in deeper water, 50 to 100 feet, on incoming tides, and it’s the bulls, at least +30-inches, that move offshore to spawn. They spawn off and on for months, with a female dropping millions of eggs in a season.

Good guides won’t target spawning redfish. Bringing the fish up from deep water causes problems, they’re shallow water fish, and for meat fishers the big reds are poor quality.

Bulls, as in Bull Reds, is a generic term that covers any redfish, male or female, that’s reached 30+ inches. Apparently the lady redfish are also bulls, so I guess that makes them transgender, so the Texas Legislature should take note. After release, fertilized eggs hatch in a day or so and like tarpon the larvae are carried inshore, The fry feed first on plankton, then move on to crab and shrimp and baitfish.  Their first year they reach 14 inches.  By year four or five they’re mature. They can live longer than 30 years, and reach 70 pounds and 50 inches.

I can think of few things lovelier than a slot-sized juvenile red sitting in seagrass in clear bay water.  I must think they’re pretty because I spend so much time looking for them. I also think their elders are kinda ugly, but that’s also a problem for me as I age.

The most important thing I was ever told about redfish, other than strip-set, was don’t grab them in the mouth like bass. Reds eat crabs. Fish that eat crabs crush fingers. It’s probably wise not to stick fingers in their mouths.

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The Ten Best Summer Steelhead Flies!!!

Disclaimer: I wrote this as a joke, because I have no idea what the ten best steelhead flies might be, winter or summer, and I feel guilty every time somebody ends up here. It’s actually a long shaggy dog story about a fly I tied with an ostrich feather that a drag queen gave me at a pride day parade. I did, in fact, catch a summer steelhead on that fly, so if you want to know the very best steelhead fly, it’s one you tie with a feather given to you by a drag queen at a pride parade.

I’m sure someone knows what the ten best summer steelhead flies are, but I haven’t a clue. In September We  go to Oregon, but before, in less than a week, we go to Louisiana. The jumble has me thinking about redfish and steelhead flies at the same time, and I’m no good at multitasking.

I like simple flies. A few years ago the rage in redfish flies was redfish crack, the hardest part of which was using a magic marker.  Tie some EP fiber to the hook for a tail, wrap some EP brush for a head, use a sharpie to bar the tail, brush out the head, done. I greatly admire that fly.

My current favorite redfish fly is this unnamed thing, or at least unnamed to me. It’s my favorite because I made it up after fishing an Avalon for permit, and because the first fly I ever fished in saltwater, a rattler, had rattles. I later caught 50-odd crappie in a single day with a rattler, and later still caught a four-pound bass. I like flies that make noise. I would name the fly I made up, but I figure lots of people have made up the same fly, and one of these days I’ll stumble across its name.  Meantime it’s easy to tie and catches all sorts of stuff. Plus it’s kinda weedless, or as much as any fly is ever weedless.

Rattler. Ok, maybe it was only 30 crappie. CRAH-pee. Puh-CAHN.

Sac-au-lait.

Steelhead flies though are a different matter. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever thought about making them simple, and I don’t know why.  Are steelhead peculiarly complex? Do they never hit a Clouser? Steelhead flies look like somebody wanted to tie classic salmon flies, smoked a joint, and came up with Modern Steelhead Flies. That’s the book I bought to teach me all about steelhead flies, Modern Steelhead Flies.

It’s hard, by the way, not to make jokes about marijuana and Oregon.

Kris and I finally paraded with my firm in this year’s LGBT Pride Parade, and I learned that sometimes Texas parade routes smell like marijuana. Colleagues ask every year if I’ll march and I say sure but then something happens. I put off joining the parade for two years, and they finally shamed me into it. Personally I think it’s a better world when LGBT folk can do some shaming.

The Pride Parade in Houston is no small affair.  There are thousands of paraders, and tens of thousands of paradees. Our daughter dropped us off on Allen Parkway and we walked a bit to the staging point. I really dressed for the parade too: a pair of running shoes, khaki shorts, blue linen shirt, and the crowning glory, my straw fedora. I was a little worried I might stand out too much, but believe it or not, some participants were even less restrained than me. Really. Kris said there was a topless lady, but I didn’t see her. Ogling the topless lady would have probably been wrong anyway, but Kris thought she might be topless at a parade with some expectation of being ogled. Could be.

There were groups from churches and big oil. There was the mayor and the parents of transgender children. There were Democratic candidates, though I think I must have missed the Republican float. We were the only big law firm, but there were lots of banks, and some smaller firms.

So meantime I haven’t actually read much of Modern Steelhead Flies, but it’s got good pictures. Of course I had absolutely none of the fly tying materials for steelhead flies. This is always a given for any new fly, one never has the stuff. This though was particularly brutal. Hooks? Nope. Hot pinks and purples and blues? Nope? Ice dubbing? Not a bit of it. I didn’t own a single ostrich feather.  The first fly I tried, something called a Fifth Element because of all the blue feathers (none of which I owned), had 72 different layers of materials. I spent an hour ordering from FeatherCraft, and when they didn’t have everything I ordered some more from J. Stockard. None of my local shops were going to carry this stuff. I finally found blue Gamakatsu octopus hooks on Amazon. The Feather Thief got nothing on me.

Then I tied the fly, got to the end and realized I’d  forgotten to order the last five layers of stuff.  I tied in some black marabou and called it a day. It looked pretty good, too, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the big gaps on the back side where I didn’t get the materials all the way around the hook.

The third fly in the book, which was also on the list of flies the Oregon outfitter sent, was Jeff Hickman’s fish taco.

Now Mr. Hickman’s fish taco really appealed to me. It was on the outfitter’s list. It was relatively simple compared to the other stuff, only 67 layers or so. Most of all I could look at the fly and think, that looks fishy. That’s the highest praise for any random fly sitting in a box: It looks fishy. Plus it was a taco. I might prefer an enchilada, or even a chalupa, but I’m a Texan and if what you can get is a taco you take a taco. I know and like people who’ve written admirable books about queso and salsa, and I’ll throw in a gratuitous plug for them here. I have also gone miles out of my way to get barbacoa and lengua tacos with just a brush of onion and cilantro, and this was a taco.

I was sitting in my office one day and got distracted and watched a video of Jeff Hickman tying Jeff Hickman’s fish taco. He seemed like a genuinely reasonable guy. He drank unpretentious beer. He took it in stride when he forgot to tie in the 33rd layer of rainbow black flashabou.  I figured this was a guy who wouldn’t mind if I had to use a hot pink hot spot instead of red because I only ordered hot pink ice dubbing.

I also had no ostrich feathers, and 90% of the fish taco is ostrich feathers.

So Kris and I are walking to the staging point for our LGBT Pride parade group and I’m dressed in my gaudy outfit and I feel a hand on my shoulder. A big hand.

Now I’m 6 feet, or I was 40 years ago, but I turn and look up, way up, into the face of either a transgender lady or a drag queen–the taxonomy confuses me some but you can be one without being the other, or vice versa–in a long black satin sheath gown and enough dyed black ostrich feathers to festoon, well, an ostrich. We were of a certain age together, but she’d spent a bit more time in tanning beds, and I was dressed more like a law firm partner taking his grandkids to the zoo. I had no ostrich feathers.

“Darlin’, we gotta spruce you up.” Ok, maybe that wasn’t precisely what she said, but that’s what it sounded like to me.  She plucked an ostrich feather and stuck it in my hat and declared me more festive. I now have a spirit animal for this trip to Oregon, but I haven’t decided whether it’s an ostrich or a 6-foot-4 drag queen in the LGBT Pride parade. I’m leaning towards the latter.

So meantimes.

Kris and I are driving from Galveston and talking about what we need to take to Oregon and she says she’s been looking at the email from Jeff Hickman and I say who? She says Jeff Hickman and I say the fish taco guy? She says what? Jeff Hickman it turns out is our outfitter. I guess I knew that, we’d exchanged emails and all, but it hadn’t registered that the guy I was watching on YouTube tying fish tacos was the guy I was e-mailing. I’m slow like that.

But I catch up sooner or later and this is all coming together. I might even catch a fish. I’ll tie up some hot pink redfish crack with lavender hot spots. If nothing else I’ll learn to tie a fish taco, and I’ll use ostrich herl scavenged from the wild.