Tag: Smallmouth Bass

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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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Indiana

It’s August. Houston is ending its second month of record heat with no rain. This morning when I walked the dogs at 6:30 it was 80°, and the high today is projected to be 101°. That’s cooler than yesterday. After the freezes of the last two years the joke is that post-global warming there are two seasons in Houston, Hell and when Hell freezes over.

This morning in Indiana it was 57°. There’s no rain there, either, but the high in Indiana today will only be 91°. That’s a perfectly reasonable August day. We’re going to Indiana to enjoy beautiful summer weather.

Yesterday at a dinner I sat across from a psychoanalyst who grew up in Indiana. She left in 1974, which she said was the height of Indiana’s Rust Belt economic failure. Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, West Virginia . . . That must be the year we started buying Japanese cars, outsourcing carburetors to Mexico, and importing computer chips from China. Ok, maybe the computer chips came later. Indiana’s economy was either manufacturing or farming, and since its peak in the 1950s, American manufacturing in the Rust Belt had declined into collapse. She said that still, it was a wonderful place to grow up, and that where we were going, near Crawfordsville, is lovely. She also said she couldn’t have done what she does in Indiana. I suppose that in the Rust Belt years there wasn’t money for fripperies like mental health.

U.S. Expansion 1790, Perry Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas.

I think we erred when we stopped calling Ohio and Indiana the Old Northwest. Now it’s the Midwest, lumped together with Kansas and Nebraska, but historically the Old Northwest was the heart of the first westward expansion of the brand new United States, and it’s where we abandoned any pretense of Native American assimilation. That bit of our history deserves pondering, but until now I never have. Indiana Indians refused to transform into European farmers, and even if they’d tried we probably wouldn’t have let them. We certainly didn’t put up with that sort of nonsense with the South’s civilized tribes.

By 1816, when Indiana became the 19th state, there was no remaining Native American opposition to European settlement. Indiana had gone from the 1810 formation of the Tecumsah Federation to unopposed European settlement in six years. Death and removal had become the tools of American expansion, and would remain so.

Kurz & Allison, Battle of Tippecanoe, 1889, Library of Congress, https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/pga.01891/.

William Henry Harrison, the future short-lived President, was appointed Indiana territorial governor in 1801. He was a well-to-do Virginia boy–he was still in his early 20s–and he had two goals; to open the territory for expansion, which he did, and to claim the territory for slavery, which he didn’t.

He failed to expand slavery for the most unexpected of reasons: white Southern settlers. When Indiana’s first constitution was written, the majority of Indiana settlers were Southerners from slave states, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, but they were poor Southerners from slave states, not William Henry Harrison’s slave-owning aristocracy. When they adopted their new statehood constitution, they prohibited slavery. It may have been the right thing to do, but their motive wasn’t humanitarian. They didn’t want to compete with Southern slave owners for land.

They didn’t want to compete with African Americans either. Indiana’s 1851 constitution prohibited black immigrants, and imposed registration requirements for existing black inhabitants.

The Lincoln family was part of the migration of poor Southerners from Kentucky to Indiana, until they finally moved on to Illinois when Abraham was 21. Indiana missed a bet when it let young Honest Abe leave.

St. Mémin, Charles Balthazaqr Julien Fevret de, 1800, William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States, engraving, Library of Congress; Tecumseh, between 1860 and 1900, wood engraving, Library of Congress.

Notwithstanding Lincoln, Indiana has a reputation for conservative politics, and its current politics certainly are. It’s the state that gave us Mike Pence, former vice president and before that the Indiana governor. Poor Pence. He is so hated as a sycophantic toady on the left and as a craven coward on the right that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for stepping up on January 6. Me? I will always be thankful for Pence, though I wouldn’t vote for him. I suspect that history will be kinder to Mike Pence than we are, at least if the nation survives the next score years.

In 2016, Donald Trump carried Indiana by 56.9% to 37.8% for Hillary Clinton, with 2,734,958 total votes. The Libertarian, Gary Johnson, received 5% of the vote. Four years later Trump carried 57.02% of the vote and Biden 40.96%, with 3,033,118 total votes. The Libertarian, Jo Jorgenson, dropped to 1.95%. It probably should be noted that Trump’s numbers might have been inflated by having native-son Pence as a running mate, but I suspect that in Indiana Trump would have walked away with the elections anyway. Democrats won in areas you’d expect, urban Indianapolis and the college town of Bloomington. Then there are the somewhat unexpected old industrial counties, Lake and St. Joseph in the far northwest, but unexpected to me because I know very little of Indiana. Finally there’s Tippecanoe County, with a population of 186,251. It voted for Trump in 2016, but switched to Biden in 2020. It is the home of Purdue University, and maybe that explains it, though switched majorities are always interesting.

Indiana 2020 election results by county, Wikipedia.

Barrack Obama did squeak by with a win in Indiana in 2008, 50% to 48.9%, but he didn’t repeat in 2012 when he dropped a full 6%. All of the statewide officials in Indiana are Republican, as are both senators and seven of the nine members of Congress. In the state assembly, 40 of the 50 senators and 70 of the 100 representatives are Republican. I reckon Indiana deserves its conservative reputation.

Geographically, in the north Indiana is bordered by Lake Michigan and Michigan, in the east by Ohio, in the south by Kentucky, and in the west by Illinois. The Ohio River separates Indiana and Kentucky, and the Wabash River flows along the lower third of the Illinois-Indiana border–the part where the border is squiggly. It is the 38th state by size, between Virginia and Maine, with 35,870 square miles, but it’s 17th by population with 6,833,037 people as of 2022. Massachusetts is 16th.

Northern and central Indiana were glaciated and tend to be flat to rolling. There’s corn in them there rolls. Corn and soybeans make up about 60% of Indiana’s agriculture production. Unglaciated southern Indiana is apparently more varied, with sedimentary deposits of limestone, shale, sandstone, and dolomite, some of which apparently protrude as bluffs and whatnot. Coal mining in the south is located north across the Ohio River from Kentucky’s northwestern coal region. “Paradise” is on the Green River in Kentucky, not the Wabash, and “Coal Miner’s Daughter” set in Indiana just ain’t quite the thing.

Current Indiana coal permits. The blue circles are surface mines, the purple squares are underground, and the yellow stars are processing facilities. I think. Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

With all that sedimentary rock in south Indiana filtering water, farms growing corn, and proximity to Kentucky, Indiana ought to be an excellent location for bourbon, and apparently there’s excellent bourbon made in southern Indiana. In the interest of science I’ll go out of my way to try some.

In addition to corn and good water, Indiana has a ready supply of white people. Indiana is 77% Anglo, with less than 10% of the population African American, less than 8% Hispanic, and 3% Asian. Indianapolis, the state’s largest city with about 900,000 people, is 88% Anglo. Only in the northwestern industrial corner closest to Chicago are there sizable African American or Hispanic populations, in Lake County 18.9% and 17.7%, respectively.

There are two reasons to go to Indiana to fish. This gets complicated, but in the Newer Northwest, Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, they haven’t quite managed to kill off all their steelhead, and there is still a steelhead fishery there, some of it wild. When we fished in Washington and Oregon, we fished for steelhead, though we only caught a total of one. Steelhead are rainbow trout that join the navy and go to sea, then return to their natal rivers to spawn. Genetically they are exactly like the rainbow trout that never leave the western rivers. Behaviorally they are much closer to Pacific salmon. Feeding in the Pacific they grow large enough to rival some of the Pacific salmon as well.

Sage, Dean, Townsend, C.H., Smith, H.M., Harris, William C., Great Lake Trout, 1924, Salmon and Trout 351, MacMillan Company, New York, New York, Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington. The scientific name is now Salvelinus namaycush.

Meanwhile the Great Lakes were once populated with lake trout, a close cousin of brook trout. Lake trout are the largest of the chars, and are native to the northern US and Canada. I don’t think they were ever particularly popular with fly fishers–they live deep in big waters, plus they are invasive in places like Yellowstone–but in the Great Lakes they were once a popular gamefish for gear fishers and an important commercial fishery. Then they were effectively wiped out of the Great Lakes by pollution, overfishing, and invasive sea lampreys after the Welland Canal connected the Lakes to the Atlantic. I could have bad dreams about invasive sea lampreys.

To replace the lake trout fishery, the Old Northwest settled on stocking New Northwest steelhead. Now in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Upstate New York–Steelhead Alley–fly fishing in the dead of winter for steelhead migrating into rivers from the Great Lakes is a thing. In my mind it’s a strange, cold thing, but still a thing. To steelhead anglers in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, the notion that fishing for a stocked freshwater lake fish and calling it steelhead is anathema. It really is quite the etymological dispute.

We are not going to fish for Great Lakes steelhead, or whatever it is they’re called that doesn’t make somebody angry. We are going to fish for smallmouth bass, which are native to Indiana. I’m told that Indiana is the very place for smallmouth bass, mostly by the State of Indiana. I am also told, mostly by the State of Indiana, that the particular place we’re going, Sugar Creek, is among the very best places for Indiana smallmouth. I hope the State of Indiana is at least as honest as its two famously honest sons, Abe Lincoln and Mike Pence.

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Kentucky

Kentucky has whiskey and horses, a coal-miner’s daughter, Daniel Boone, and Muhammed Ali. I like whiskey, perhaps too much, and I wish all horses well. The legacy of coal is becoming more and more just that, a legacy. Muhammed Ali was The Greatest. He said so, and I agree.

I’ve never been to Kentucky (or for that matter its northern neighbors, Ohio and Indiana). I’ve been in Missouri across the Mississippi from Kentucky, and often enough to Tennessee, but never Kentucky. This is how Kris and I will look entering Kentucky for the first time, except that I’ll be carrying a fly rod instead of a rifle:

George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851, oil on canvas, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis.

I hope we can get a horse at the Kentucky border. Otherwise Kris will have to walk.

As of the 2020 census, Kentucky has a population of 4.5 million. The population is 87.5 percent white, 8.5 percent black, and 4 percent everybody else. Less than 5 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino. The consolidated city-county of Louisville, the state’s largest metro area, has a population of 782,969, with the city itself being 32.8 percent Black and 62.8 percent white. Consolidated Lexington, the second largest area, has a population of 322,570. The urban areas in Kentucky are seeing substantial growth, both economic and by population. The rural areas are generally suffering population losses, and they’re poor. As of 2019, Kentucky ranked among the poorest states, 44th, with a median annual family income of $52,295, just ahead of New Mexico and just behind Oklahoma.

In the 2020 presidential election, Kentucky voted 62 percent (1,326,646) to 36% (772,474) for Donald Trump. That’s pretty consistent with the other poor states, except New Mexico. The only two areas voting for Democrats were the two most populous counties, Fayette (Lexington–59.25% for Biden) and Jefferson (Louisville–59.06% for Biden). The Kentucky senators are Republicans Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell. Five Kentucky Congressmen are Republicans. The sixth, John Yarmuth, is retiring.

Kentucky Presidential Election Results 2020.svg
From Wikipedia

Interestingly, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky are Democrats, though nobody else in Kentucky appears to be. The Governor, Andy Beshear, won the 2019 election by fewer than 5,000 votes, and the election must have seemed a harbinger for the 2020 presidential election. Maybe it was, but not in Kentucky.

On the north, Kentucky is bordered by the Ohio River, on the east the Appalachians, on the west the Mississippi, and the south, well, nothing really. It’s just one of those arbitrary borders that separates two places, in this case Kentucky and Tennessee. The Appalachian/Cumberland Plateau takes up the eastern third of the state. Central Kentucky is apparently rolling hills covered with bluegrass pastures, while the northwest again becomes hilly. There’s some Mississippi River marshland down in the southwest, but not a lot.

There are two coal-producing areas, the Western Coal Field and the Eastern Coal Field. Butcher Holler is in the Eastern Coal Field, somewhere to the right of Lexington.

My daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines
All day long in the fields a-hoein corn

Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1969.

Kentucky coal mining, Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky

In addition to the Ohio, there are two other major rivers in Kentucky; the Cumberland wanders through Southeast Kentucky and North Central Tennessee, and the Kentucky runs from the Appalachians northwest through central Kentucky to the Ohio. There’s also a bit of the Mississippi. The Green River, the one in John Prine’s Paradise that Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauled away, is in the Western Coal Field.

The Green is supposed to be a pretty good smallmouth river.

For anglers, all of that stuff–except maybe the whiskey and the rivers–is of secondary importance to the real question: what kind of fish are there, and where. Kentucky is not a destination fishing state, at least for fly fishers, but in addition to the big three there are plenty of smaller rivers and streams. There are stocked and naturally reproducing trout, but they’re not native–though a lot of the fly fishing literature on the state is about where to find trout. Most of the guides in the state appear to be located near the Cumberland in Southern Kentucky–a dam tailwater–though there are also some guides out of Lexington. In addition to trout, there are catfish and sunfish, spotted bass, largemouth bass, and smallmouth bass. When we go next week, I hope we can try for smallmouth near Lexington, but it may still be too cold.

I recall that spotted bass used to be called Kentucky bass, but I had a hard time finding references to Kentucky bass on the internet.

Micropterus Dolomieu Small-Mouth Black Bass
John J. Baird, Small-Mouth Black Bass, 1897, Manual of fish culture based on the methods of United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In addition to Muhammed Ali and Loretta Lynn, Kentucky has had a penchant for producing (or being the home of) poets, especially reasonably important 20th Century poets. There are, in more or less historical order, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, and the recently deceased bell hooks. I can’t say that I’ve read anything by Warren except for All the King’s Men, which I vaguely recall is a novel, but Warren is the only person to have won a Pultizer Prize in both fiction and poetry. I’ve read a good bit of Merton, particularly The Seven Storey Mountain, which I vaguely recall is an autobiography. Reading his poetry–which isn’t always comprehensible–feels almost like reading parts of the Bible–which also isn’t always comprehensible. I’ve read almost none of bell hooks, who honestly until her recent death I hadn’t heard of. Old white Southerner, black feminist writer–I guess I’m not her target audience. I’ve reserved a couple of her books from our local library, but don’t have them yet.

Getting ready to go to Kentucky, I’ve read a good bit of Wendell Berry, who is, I think, peculiarly Southern in his dedication to agrarian values and anti-government convictions, and peculiarly un-Southern in his antiwar convictions. He also doesn’t seem to ever write a funny line, which seems peculiarly un-Southern except among evangelicals. The closest I could come to a funny line was this:

It may be that we can keep without harm some industrial comforts; warm baths in wintertime maybe, maybe painless dentistry.

From Our Deserted Country, Ten Essays.

I say it’s not funny. It’s kinda funny, but I suspect even in that Berry was mostly serious. In his photos he looks happy enough.

Berry in December 2011
Guy Mendes, 2011, Wendell Berry

Besides the poets, I am old enough to have grown up revering Daniel Boone, but probably the folk hero Daniel Boone, not the actual Daniel Boone. The actual Boone never wore a coonskin cap, and no American hero has survived more historical (and ahistorical) revisions than Boone, culminating in the 1964 TV series Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker.

I loved that show.

The actual Boone was born in 1735 to a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. After his father, Squire Boone, fell out with local Quakers, the Boones moved to North Carolina. Daniel married Rebecca in North Carolina in 1756, but he didn’t much cotton to farming. Even after marriage he spent most of his time on months- and even years- long hunts for pelts for the fur trade. He wandered as far from North Carolina as Florida, and purchased land there. At some point he wandered into Kentucky.

In the popular imagination, Boone opened Kentucky for settlement. He first entered Kentucky in 1767, and in 1769 returned and spent two years exploring. That’s two years out gallivanting. There is a possibly apocryphal tale of Boone returning from a long hunt to find that Rebecca had a new daughter fathered by Boone’s brother. Possibly apocryphal, possibly true. If true, Boone apparently took it in stride.

Defenders In Siege Of Boonesborough H Pyle Harper's Weekly June 1887.jpg
Howard Pyle, 1887, Defenders in Siege of Boonesborough, Harper’s Weekly.

Boone famously trail-blazed the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap. Boone entered Kentucky during a peculiarly violent period of American history. Beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing through the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, there was constant warfare and the threat of warfare with the British and the Northwestern tribes. Boone had the reputation of an Indian fighter, and he was certainly involved in the Northwest Indian War, but late in life Boone said that he had only ever killed three Indians. He was a brilliant pathfinder, a respected leader, a great hunter, but not the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew. He was a colonel in the state militia, at a time when because of the constant threat of local war the rank meant something.

My favorite Boone quote was that he was never lost, but that he was misplaced for a few days from time-to-time.

In 1799 Boone moved west to Missouri because he went broke in Kentucky. He had claimed a lot of land in Kentucky, but didn’t really have the temperament to be a land investor, and didn’t have the resources to hold all of his land together.

In 1820 he was 85 when he died in Defiance, Missouri. He was a legend in his own time, largely because of a contemporary popular pamphlet. Later the penny press took up Boone, and created the folk-hero that lasted through my childhood infatuation with the Boone portrayed by Seth Parker.

D. Boon cilled a bar and swung through the forest on grape vines.

Carl Wimar 1855, The Abduction of Boone’s Daughter by the Indians, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

In the 1800s Wisconsin historian Lyman Draper collected Boone’s papers and the oral remembrances of his descendants and his contemporaries, so unlike many historical figures we know a lot about Boone. Boone himself wasn’t shy about telling his story, and unlike many, he was pretty reliable. Later still there would be largely discredited revisionist theories concerning Boone, that pronounced that most settlers of Kentucky came down the Ohio River, not across the Wilderness Road, or that Boone was only the lackey of real estate investors who told him what to do, or that in some other way Boone should get no credit for the settlement of Kentucky. That, apparently, is about as bad of history as the folk tales, even though it was propagated by academic historians.

Interestingly, the folk-hero Boone is the subject of an early statue removal, in this case in the nation’s capital. A marble statue of The Rescue, generally believed to be Boone rescuing his family, was displayed in the Capital from 1853 until 1959, more than 100 years, until it was removed during building work and never put back. By 1959 it was the subject of considerable controversy, and I figured that they did the building work just to get rid of the statue, along with the statue of Christopher Columbus on the other side of the stairway (which is also still in storage).

GreenoughRescue.jpg
Horatio Greenough, The Rescue, 1837-1850, white marble. It was dropped by a crane at some point, and is now in storage. I’ve never heard that it was dropped on purpose.

Boone was 43 by the time he made it to Kentucky. For my first trip to Kentucky I’m a bit older than that, but instead of founding Boonesborough, I can make a motel reservation. In any event, I’m just in it for the whiskey. I mean the fish.

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North Carolina

Here’s a list of famous people from North Carolina:

  • John Coltrane
  • Dolley Madison
  • The Dale Earnhardts
  • Cecil B. DeMille
  • Billy Graham
  • Sugar Ray Leonard
  • Roberta Flack
  • Thomas Wolfe
  • Andrew Johnson, sort of.
  • Andrew Jackson, though he’s probably from South Carolina
  • James Taylor
  • Doc Watson
  • James K. Polk, sort of.
  • Nina Simone
  • Richard Petty
  • Earle Scruggs
  • Andy Griffith
Hugo Van Gelderen, John Coltrane, 1963.

I left out Soupy Sales, but you get the idea. It’s not a bad list. It’s a very respectable list, and you might come up with people I left out, but here’s the thing: this is not a list that you look at and say that the sons and daughters of North Carolina have changed everything. It’s certainly had its effect on Nascar, and two Nascar movies, Days of Thunder and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, were filmed in North Carolina. That’s a full 24 hours of driving fury. And what state wouldn’t be proud to claim John Coltrane, Doc Watson, and Nina Simone?

Talledega Nights by-the-way is the better movie. After Bull Durham, it may be the most quotable sports movie ever.

Of the three presidents on the list, Polk, Johnson, and Jackson, two were born in North Carolina but are known as Tennesseans, and the third, Jackson, was almost certainly born in South Carolina (and is also known as a Tennessean). North Carolina seems to claim him out of desperation. The state’s most important historical event was the flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were from Ohio.

Matthew Brady, James K. Polk, Tennessean, 11th President, daguerrotype, 1849.

North Carolina was always one of our scruffiest states. It is, oddly enough, one of the earliest settled, or attempted settled anyway, by Europeans, first in 1524 by the Spaniard Juan Pardo with a string of forts (that promptly disappeared), and then by the British with two colonies on Roanoke Island, one in 1586 that was abandoned, and one in 1590 that disappeared, taking with it North America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare.

North Carolina wasn’t that far from the Virginia colonies, just across the state border, but the coastline was inhospitable because the Outer Banks effectively blocked navigation, and a monstrous bog, aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp, blocked immigration from English-inhabited Virginia except by the desperate–run-away indentured servants and other rif-raff. Through the Colonial Period North Carolina seems to have been settled mostly by tax scofflaws, pirates, and Quakers, and the former finally ran out the Quakers. Lack of transportation and urban areas left it relatively isolated and poor. Until World War II it was probably our poorest state.

Rebeca Wynn, US Fish and Wildlife Service, The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, 2010,

I had a lot of ancestors who lived in North Carolina, and at least one, born in North Carolina in 1788, seems to have made it to Texas by 1846, the year after annexation and statehood. It’s too bad, too. If he’d only made it one year earlier I could claim membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I don’t know if there really is a Sons of the Republic of Texas, but I’m pretty sure there must be.

Even North Carolina’s literature seems scruffy. I suspect that nobody reads Look Homeword, Angel, any more. I read it years ago, and tried to read it again years later but couldn’t make it through. I remember it being about people who just seemed, well, scruffy. They weren’t evil enough to be bad, and were too mundane to be really memorable. The writing is supposed to be revolutionary, but that’s old hat. Even the newest, most popular North Carolina novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who is raised by wolves in the Great Dismal Swamp, or near enough. I don’t think there are actually wolves. Kris’s book club read it, but I haven’t.

Satellite photo, The Outer Banks, 2009, NOAA.

I’ve fished in North Carolina once before, almost 30 years ago. We fished on the Davidson, in Western North Carolina. Originally this was brook trout territory, but it’s been stocked for years with rainbows and browns and the rainbows and browns have reproduced, spread, and crowded out the brookies, so that the brookies are now found mostly in small high country streams. Twenty-odd years ago I caught my first brook trout in North Carolina, a tiny thing, up above a waterfall where the rainbows couldn’t make lunch of him. We’re fishing for trout again this time, or possibly smallmouth, near the mountain town of Cashiers.

Any smallmouth east of the Appalachians are also transplants.

I’m guessing that there is a saltwater fishery along the Atlantic, and South Carolina is well-known for its redfish, but we won’t make it as far as the coast. After we fish near Bristol, Tennessee (home of Nascar’s Bristol Motor Speedway), we drive south and a bit west back to North Carolina. Shouldn’t work that way, but there you are.

When the Carolinas split in 1729, North Carolina had 6,000 slaves, while South Carolina had 32,000. Tobacco was North Carolina’s big crop, but it was not an industrial agriculture crop like cotton. There were slaves though, in Eastern North Carolina. The Carolina Quakers actively opposed slavery, which was one of the reasons they were impolitely encouraged to leave. By the 1860 census there were 331,059 slaves in North Carolina, or about 33% of the total population, compared to 57% of the population of South Carolina. There were Confederate states with fewer slaves, but they were western, newer states, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida. In 1860, Florida’s total population was only 140,000. I suspect that a significant part of North Carolina’s enslaved were centered in the southern rice-growing region around Cape Fear, North Carolina’s only port, and where Virginia immigrants had gathered along the coast.

During the Civil War North Carolina was relatively untouched physically, but more Confederate soldiers came from North Carolina than any other state, 130,000, more than 12% of its total population. More than 40,000 Confederate North Carolinians died during the War, about half from disease. As with Tennessee, there was considerable Union sympathy in the Appalachian portion of the state, and about 8,000 North Carolinians fought for the Union, 5,000 black, 3,000 white.

North Carolina’s population today is estimated at 10,488,084, and it’s grown consistently and fast since about 1880, when the population was about 1.4 million. It is our 9th most populous state, after Georgia but before Michigan. About 68.5% of the population is non-Hispanic white, and 21.5% African American, which leaves about 10% for everybody else. About 8.4% of the total population is Hispanic. It’s a pretty place, with a hospitable climate as long as no hurricanes blow in from the Atlantic, and I suspect a lot of the North Carolina’s growth is about it being a pretty place with a hospitable climate. People from Houston retire there.

Rivers Langley, Earl Scruggs, 2005, licensed under Creative Commons license, unedited.

It is still not a wealthy state, ranked 41st, with an average annual income in 2018 of $53,888. I suspect that there are greater disparities in income in North Carolina than there are, say, in Missouri, ranked 40, or Tennessee, ranked 42, but that’s just a hunch. Like I said, affluent people from Houston retire there. Affluent people from Houston don’t retire to Missouri.

North Carolina may be one of the states that decides the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Biden needs about 40 electoral votes over what Hillary received in 2016, which means that unless he wins Texas and Florida he has to win some combination of three larger states that Hillary didn’t win. Of the states that were close in 2016, Pennsylvania (20) and North Carolina (15) would just about do it.

In 2016 President Trump took North Carolina 49.83% to 46.17%, but of all the state electoral maps I’ve looked at, North Carolina’s may be the strangest. It doesn’t appear to be driven so much by an urban/rural or a white/black split as an affluent/less affluent split, but that’s a wild guess. Maybe it’s that North Carolina has become such a refuge, and the refugees aren’t collected in big cities. Anyway, it would take a lot more delving than I’m willing to do to figure it out. Here’s the map:

By Ali Zifan, Wikipedia.

Look up a map of the state and compare the two. It’s a strange jumble of who voted how, and not obviously explained by the usual splits.

One of North Carolina’s Senate seats, held by Republican Tom Tillis, is up in 2020, and the race is generally considered a toss-up, though current polling shows the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Current polling shows Biden leading Trump 49% to 48%, which is meaningless.

And by the way, the most quotable sports movie, Bull Durham, was set in North Carolina. I will almost certainly watch Bull Durham again before the weird short season baseball business kicks off next week, and we head to North Carolina.