Tag: Trout

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Lahontan Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii henshawi)

Lake Tahoe Trout, New York Forest, Fish and Game Commission, Seventh Report of the Forest, Fish and Game Commission of the State of New York, 1901, Albany, N.Y, J.B. Lyon Company.

The Lahontan cutthroat trout is the state fish of Nevada, and it’s what we’ll fish for in Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River. You’d think that the name Lahontan was Native American: The Lahontan Sioux, the Lahontan Paiute, the Lahontan Comanche. Where the Lahontan cutthroat are located, west northwest Nevada, there was once, roughly 15,000 years ago, a Pleistocene lake covering much of the Great Basin: northwestern Nevada, southern Oregon, and northeastern California, and there are remnants of that lake, Pyramid Lake, Walker Lake, Lake Tahoe. Pyramid Lake was the deepest part of Lake Lahontan, with the lowest point 900 feet below the surface. Lake Lahontan was the historic range of the Lahontan cutthroat.

Lake Lahontan, © 2004 Matthew Trump, under GNU Free Documentation License.

But back to the name Lahontan. The trout (and the ancient lake) were named after Louis Armand, Baron de Lahontan, who was neither Sioux nor Paiute nor Comanche. Lahontan was a 17th century French explorer in Canada, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He never made it to Nevada. The name was chosen in the 1860s by a U.S. Geological Survey geologist, Clarence King, who admired Lahontan, or at least liked the name.

The Lahontan cutthroat was originally named the salmon trout because of its size, but unlike Lahontan that was a lousy name and didn’t stick. The Truckee River was originally named by John C. Frémont as the Salmon Trout River, but that didn’t stick either. Like I said, salmon trout as a name is lousy.

In the United States, Nevada seems always to be a one-trick pony, though that trick has changed over time. The current trick is tourism. The previous trick was mining precious metals, silver and gold, mostly silver. The original inhabitants, the four principal tribes, the Shoshone, Washoe, Northern Paiute, and Southern Paiute, plus the far west settlements of the Anasazi (or Puebloan as they now prefer to be called), got on well enough. They supplemented subsistence agriculture, beans, squash, and corn, with hunting and gathering. Ok, they ate desert lizards, but they also ate Lahontan cutthroats. They didn’t rely on silver or gambling. And they didn’t need Elton John, though maybe they would have liked him better than I do.

Jordan, David Star, Tahoe Trout, Salmo Henshawi, Fishes, 1907, New York, N.Y., Henry Holt and Company, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

The Lahontan cutthroat was almost extinct by the 1940s, and the tie between mining and its extinction seems obvious. In 1860, the population of Nevada was 6,857. By 1870, after ten years of boom driven by silver and gold, the population was 42,941. It was during this period that Mark Twain went to Nevada with its new territorial secretary, Orion Clemens.

Over the next 40 years the market for precious metals went up and down, mines played out and new booms played out, mining towns like Belmont, Nelson, Unionville, Silver City, and Gold Point came and went. A United States mint was built in Carson City and then went away. Monetary policy favored silver as a base for U.S. currency, and then didn’t. Nevada was crucified on that cross of gold. In 1900, the population of Nevada was still 42,335. There had been some growth and some decline during the interim, but it didn’t stick.

O’Sullivan, Timothy, Miner working inside the Comstock Mine, 1867, Virginia City, Nevada, National Archive.

Nevada had snuck into statehood during the Civil War–“Battle Born” appears on the state flag. It was a sure Republican vote for the 13th Amendment ending slavery. But Nevada’s mining population wasn’t very stable and the state didn’t exactly lend itself to other kinds of economic development, desert lizards not being an exportable dietary commodity. I’m sure they’re fine, and I’m sure they’ll be appearing on the menu of some New American restaurant in Brooklyn soon, but meantime by 1900 Nevada residents were stuck in a 20-year economic depression. At one point the population was so small that removal of statehood was seriously considered. How can a state with 20,000 eligible voters have two senators and a congressman?

O’Sullivan, Timothy H., The Pyramid and Domes, Pyramid Lake, Nv., 1867, from Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Clarence King, geologist in charge. Library of Congress, from Wikimedia Commons.

Between 1904 and 1913 the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation constructed Lake Tahoe Dam and Derby Dam as part of a series of dams to divert waters from Lake Tahoe to agriculture land as part of it’s Newlands Project. The Lake Tahoe Dam controls flow from Lake Tahoe, the Derby Dam diverts water from the Truckee River drainage into Lake Lahontan and the Carson River watershed. That water irrigates something over 50,000 acres, which is a lot to an Easterner, but really not so much. It was the first project of the newly created U.S, Reclamation Service. New lands for old!

One can just see the engineer’s and politician’s minds a-spinning: silver is pretty much done, the senators from Nevada won’t leave me alone, and the state otherwise can’t support much settlement. We’ll transform the region into the Garden of Eden! With farming! Not that farming ever appeared to be all that much fun to me, though I’m thankful somebody does it.

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Carson River Diversion Dam.

The result was that Lake Winnemucca Lake, a sister-lake to Lake Pyramid, lost all inflow and dried up. Lake Pyramid lost 80 feet of lake elevation. Lahontan cutthroat trout, already decimated by a commercial fishery supplying California and the mining boom with salmon trout, no longer had sufficient flows or water quality in the Truckee for the native fish to move upriver to spawn–they are their own kind of mildly anadromous migratory fish. By 1943, the Pyramid Lake population was extinct. On the other side of the Lake Tahoe Dam, in Lake Tahoe, predation by introduced lake trout and hybridization with rainbows wiped out the Lahontan cutthroat by the 1930s.

There is an amazing story of the discovery of pure-strain Lahontan cutthroats in the 1970s high in the Sierras (of course it would be a better Nevada story if they were living with a striper in Vegas). They were recovered, hatchery-raised, and reintroduced to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee. By 2013, Pyramid Lake anglers standing on ladders were once again catching 20-pound Lahontans. These can be big fish, and the record fish, 41 pounds, was caught in Pyramid Lake in 1901. Reading about the Pyramid Lake fishery by those who care about it, there is an almost religious conviction that soon a 30-pounder will be caught.

The Cui-ui, a lake sucker important to the diet of the Northern Paiute, was also decimated in the 20th Century and has also recovered (also supported by hatcheries), but it’s not much of a fishing target, so it’s not news unless you’re the Northern Paiute. Pyramid Lake, by the way, is managed by the Pyramid Lake Paiute, and the return of both the Cui ui and the Lahontan cutthroat is thanks in big part to tribal management. One doubts that if they’d had anything to say about it they would have allowed the irrigation diversion in the first place. One suspects what makes the Garden of Eden is always relative.

Snyder, John Otterbein, Cui-ui, Fishes of the Lahontan System of Nevada and Northeastern California, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fisheries, v. 35, 1915-1918, Washington, D.C,, Government Printing Office.

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The Waw

General Jubilation T. Cornpone, from Li’l Abner, Paramount Studios, 1959.

Before we went to Vicksburg I listened to Jeff Shaara’s novelization of the Siege of Vicksburg, Chain of Thunder, because Vicksburg is a good place to think about the effect of the Civil War on the white South. The citizens of Vicksburg were besieged, starved, bombed. They lived in caves. They ate rats. From May 18 through July 4, 1863, the War was in their home, and if the War began for the defense of slavery it ended with the failure of that defense and other things besides: a deep and culturally inbred resentment of the invader, and conviction as to the superior virtues of the defeated. The misery of invasion still resonated in 1971 when Joan Baez’s cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down was at the top of the charts. The Band’s version is pretty good too.

And notwithstanding the modern world the resentment and conviction probably aren’t done yet either.

From The General, 1926, MGM. The General is the funniest movie ever made and is in the public domain because somebody didn’t bother renewing the copyright. Go figure.

From Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them—and possibly five—were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up.

The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw; or befo’ the waw; or right aftah the waw; or ’bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo’ the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ch. 26, 1883, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, Ma.

There’s a strange statue in AsiaTown in West Houston, a larger-than-life bronze of a South Vietnamese infantryman in full battle gear walking side by side with a bronze American G.I., also in full battle gear. It’s the Memorial to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The statue is in a district where not long ago a Vietnamese city council member was defeated at least in part because he had accompanied a former mayor on a trade mission to Vietnam. He visited the Yankees. Sometimes it’s just hard to get over it. Ask the Scots or the Irish or any given Cuban in Miami. Go visit Napoleon’s Tomb. Visit Quebec. Not everyone’s a good loser.

Now mind, there is no defense of the Lost Cause, there’s no getting over the moral indefensibility of many of my ancestors going to war to defend slavery: to paraphrase Grant, pretty brave guys but man did their cause suck, and for black Americans it really sucked.

University of Alabama Students burn desegregation literature, 1956, Library of Congress.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, with desegregation and voting and civil rights, our insights into the causes and effects of the War changed, or should have changed, not just in the South but the North as well. Maybe they did for some, but its symbols also became the symbols for a new conflict, or at least a refocused conflict carried over from the old. Notwithstanding that it was during the centennial of the War, I’m not buying that in 1962 Dixiecrats in South Carolina for the first time raised the battle flag at the state capitol because they got hyped up about history. I do suspect that a television show starring a Dodge Charger named the General Lee with a battle flag on its roof was dreamed up in Hollywood as a live-action cartoon, was innocent if naive, and that if anyone should be offended it should be white Southerners, but there you are: there are no longer any frivolous uses of that flag, and there are certainly no innocent uses. I may miss General Jubilation T. Cornpone in the Sunday funnies, but you can’t go home again.

* * *

Meantime we’re packing for Mississippi, and Saturday we drove to New Braunfels where I caught a nice rainbow on a red and black zebra midge under a flashback pheasant tail under a tan worm under some weight under a bobber, and I caught it right at the top of a run, right where it was supposed to be. Plus notwithstanding all that hardware I only got tangled twice. On the way out of town we ate at Krause’s, which has reopened and constructed a great beer hall next to the old restaurant. At our shared table we met a couple from New Braunfels with a place for rent in Arroyo City, on the Laguna Madre. Kris loves fishing the Laguna Madre. Unlike Florida I can catch fish on the Laguna Madre. She was ready to move to Arroyo City.

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Mississippi Donuts

Sunday morning in Vicksburg we stopped for donuts at Donut Palace before we toured the National Battlefield. Donut Palace is a pretty basic donut shop, clean and well lighted, without pretensions or flourishes, and it seemed to have a reasonably steady stream of customers. The other donut shop in Vicksburg, Divine Donuts, was closed on Sunday morning, because the Divine always rests on Sunday.

I had a pretty involved conversation with two customers. Mississippi accents are richer than most, and theirs were money. They had stopped for donuts on the start of a seven-hour road trip to Throckmorton, Texas. I blurted out that Throckmorton was my home town, thought better of the exaggeration, and tried to explain that it was within my home territory. Throckmorton was a bout 70 miles from where I grew up in Vernon, and about 30 miles from where my mother grew up in Seymour. In those parts, that’s nearby.

We had a nice conversation about hunting quail and dove, and I wanted to ask them if they knew a nearby farm pond to fish but I didn’t. It was cold, and even at a farm pond the fishing would be hard, and secretly I didn’t want this to be my last trip to Mississippi. As for Throckmorton, Texas, it was named after James Webb Throckmorton, who was born in Tennessee, and in 1861 had supported Sam Houston’s attempt to keep Texas in the Union. He was one of six Texas secession convention delegates who voted against secession. He then enlisted in the Confederate army, ultimately serving as brigadier general of something or other which was not the army, and late in the War as the Confederate commissioner to the Indians.

Texas was a recalcitrant Reconstruction state, and Throckmorton was the recalcitrant first Reconstruction governor. He repudiated the 14th Amendment because Texans, meaning white Texans, didn’t like it, which meant that he refused to protect freedmen or Freedmen’s Bureau agents. He was removed from office by Phillip Sheridan. Throckmorton the City is the County seat of Throckmorton the County, but I reckon they weren’t named for Throckmorton’s dubious accomplishments but because of the sheer poetry of the name. Throckmorton. Doesn’t that just roll off the tongue? I figure his constitutional analysis was a fluke and he was the last Texan ever who thought that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply.

After the two guys Going to Texas had Gone to Texas, I asked the donut shop owners if they were Cambodian. They were, and had close ties to Texas donut shops. That means that Cambodian ownership of donut shops has now spread out of Houston through Louisiana into Mississippi. There were some other earlier minor migrations into Mississippi. Chinese immigrants arrived during Reconstruction, and there are Chinese restaurants here and there. Tamales came with cotton workers brought in from Mexico after the turn of the last century, and are a favorite of the Delta. Donut Palace was selling the sausage rolls that Texas donut shops call kolaches, and they sold that greatest of Cambodian donut shop inventions, the Czech-Cajun-Cambodian boudin kolache. Their boudin came from Beaumont. It was delicious.


Cambodian donut shops are family affairs, and the owners were charming. I mentioned to them that I had heard that Dallas donut shop owners were often Koreans, and they said yes, and that the Koreans worked very hard and even slept in their shops. They said that one Korean would often run a shop alone, and that they knew a Korean who had two shops that he ran himself. I couldn’t figure how that worked, and I didn’t ask, but it wore me out just thinking about it.

* * *

Yesterday we drove to Sattler to fish the Guadalupe. It was only the second time we’d been to the Guadalupe this year. It was crowded, and nobody we talked to was catching anything, including a guide and his clients in a raft. It was TroutFest again, and the same guys with beards were there again this year. Before we fished we ate lunch at The Real Pit Barbecue in Sattler, and in honor of the first Astros spring training game I had a Frito pie. Frito pie is Texan/New Mexican, consisting of chili spooned onto Fritos, sometimes in a sliced open single serving sack, and garnished with cheese and onion. Being a combination of salt, spice, beef, and fat they are delicious, and because I explained to the lady at the counter that the Astros’ season depended on my eating a Frito pie–I’m mildly superstitious about baseball (but oddly never about fishing), she, being an Astros fan, made me an excellent pie. The chili had beans, or at least there were beans added, but I didn’t complain. I’m no Pythagorean.

When we finally got into the water I spent most of my time untangling line or re-rigging and wondering how I could get my tippet, nippers, weights, forceps, sunglasses, readers, camera, wading stick, net, and flies ready to hand. I used to wear a vest, and then tried a different vest, and am currently using a sling pack. I’ve used satchels and hip belts and lanyards and chest packs, and they all have their problems, but yesterday was a real mess. It was that day when everything was always wrong. At one point I sat down on a limestone ledge and took everything off and started over. I also had to unwrap the fly line that had somehow twisted 20-odd times around my net.

Maybe I need a pack. I’ve never tried a pack.

Late in the day I caught a small trout on a red and black size 16 zebra midge under a bead head under some weight under a bobber, then hooked a nicer fish that flipped off the hook after a couple of jumps. I figure I need to eat a Frito pie every time I fish the Guadalupe. Not that I’m superstitious.

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Broken Bow, Oklahoma

Saturday we fished with Chris Schatte on the Lower Mountain Fork River. I was going to brag that I caught two fish for every one of Kris’s, but then Kris caught another fish. It wasn’t a day with a lot of fish, but I never remember much about catching a lot of fish. I remember specific fish, not multitudes. 

We picked the Mountain Fork because it was in Oklahoma and close enough for a long weekend drive. The names are a bit confusing. It’s the Lower Mountain Fork River, which is a tailwater below Broken Bow Lake, which is in Beavers Bend State Park. It’s near the towns of Hochatown and Broken Bow, just past Idabel. It’s a pretty trout river within three hours of Dallas/Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, and there are a bunch of smaller cities, Norman, Lawton, Tyler, Longview, Shreveport, Texarkana, that are even closer.  It’s popular. It’s pretty.

To be fair, most of the folk in that photo were an on-the-water class, and if we’d walked further upriver we would have probably walked away from the crowd, but in the afternoon we picked our bit of river and fished that bit. I figured that it would get me ready for fishing in New York and Connecticut and Montana, all the crowded places. I’ve never fished much with crowds, and usually I tend to cast and move. There wasn’t much casting and moving.

We had fished a different part of the river that morning, and there were fewer people. It was theoretically a better place to fish, but at least this trip we didn’t get any strikes. Chris the Guide thought that three days’ heavy generation had put down the fish.  

Southeastern Oklahoma looks like Wisconsin. The trees are different, sure: I didn’t see a single cypress knee in Wisconsin, but at the end of the day lumber is business in both places. Driving out of Oklahoma Saturday evening there was lumbering machinery and lumber trucks everywhere. The cheese is better in Wisconsin, and the cheese curds, but Hochatown, Oklahoma had Stevens Point beat for pizza, and they both had good beer.  Even the weather, mid-November in Oklahoma and late September in Wisconsin, was pretty similar. I’m not sure if there’s been a freeze yet in Beavers Bend.

Out of curiosity we would probably have gone to Mountain Fork sooner or later, and might go back again, but the river’s probably happiest without us. People should go to the Mountain Fork because it’s their river, not because it’s a destination river. I suspect there are rivers all over the country just like it. Good places to go for days and weekends year after year, places that satisfy the need for pretty but close enough for frequent fliers, a place to know and criticize and praise, and maybe love.

We fished nymphs and emergers under a bobber without added weight. I missed a bunch of strikes, especially at the end of the swing when I made a few short strips before picking up the line. I was casting well enough, and at one point I fished three flies without killing anybody. I didn’t get hopelessly tangled until it was time to quit for the day, and then we quit for the day. 

Mid-afternoon I lay down on the bank and took a long nap.  Kris said I slept for about an hour, and that’s fine with me.  I guess people moving upriver had to step over me, or at least around me, but nobody tripped or kicked. It was a fine river for a nap, and I’ve napped by many fine rivers. If I did a product review of the FishPond Summit Sling, I would note that it’s exactly the right size to use as a pillow for napping bankside. For me that’s not a small consideration.

I watched Kris the Angler cast and she was casting beautifully.  Last year she didn’t cast so beautifully. 

When I planned Oklahoma I had thought that we would fish without a guide. I wouldn’t have used emergers, and I wouldn’t have known where to fish, but sooner or later, this trip or the one after or the one after that, we would have caught fish, but we fished with Chris the Guide because he was a freshman at my high school when I was a senior, and I got to spend the day talking about people and places we knew, the Osbornes and Joe Chat, what businesses were left downtown in our hometown, Johnson’s Jewelry, and what was wrong with the town’s water system. Chris has a good life: they picked Broken Bow because land is cheaper in Oklahoma than in Colorado. They bought some acreage. They built a house. He started guiding. They own an Airstream and his wife does triathlons and they go to Canada and Minnesota in the summer. It all sounded great to me.  

Plus I caught my fish.