Currier & Ives, Brook Trout, 1868, chromolithograph, Library of Congress.
If you fly fish, sooner or later you hear two things:
You idiot. Brook Trout aren’t a trout.
Brook trout have been driven out of their native range.
The first, that brook trout aren’t a trout, isn’t so much spoken as declaimed. Those aren’t trout! Those are char! What’s actually being said is that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, are taxonomically closer to members of the genus Salvelinus, commonly called char, than they are to brown trout, Salmo trutta, always called trout. Of course that begs the question of why rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, get a pass on trouthood when they’re taxonomically closer to Pacific salmon than to brown trout. And that begs the question of why Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a salmon when they’re taxonomically closer to brown trout than to Pacific salmon.
Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, c. 1874, National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School. There’s an angler in that painting, though well hid. He’s above the rock on the left in the small falls. The painting could have just as well been named Brook Trout in the Catskills, but not Char in the Catskills.
These are probably the sorts of existential questions that trout ponder, but for me at least there’s some irrelevance to it. One supposes that all that taxonomic relativity means something scientifically, but common usage is common usage, and it’s brook trout, not brook char. One also supposes that the taxonomic classification of beetles is just as confusing as the various fishes, but likely as not every time you say June bug no one says that’s not John but Paul.
Historic Brook Trout Eastern Range Map, Trout Unlimited.
Questions about brook trout range are much more interesting. There was a time, roughly coinciding with somewheres in the Pleistocene to 1883, when brook trout were the only river trout in eastern North America. They ranged from Georgia to as far west as Michigan and north into Canada. By the 19th Century the Catskills were the destination fishery for New York, like now New Zealand and Iceland and Christmas Island and Kansas are the destination fisheries for modern anglers, and without cars or even trains the Catskills weren’t much easier to get to than Christmas Island. When in 1830 you fished the Catskills for trout you fished for brook trout, and I suspect that no officious busybody butted in to to tell you that’s not a trout it’s a char.
Brook trout first declined in much of their native range because of over-fishing and habitat degradation. Meanwhile innovators were beginning to raise hatchery brown trout, and the browns were adaptive and more heat and environmentally tolerant. Brown trout were first introduced into Michigan, but their introducers quickly took them east. Rainbows from the west coast were also introduced. While being crowded out of the east, brook trout meanwhile were carried west, and, along with their cousin the lake trout, brook trout are now an invasive species in cutthroat habitat. Poor cutthroat. They catch it from everybody.
By the way, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) are not a trout but a char.
U.S. Geological Survey, Native and Introduced Ranges of Brook Trout, 2013. I have never heard of brook trout introduced in Texas, but I’m sure somebody did. Howdy!
There are efforts by the the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a coalition of states, local governments, and private entities, to restore brook trout populations and habitat in their native range and to preserve the rivers and lakes where brook trout populations are healthy. the following Joint Venture map is dated, but it indicates where to fish for native brook trout. Maine. Go to Maine. And northern New Hampshire.
Hey! We’re on our way to northern New Hampshire!
From Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, Eastern Brook Trout: Roadmap to Restoration, before 2012. Who doesn’t date data?
Brook trout, which are members of the char family, spawn in the autumn beginning in their second year. I came across this peculiarly lurid description of brook trout spawning on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife website:
Pre-spawning courtship of the brook trout begins with the male attempting to drive a female toward suitable gravel habitat to facilitate spawning. A receptive female chooses a spot and digs a redd. While the female brook trout is digging, the male brook trout continues his courtship activity, darting alongside the female and quivering, swimming over and under her and rubbing the female with his fins.
Dang. These are your government employees at work. Pretty salty stuff.
And speaking of salt, like rainbows brook trout can move into the ocean (in which case they’re called salties). They return to freshwater to spawn.
If there’s a creature that a brook trout can put in their mouth, they’ll eat it. They feed by sight, so they’re daytime feeders. They’re short-lived, commonly living three to four years. Their size varies based on habitat.
50 fish from American Waters, Allen & Winter, Richmond Virginia, 188__. Cigarette cards.
Man they’re pretty. They’re also not a trout, but a char.
Four to eight pound brook trout are trophies. All of the IGFA tippet class records for brook trout are from Canada, and range up to about 10 pounds. The all tackle record is a bit more than 14 pounds. Weirdly all of the women’s records are vacant except for two pound tippet, which is for a 2 lb 8 oz fish. Kris really does need to get busy.
First things first, I caught a fish, but unfortunately Kris didn’t. Actually, I caught two fish, one was a Summit Lahontan cutthroat that probably weighed two pounds. The other was a Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat that weighed about five pounds. Those are goodly trout for anyplace else, and they were fun to catch, but I gather they are on the small side for Pyramid Lake.
Kris meanwhile never had a fish take a fly. It was nothing she did wrong. She was casting well, and while the fishing is unique, and while we wouldn’t have figured it out on our own, with a good guide it’s not hard. We were fishing with Casey Gipson out of Reno, and Casey was all the good things a good guide should be. He had good equipment, including excellent ladders. He was patient with the birds nests we made of our leaders. He kept us at plausible locations out of the crowds. When he picked us up at the hotel he had coffee. Coffee is no small thing.
He is also a great cook. You wouldn’t think that was so important, but shows what you know. We had homemade chorizo po’boys for lunch the first day and homemade chicken burritos the second. Whatever else happened, we had great food. And coffee.
Casey’s photo. I’m the model. I’m not really sleeping. Really.
But the fishing was slow. What we kept trying to explain to Casey was that this was just a normal fishing trip with the Thomases. Unless you know that the Thomases are going to be there, April may be the best time to fish Pyramid. If we’re there the fish will be down for our visit. Honestly, except for the nap I took on the bank the second day, we fished hard, we fished reasonably well, and I didn’t hurt anybody with my casting.
Casey told us that the worst fishing days on Pyramid are the nicest days, the days when the barometric pressure is high, the breezes are gentle, and the lake is glass. The best days to fish are the days when the weather is the worst. We had nice days, beautiful days, the days of the first morning of the world. Casey worked his butt off, but what can you do? It’s easy to guide when all you have to do is net and release fish. Poor Casey had to answer all the questions we came up with because we weren’t busy, plus come up with stories to keep us engaged. Nobody ever said guiding was easy.
We had planned to fish one day on the Pyramid and one on the Truckee River, the river that carries water from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, but the Truckee flows were dangerously high, around 6,000 cubic feet per second. Our Reno hotel room window looked down on the Truckee, and we constantly checked the river, hopeful, but then had hopes washed away. The river was dashing and carrying on and generally taunting us. It was one whole lot of silted, roiling, angry water. I’m sure most weekends it it’s the gentlest bubbling brook, perfect for a three weight bamboo rod and size 18 quill Gordons.
The first day in Nevada we drove up the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, and the last day we drove to Silver City. Both are classic Western alpine environments, formed by tectonic pressures that jumbled igneous rock into dramatic poses. There are pine trees and winding mountain roads and when it snowed on our drive to Tahoe we sang “Snow” from White Christmas. Pyramid though is different. It’s also dramatic, but in an Old Testament Biblical sort of way. It looks like where Moses and the Hebrews spent their 40 years in the Wilderness.
And there are no trees, but of course that didn’t stop me from getting my fly snagged in sagebrush. There are rocks, but the rocks aren’t the product of geologic cataclysm. The rocks are tufa deposits, a deposit of carbonate minerals like what accumulates around old plumbing where the water’s hard. Sometimes the deposits are rounded and lumpish, sometimes striated like something shattered and sharp and broken. The color of the deposits matches the sand and the sagebrush; tan, grey, barren, and dry.
The lake is on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, and the fishing season is from October to the end of June. It’s huge, 28 miles long and nine miles across, but the air is so clear and dry that distances are confusing. It looks like it’s two instead of nine miles across. In the warmer months fishing is closed and other uses take over. Casey thought that the tribe closed the fishing season as much to prevent conflicts between jet skiers and anglers as for conservation.
Other than the big tufa rock, the lake shore (and the lake bed) is course sand and small broken rock, a beach perfect for summer recreation. There’s plenty of sage brush, but not much else. The near lake floor is a series of shelves, and you can see the pattern repeated on the shore. Shelf, drop, shelf, drop. The trout cruise the drops, and Casey planted our ladders about 15 feet from the shore at the first drop’s edge. Now Casey is a big ‘ol boy, but it’s height not girth. He’s 6’8”, and Kris (who’s 5’4”) distrusted his awareness of relativity. He did ok though, and she never drowned nor even dunked, much. Casey said that the key to excellent ladder placement was to never wade out past his wader belt, which was not quite to the top of Kris’s waders.
When we fished, we first climbed the ladder, and then cast out 30 feet or so to get beyond the drop to the feeding fish. There be monsters. When there were no fish in the first hours, Casey had me prospect with streamers on a sinking line. I’d let the line sink and then retrieve with short strips. Other than that we fished nymphs under fluorescent Screw-Ball Indicators. Casey said that streamers are generally fished in the fall, and nymphs are fished the rest of the season, and we fished big weighted nymphs: mahalos, holographic midges, red red and more red chironomids. Ok, they weren’t always red, just mostly.
There was no real retrieve on the nymphs. The shifting lake current and the wind carried the indicator and nymphs through a drift, and from time to time you might give the line a twitch to jig the flies or an up-current mend to get slack out of your line. Sometimes the drift went left to right, sometimes right to left, sometimes straight toward you. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d do all of that some more. It was oddly mesmerizing, watching the bobber work through the waves.
If the fishing is on then the fish take is quick and strong. Casey said that when you see the indicator go down, that with a really large fish there will be no retrieve: it’s a full stop, like hooking a rock that commences a fight.
I fished a lot of different rods, mostly 7-weights, some of ours, some of Casey’s. I fished for a while with Casey’s 11-foot two-handed rod using roll casts, and Casey said that Spey rods and switch rods were pretty much all he personally uses on the lake anymore. I liked it for a bit, but then got distracted and my roll cast went to play the slots back in Reno. I went back to single-handed rods. I’m better at daydreaming with single hand rods.
I asked Kris if we needed to go back to Nevada to catch her a fish. So far she’s caught fish everywhere I’ve caught fish except Mississippi and Nevada, but Nevada is a strange place, and it was a hard trip for a long weekend. I think she’s decided that this fish in every state business is mine, not hers, and while she likes going along she doesn’t need to catch a fish. I still need to go to Oxford, Mississippi though, even though I caught a fish in Mississippi. She didn’t catch a fish in Mississippi, but I could use that as an excuse to go again. Maybe Nevada falls into the same category.
From The Great Train Robbery, 1903, directed by Edwin S. Porter.
This is a blog post with footnotes. [1]
Reno Fly Shop has a podcast, and it’s good. It’s an interview format with some national fly fishing personalities and some Nevada or California locals with local knowledge. The episodes are each about an hour, which is just right for my morning stumble around Rice. The host, the shop owner Jim Litchfield, is a generous and engaged interviewer, but the podcast always gets around to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River. That can be a bit of a stretch for some of the national fly fishing personalities, so the locals have a decided advantage.
A recent podcast was with Meredith McCord, who is not local to Reno, but like me is from Houston. She spoke at Texas Fly Fishers last year. I don’t know her, but from the audience Ms. McCord seems lively and personable, with a Southern Girl’s penchant for girly casual wear and plenty of well-coiffed hair. She also has a penchant for IGFA records.
The IGFA is the International Game Fish Association, which apparently exists to keep lists of world records and establish rules for catching big fish. Like fly fishing competitions, it has little to do with the rest of us.
On the podcast Ms. McCord was talking about her IGFA records–she holds about 9,000. [2] The talk on the podcast sooner or later got around to IGFA records for cutthroat trout, all of which are from Pyramid Lake. The IGFA doesn’t differentiate among subspecies of cutthroat trout, a cutthroat is a cutthroat is a cutthroat, so a westslope cutthroat from a tiny stream in Montana is in the same swimsuit competition as a massive Lahontan, and it’s no contest. On the other hand there are male and female records, not differentiated by the gender of the fish but by the gender of the angler. I’m pretty sure the records are kept separate so that a boy won’t need to feel bad about being beat up by a girl.
Following are the women’s records for cutthroat:
IGFA Women’s Fly Fishing Records for Cutthroat
If reports are right and ten- to 20-pound Lahontan cutthroat trout are reasonably common at Pyramid Lake, then these records are ready to be broken. [3] Even I could probably land a trout a bit bigger than two pounds on 20 pound tippet. Of course I’d have to change my self-identification, and nobody makes that kind of decision just to catch a fish.
Looking at the list, the second column is the problem. The second column represents a recent rule change that requires a minimum weight for record fish based on the weight of the tippet. The change was adopted after some records were already set, which is why some of the cells are blank: one way or another those records met the new rule requirement. The rule change might attest to the sportsmanship of IGFA rulemakers, but I suspect it probably goes more to the credibility of a 1 lb 12 oz fish being the record cutthroat for 16 pound tippet.
The change requires that for a fish to establish a record, it must weigh at least half of the weight class of the tippet. [4] You don’t put a bantam weight in the ring with a heavyweight and still call things sporting. Of course there’s a four pound tippet class for tarpon, and catching a 100 pound tarpon on a four pound tippet seems more like needless cruelty than sport, so, like I said, credibility is a better explanation than sportsmanship.
Because many of the women’s cutthroat records are oddly low, Pyramid Lake is prime for new records, particularly for women. Listening to Meredith McCord in the podcast I started wondering if Kris would like a record of her own.
The tackle side of establishing records is pretty straightforward. You can fish with any kind of rod as long as it is at least six feet long and is generally recognized as a fly rod. An Orvis Practicaster probably doesn’t cut it, but anything else sold as a fly rod is probably fine. Same goes for reels. [5]Your line can be any kind of fly line and backing. Really the tackle rule comes down to this: if you’re using tackle that’s generally recognized as a fly rod, reel, and line, then from (a) inside the knot attaching your leader to the tippet to (b) inside the knot attaching your tippet to your hook, your class tippet, the one that tests 2 or 4 or 16 or 20 pounds, has to be at least 15 inches long. That’s pretty much it: at least 15 inches inside the knots. It can be longer, but it can’t be shorter. [6]
Now once you sort out the whole gear thing, the conduct thing [7], and the species identification thing [8], you get to the real problems: the weight and length thing, and the fly thing.
Notwithstanding that I’ve got this whole list going on of fish-I-caught, I’m not a particularly ambitious angler. I want to catch a fish in Kansas, but in Kansas I’d be perfectly happy if it was a six-ounce sunfish. I also understand that from the fish’s perspective fishing is a pretty cruel thing to do. I’m not going to stop fishing, but all in all I want to play a fish quick and get it back in the water so that it can go on about its business of killing and eating stuff and fish sex. I’d kill a fish and eat it, but I don’t really like to clean fish. I’d just as soon put the fish back.
But when I put them back I want them to survive, and our notions of how to handle fish for fish survival are evolving. There are the great guidelines from KeepEmWet Fishing, most of which involve keeping the fish wet, using a net, using barbless hooks, and reducing handling.
Ernest Hemingway and family with four marlins, 1935, Bimini, Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, Public Domain.
I’ve assumed that IGFA records were all established with dead fish, and that’s not right. While there’s nothing I see in the IGFA rules that prohibits killing fish, IGFA is a partner of KeepEmWet, and has adopted its own rules, guidelines really, for releasing fish. [9] However good the angler, and however good the angler’s intentions, [10] establishing a record requires handling, and there’s a tension between any handling and keeping a fish alive. The IGFA has established procedures for handling and weighing fish aimed at release, and the pictures in my head of dangling dead fish are wrong, or at least unnecessary to establish a record. [11] Still, all in all, all of this folderol seems a lot of trouble, and I’d just as soon not bother. If sometime Kris wants a record, I’ll surely help, but I don’t think I’ll mention it to her. Don’t you mention it to her either.
In addition to the weight thing, there’s the fly thing. Saltwater anglers hate the 12 inch bite tippet regulation [12], which according to rumor is too short to effectively deal with tarpon. For freshwater anglers, the really dumb part of the IGFA rules is a prohibition against droppers. [13] Only single flies are allowed, one supposes to discourage snagging, but really? It’s not like fishing droppers isn’t one of those things done since Dame Juliana Berners, and everybody fishes at least tandem flies when they nymph. The last known person to fish a single nymph was in 2006, and that was only because he’d lost his dropper in a tree. From what I can tell all fishing in Pyramid Lake involves dropper-rigged nymph fishing or streamers, and the practice is to fish tandem streamers. The IGFA rule is inconsistent with how anybody fishes, and I’m not setting any records until the rule is changed. Hah! Showed them. Let them defend their vaunted credibility now.
The Booke of haukynge, huntyng and fysshyng, with all necessary properties and medicines that are to be kept, Tottel, 1561, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/berners/berners.html
[1] Lawyers love footnotes of all things. Some of the best stuff is always in the footnotes. I wish I could figure out how the text notation could jump to the footnote, and vice versa, but I can’t, so there you are. If you want to read the footnotes you’ll just have to do it manually. Sorry.
[2] Ms. McCord holds a lot of records, but I made up the number 9000. It just sounded good.
[3] IGFA measures things by kilograms, but I skipped straight to the stateside pound translation. If you want to get back to the IGFA designation a kilogram equals 2.2046 pounds.
[4] If you’re paying close attention, this is probably confusing because the chart gives the minimum weight for 16 pound tippet at 8 pounds, 14 ounces. Even by my low math standards that is more than half of the weight of the 16 pound tippet class. That’s because the IGFA doesn’t use good ol’ American tippet, but some kind of European stuff measured at 8 kilograms. The 16 pounds is an approximation of eight kilograms. Eight kilograms weighs more than 16 pounds. Who knew?
[5] The exact language of the reel rule is as follows: “The reel must be designed expressly for fly fishing. There are no restrictions on gear ratio or type of drag employed except where the angler would gain an unfair advantage. Electric or electronically operated reels are prohibited.” I guess that you couldn’t use a Tenkara rod because the reel for the rod isn’t expressly designed for fly fishing. Maybe someone could argue that the absence of the reel was expressly designed for fly fishing, and that counts for reel design. This is a shame, since I reckon that all of the saltwater Tenkara anglers are out there right now trying to beat the record for sailfish.
[6] At this point you should be asking yourself how the heck do I know that my leader actually tests at that weight? There are pre-tested tippet spools you can buy from companies like Courtland, which should provide consistent break points over the length of the line. This differs from how most of us buy tippet, which actually has less to do with the break strength than the tippet diameter. We don’t really care if our .015 diameter tippet measures a bit more than 8 lbs over its length. Record setters do, and you have to send your leader and tippet in for testing with your record application. You’d think these IGFA people think that fishers are all liars, or at least poor judges of their catch.
[7] This is gross over-simplification, but the conduct rules pretty much come down to catch the fish as you normally would, don’t actually shoot it, and except for netting or gaffing in the final stage, don’t let anybody help you land the fish.
[8] Take lots of pictures of the whole fish. Take pictures of the fish from every conceivable angle. If there’s going to be any doubt of the fish’s species, The IGFA recommends you take the fish to your nearest ichthyologist for identification. I kid you not. A photo has to show the full length of the fish. A photo has to show the rod and reel used to the catch the fish. I think a photo has to show the scale used to weigh the fish, and I think I’d send in a photo of the scale in the very act of weighing the fish. Scales are notorious liars, as anybody with a bathroom scale knows.
[9] One supposes best practices for keeping fish alive doesn’t include taking the fish to the nearest certified scale. The scale certification rules confuse me, but I gather that the best scales are spring scales—not digital as one would expect—and that Boga grips are considered good scales, but not good fish handling devices if you’re using them to hang fish up by the lips. Lip hanging is both hard on the fish’s jaw and on their internal organs, which will come as a shock to us largemouth bass anglers. IGFA will pre-certify your scale for a charge and a membership fee, or will certify the scale after the fact. Then of course you run the risk of having used a bad scale, plus you still have to pay the membership fee.
[10] Now if I were a particularly devious sort of record chaser, and I’d caught a record fish, then I might conclude that if I release a fish and it lives long and prospers, then somebody could break my hard won record next year with the same fish. I don’t know how the minds of record chasers work, so maybe none are that sort of devious.
[11] Apparently the best way to weigh a fish is in a cradle or a net, so you have to establish the weight of the sling or net and subtract it. I’ve got no idea what the IGFA requires to establish the weight of the sling or net.
[12] In addition to the class tippet rule there is also a special rule for bite tippet, which is important for fish like tarpon. That’s a whole other discussion. Twelve inches.
[13] If you’ve read down to this footnote, and you don’t know what a dropper is, then I’m a more engaging writer than I thought I was, or you’re one of my children and you’re humoring me. If you think about fly #1 tied to a fly line, and then fly #2 tied to a piece of line tied to the hook bend of fly #1, fly #2 is the dropper. The whole thing together is a dropper rig.
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.
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.
