Tag: Trout

Posted on

McCloud and Lower Sacramento Rivers, California, Rainbow Trout, July 8-9, 2023

On our second day fishing in California, we fished on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta. I had heard that the Upper Sacramento was fishing really well, but that the McCloud was off-color and too high from late runoff. We had our choice, the Upper Sacramento that was fishing well or the McCloud that wasn’t, so of course we chose the McCloud.

Actually I chose the McCloud without asking Kris. Don’t tell her. We were fishing with Paul Leno from The Fly Shop. I had told Paul about fishing for McCloud River rainbows on Crane Creek in Missouri, and Paul agreed that we needed to see their source. Most of the world’s transplanted rainbows share McCloud River genetics, so not going would be like Christians skipping Bethlehem when they visited the Holy Land. A lot of North American fishing starts on the McCloud.

Google Earth

To get to the river we drove south from the town of McCloud and then turned left onto an unpaved forest road. The forest road descends, and then descends some more, and then descends some more, down into volcanic rubble, ruts, fallen rocks, and dust. I was following Paul’s truck, but if I got too close, say within 50 feet, I couldn’t see the road for the dust. You know those roadside signs, Beware Falling Rock? As a child I thought they meant watch the cliff face and be ready to dodge, but I guess they’re actually warning about the rock that’s already fallen. If you hit that rock hard enough it sure could mess up the rent car.

Anyway, that’s the kinda thing one contemplates on the creep down the forest service road to the McCloud River. That, and wondering if AAA would come get me when I popped a tire. The seven miles took about an hour. I didn’t have much faith that even if they came AAA could ever find us.

When we parked the rental car at the end of the road we still had to hike a mile or so to the Nature Conservancy’s Kerry Landreth Preserve, which lets in ten anglers at a time. There was one other angler already there somewhere, but we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Apparently it’s usually full, but it’s a hard place to get to, and even after we reached the river we had to crawl down the bank through riverside brush and rock to fish.

This was youngster’s fishing. At 16, or 26, or 36, I would have enjoyed the scramble. At 66, perched above the river, trying to get a fly to drift through a 10 foot pocket in a twist of rock garden 10 feet below me, I kind of regretted that I’d traded in my afternoon nap. It was hard, technical nymph fishing, and while it was certainly challenging, I haven’t yet convinced myself that it was fun.

Paul got us to the river, coached us, and at some point corrected the way I was mending my line. Mends are peculiar to fly fishing rivers. The idea is to get the fly to float down the current with no drags or skitters or whatnot that will look unnatural to fish. The problem is that between you and your fly the river has conflicting currents, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, that are put there solely to give the poor angler grief.

To avoid drag you have to mend your line: you force slack into the line between you and the fly, either upstream or downstream depending on the currents, so that the line slack lets the fly drift true. To force slack you lift the line from the water and move an arc of line up or down with the rod tip–down if the current between you and the fly is slower, up if faster. Ideally you move the line without jerking the fly and scaring all the fish for a couple of miles.

I’m pretty good at the theory of mends, but not so good at the application. I long ago gave up on not moving my fly when I mend, and had finally settled on not moving the fly a whole lot. I kinda figured that if I diverted my eyes the fish would be courteous enough to do the same. Paul watched me and said that I was trying to throw the line, and that what I should do is lift the line and set it down as if I was writing the letter C with my rod tip. And it worked.

Dammit, it worked. Here all this time I was content with ignorance, and I found that I didn’t really like being wrong. Worse, it was easy to do it right. Dammit.

I caught two fish (which is about par for my course). With all the creeping and crawling and scrambling involved, and with lunch–never forget lunch–we didn’t actually fish that long, maybe three or four hours. At lunch Paul asked me what I thought about the McCloud.

Paul really loves the place, and he was asking a deeper question than whether or not I had had a good day fishing. I had fished there for four hours on a difficult day. By July in California’s drought years, the McCloud would have been running hundreds of cfs slower. It would have been clear, and it would have reflected a Caribbean blue. We spent one day on the McCloud in a rare wet year when the water was high and cloudy, and for us old folk it was a very hard day.

Still.

Like a lot of dammed Western rivers, the McCloud pre-dam held migratory runs of salmon. It doesn’t anymore, and in my mind that’s tragic, but it’s the same tragedy shared by a lot of rivers, East and West. The McCloud is special though because it also has that strange history of being the site of the first federal fish hatchery, and its trout, the particular rainbow subspecies of McCloud River redbands, were transported everywhere, to New England and Montana and New Zealand and Argentina and Chile and, well, everywhere, even to Crane Creek in Missouri.

I guess I can’t answer Paul’s question. It was different. It was rugged. The fish that I saw were stunningly beautiful. Would I go back there? I don’t know. I’m still decompressing. Would I think about about the river? All the time. I will never forget it.

𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱 

We planned to fly out of Sacramento early on Monday, and we were only going to fish a half-day Sunday. Paul suggested that we meet in Redding and fish the Lower Sacramento in the city. We’d be fishing on a good-sized river roughly two football fields wide in the middle of a good-sized town of about 100,000 people, but when you float it the river still feels reasonably remote. More important, after our day on the McCloud, it was mighty comfortable. We were fishing from a drift boat. There were donut shops and paved roads. I could have napped if I’d wanted.

Google Earth

We were fishing under bobbers, with deep nymphs drifted alongside the boat. It is, I think, about as lazy as fly fishing gets, especially when someone else is doing all the rowing.

As usual though, I can find some way to screw things up. I could handle the floppy water haul cast we were using, and I don’t hardly remember getting tangled at all. I couldn’t get the hook set right though, and even though I got takes from time to time, Paul said that I was pulling the hook out of the fish’s mouth. I was at the back of the boat, between Paul in the row seat and the motor on the transom. Trout always feed into the upstream current, so they were facing towards us.

Whenever I tried to set the hook, I would unfailingly lift the rod to my right. I don’t know why, I’m far from right-leaning, but the bobber bobbled and I went right.

That was fine as long as I was fishing on the left side of the boat. I’d pull right and the hook would set upstream into the current, into the fish. On the right side though when I’d go right I’d pull away from the fish. It was stupid, and if I had a year or two I might work myself out of it.

Apparently I wasn’t going to work it out that morning. I caught a couple, one a tiny salmon, both on the left side of the boat, but mostly I just missed. That was ok though. I’d learned something, or at least I’d theoretically learned it.

Kris on the other hand was getting plenty of sets but then had trouble landing the fish. Sitting at the back of the boat I got to watch it all. Now mind, I lose about as many fish as I catch, and I always think that if I just had more practice, that if I only hooked more fish, that sooner or later I’d figure it out and get better. Part of the problem is that I’ve heard and read so many contradictory things about playing and landing fish, usually when I’m trying to land the fish, that I don’t really have a very clear picture of what I’m supposed to be doing. Hold the rod tip up, hold the rod tip low at 30 degrees so the backbone’s in the rod, hold the rod to the side to lead the fish and tire it, don’t lead the fish because you’ll wear a hole and the hook will flop out, tighten down the drag, don’t tighten down the drag, horse the fish in as fast as you can, let the fish run, don’t ever bother getting freshwater fish onto the reel . . .

I’ve never fished with a guide as certain or as precise in his directions as Paul. Hold the rod tip up, not back but up, with the butt of the rod in front of your face. Face the fish so that the spine of the rod is fighting the fish. Get the line on the reel so that the fish is fighting the reel, not you. It was a joy to watch him coach Kris, and to watch Kris become a much better angler in the in the time it took to land one fish, . If I had been fighting the fish I’d probably have garbled his directions in all the excitement, but since all I had to do was watch it was easier to ponder, and maybe even absorb. Some of it anyway.

Now if I could just get that hook set right I could practice.

Posted on

Fall River, California, Rainbow Trout, July 7, 2023

35

In California we fished for rainbow trout in three separate rivers, the Fall River, the McCloud, and the Lower Sacramento. We could have picked other places to fish in California. There’s a guide who fly fishes for big sharks out of San Diego, there are steelhead in the coastal rivers, golden trout in the Sierras, and carp in LA parks. There were even other well-known trout rivers close to where we fished.

But we picked our three rivers, and they were good choices. Redding, California, is the gateway to Northeastern California’s trout rivers. It sits at the northern edge of the flat California Central Valley, and from Redding things can only go up.

We flew into Sacramento, 30 feet above sea level. To put this in perspective, Houston at 79 feet is universally envied for its flat terrain and low elevation. Sacramento is lower than Houston and equally flat. I bet it can’t match us for humidity though.

Redding, 165 miles north of Sacramento, is at roughly 500 feet. Driving there from Sacramento shares all the scenic wonder of a drive from Houston to Dallas, which is also roughly 500 feet. That change in elevation doesn’t really do justice to the flatness of the three-hour drive from Sacramento to Redding. It’s flat, really flat, or close enough to make no difference.

Then things change quickly. Where we spent the first night, the town of Fall River Mills, is 70 miles northeast of Redding at an elevation of 3,323 feet. Mount Shasta dominates the region north of Redding at 14,180 feet. The Cascade Range was formed by volcanoes (including Mount Shasta), and volcanic rock and debris are everywhere. Snowmelt and rain seep into the porous volcanic rock, and then after percolating underground for some years the water reappears at springs, cold and clean, and begins its run south to the Sacramento River, south to Redding, and then on to the City of Sacramento and the Central Valley.

Fall River is a tributary to a tributary of the Sacramento River. It’s fed by a huge conglomeration of springs. It flows slowly, and its surface is glass. It’s a perfect spring creek.

The river meanders roughly 22 miles through a high flat agricultural valley nestled between the Cascades and the Sierras. They grow wild rice in the valley–the kind of grass seed I thought only came from Minnesota–and cattle, but the landowners appear to take good care of the river. The cattle are fenced away to limit bank and bed damage.

Fall River is not all flat and meandering. There are falls on the Fall River, but not in the valley. We could see them from a highway overlook south of Fall River Mills, right before the Fall River joins the Pitt River. The Pitt flows south and joins the Sacramento at Lake Shasta.

Private ownership both protects the Fall River and makes it difficult to access. You can’t get there from here. You have to fish from a boat, and to get a boat with access you pretty much have to hire a guide. The guide puts in on private land, floats downstream, then motors back up to the put-in. On the way down and back he works you into the river.

Fall River is as pretty as a trout stream gets. Meanwhile the towns near the river aren’t exactly reaping the benefits, I guess because of the difficulty of access. You want to buy a vacation home or business in a prime trout location? Go to Fall River Mills. I think everything’s for sale, and nothing seems to be selling very fast.

We fished with Maciel Wolff,1. He met us at Glenburn Community Church at the country crossroad of Glenburn, then we followed him to the put-in. He told us that he had previously guided full time for a lodge, but that the lodge had shut because of fire risk. The owner could no longer afford property insurance. Who knew there were wildfires in California?

We booked Maciel through The Fly Shop. The Fly Shop sends its catalog to every fly fisher in North America. When I would tell one of my Houston friends that we were going to fish near Redding, the response would always be “I get The Fly Shop catalogue . . . ” There is supposed to be a famous hexagenia mayfly hatch on the Fall River, but that assumes that hatches–the point when hideously ugly mayfly nymphs under water transform into things of beauty and go on a short-lived aerial sex spree–actually exist. Having only ever seen a couple of hatches, I’m still dubious, but Maciel assured us it was true.

Meanwhile we were nymphing, which meant we were fishing flies that imitated the underwater life phase of mayflies, or caddis flies, or midges. As far as I can tell nymphs just imitate the ugly life stage of aquatic insects when they live underwater, and as flies go they’re relatively fungible. Dry fly anglers–anglers who might fish the mythical hexagenia hatches–talk endlessly about the specific insect and the specific life-phase that their fly is tied to imitate. Nymph fishermen seem to talk mostly about size (ranging from mighty small to ridiculously tiny) and color (the choice of which seems to be about as fickle as haute couture).

We were fishing two tiny weighted bead-headed nymphs below a swivel which was in turn below a bobber. At one point I did a rough measurement of the leader. Below the swivel the tippet was a long six feet designed to fish well below the surface of Fall Creek. Above the swivel there was a bit more than six feet of butt section. Neither the butt section nor the tippet was graduated, so the butt was something like one solid piece of 15 pound leader, and the tippet one solid piece of 6x fluorocarbon. I’ve rarely fished with a leader so specific to a place.

Maciel told us early that we wouldn’t really cast, we’d let the line touch the water behind us to create tension then then flop the flies ten feet in front of us, close to the boat. Theoretically that cast would reduce tangles by keeping everything open and in a line, but “reduce” is the key word in that sentence. All leaders I cast are prone to Gordian tangles, and once I get two flies involved then tangles are specifically required by my fishing licenses. According to Maciel the fish wouldn’t be particularly bothered by the boat, so the boat would be pretty close to our bobber. I know in my head that he was right, but both Kris and I cheated some with our casts. It’s hard not to believe in your heart of hearts that the water 30 feet away is oh-so-much-better than the water 10 feet away. Maciel was patient with us though, and he put us in position to fish, managed the boat to help with our drifts, adjusted our bobbers for depth, changed out our flies when he thought some new color was all the fashion, and untangled our tangles. He coached us through landing fish.

But truth is I am a terrible trout fisherman. The more I fish for trout, the more I realize how bad I am. The fly fishing things I’m actually moderately good at, casting fairly far, retrieving a streamer fly, and setting the hook with a strip set, the things I do all the time in saltwater and for bass, are largely–not completely but largely–useless in trout rivers. And the biggest problems I have in my usual fishing–keeping fish on the hook and releasing the fish–seem magnified.

Worse, because of the water clarity we were fishing with 6x tippet.

Size 6x tippet may take some explanation. Tippet is the final connection between the fly line and the fly, and 6x tippet is in fact a split hair. There are supposedly even smaller diameters of tippet, 7x and 8x, but I suspect anything smaller than 6x is a scam, and that all you’re actually buying is an empty spool. It makes sense sometimes to use 6x tippet, especially in spring creeks like the Fall. The leader should be harder for the fish to see, should let flies sink faster, should allow flies to drift more naturally, and should immediately break when you do something stupid. I guess that last part’s not a reason to fish it, but it’s certainly true. I caught two fish, and I probably broke off three, and all three were lost because I did something stupid. I held onto the line when the fish ran. My finger nudged the line when the fish ran. I breathed heavy when the fish ran.

Size 6x tippet has a diameter of .005 inches, and has a breaking strength of about 3 pounds. What I usually fish with, 16 pound tippet, has a diameter of .013 inches and a breaking strength of, well, 16 pounds. You can break size 6x tippet with just plain ol’ stupid, but 16 pound tippet takes really extraordinary stupid to break.((I can do that too, but not quite so often.)) Maciel would tell me how to land the fish, and then I’d go and do something different.

So I’m terrible at setting the hook with a trout set, I’m terrible at line management, I’m terrible at keeping the fish on the hook, and I’m terrible at releasing the fish if, by chance, I land it.

Still all that doesn’t really bother me. We were in a beautiful place. Maciel brought along great sandwiches from Ray’s Food Place grocery in Fall River Mills, and he coached us well. We watched barn swallow acrobatics over the water, and listened to red-winged blackbirds. We talked about hawks. We caught some fish and we lost some fish. It was lovely. Maciel and Kris made for good company, and the place was perfect. Fishing was exactly what it should be. I may not be much of a trout fisherman, but I’m pretty good at hanging out with trout.

  1. Mossy works contract with The Fly Shop and other Redding guide services, and also has his own guide service. His email is macielwolff@gmail.com or phone 831-278-2439, or contact The Fly Shop. [↩]
Posted on

Missouri Packing List

It’s been a few weeks and a trip to Cuba since we went to Missouri, but there are interesting things to add about Missouri, and by now the tornado is mostly forgotten.

Gear

We fished part of a day at Roaring River State Park. It’s a pretty Ozark mountain river, and it’s easy to wade. It was a bit crowded though. Why do I ever fish on a Saturday? Since Kris and I are both retired we don’t have to anymore, and having a place to ourselves is such a joy. Still, it was a pretty park, and we used typical trout set ups, 9′ 5-weight rods with floating lines. I caught two fish, both rainbow trout. We fished until the park trout permit pinned to my cap blew off and floated downriver.

The river is stocked from a nearby hatchery, and it was a mix of wild and stocked trout. For some folks stocked fish may seem like opportunity, but it’s always less desirable to fish for stocked fish than wild fish. I can’t usually catch much of either one, so I guess it’s not that one’s harder to catch than the other. Wild fish are just better.

I caught both trout on the Roaring River on a mop fly over a hare’s ear nymph, both fished under the surface. Mop flies are tied from one of those fuzzy mops, and are considered by some as a cheap trick. Don’t tell anyone that I used one.

I kinda like mop flies because you can get a lifetime supply of tying materials with a single trip to Walmart.

The next day we fished Crane Creek in Crane, Missouri, which is another pretty Ozark stream, and which is almost but not-quite famous. In the late 1800s, railroad workers dumped California McCloud River rainbow trout off of a railroad bridge into Crane Creek. Cane Creek hasn’t really been stocked much since, and the fish there today are the descendants of those original fish without significant interference. They may be the purest genetic strain of McCloud rainbows in the country, including those in the McCloud River.

Cane Creek

Stocking trout in rivers that support wild trout is controversial. It introduces non-native fish and diseases, and the stocked fish are just enough competition with the natives to hurt. The stockees don’t survive much either. The best-managed states, Montana for instance, have stopped stocking where there are wild trout, and a lot of the nation’s best rivers are never stocked. A creek that hasn’t been stocked, or a creek where stocking was abandoned, is a bit of a gem. That’s why a place like Crane Creek is someplace to look for.

We were there on a Sunday, and Crane Creek was also a little crowded, but I swear they were the nicest people I’ve ever come across on a river. We were at th park in the Town of Crane, population 1,495, and people invited me over to fish next to them. It was unnatural.

Crane Creek fish are small, and I fished with my tiniest rod. This is where I get goofy. Goofier. The truth is I buy fly rods and reels not because they’re better–almost every fly rod and reel is better than I am–but because they’re pretty. If I’m going to buy a reel, I don’t go in thinking that I want this reel because it has the very latest drag system and faster line retrieve, I buy it because I think it looks good. Of all the fly fishing gear I own–and I own a stupid amount of fly fishing gear–this is my prettiest rod and reel:

It’s an 8 1/2 foot Winston Boron IIIx 3-weight rod made in Montana, a rod that is way too lightweight for most of my fishing, and it’s just the loveliest shade of emerald green, with nickel silver fittings and a burled maple reel seat. The reel is a tiny Hardy Marquis 2/3 reel made in England. Are they appreciably better than any other 3-weight rod or reel? No. Could I have found a perfectly decent rod and reel for a third of the price? Absolutely. Are there any rods that look better? Well, maybe some custom classic bamboo. My goodness they’re pretty, and when the fish are small enough it just makes me idiotically happy to use them.

On Crane Creek I caught two small trout on a size 16 hare’s ear nymph under a size 14 royal Wulff, and Kris caught another. I picked the hare’s ear and royal Wulff because, well, they’re classic flies and I thought they matched that rod and reel. I’ve got standards, and I’m not fishing any mop flies with this rod.

Royal Wulff

Branson

I don’t like Branson. Am I being a snob? Of course. I have friends and family who love to go to Branson. I don’t.

There is a Trump Store, and there are shows.

I can’t think of anything worse than going to a show, unless it’s going to a Trump Store. You say the word show to me, and I feel queasy. Las Vegas? Oh lord, don’t make me go. I don’t gamble, and in Las Vegas there are shows. My daughter says the shopping is great in Las Vegas, but how can that be? I don’t think there’s a single fly fishing shop. Las Vegas at least has a minor league baseball team. I don’t think there’s any baseball in Branson.

The last show I went to voluntarily was Cirque de Soleil some 15 years ago, and I know those performers were miraculous, and that there are otherwise rational people who think that Cirque de Soleil is the best thing going. I know in my heart of hearts that that very show I went to was in all ways wonderful, but me? I was bored out of my mind. I’m still bored just thinking about it.

Maybe I need to go to a show with some mostly-naked ladies. At least I’d like the costumes.

In Branson, there are shows a-plenty, and what’s worse they’re all shows that revel in clean living. There’s Dolly Parton’s Stampede Dinner and Show, Hamners’ Unbelievable Magic Variety Show, WhoDunnit Hoedown and Murder Mystery Show, the Grand Jubilee Show, All Hands on Deck Show, Legends in Concert Show, Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Drama Show . . . The list just won’t stop. You think you’re on a river in the Ozark backcountry away from all the shows, and you come across a flier for the Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Show.

I’ve got nothing against clean living, and I consider myself a reasonably clean liver. I know and love several devout Baptists, and even some vegetarians, but clean living commodified into a show? I can’t think of a less appealing combination. Branson is one of those rare places where a soupçon of depravity would improve the moral tone.

I guess they do fish with mop flies, and plenty of people consider that depraved.

Donuts

We found two donut shops, though I’m sure there were more.

Parlor Doughnuts was a bit off the beaten path in a strip center. They sold gourmet donuts,((I’ve created a donut shop classification system, and there are four categories. Traditional shops include Houston’s Shipley’s, Krispy Kreme’s, Dunkin’, or the very best donut shop in the world, Ocean Springs, Mississippi’s Tato-Nut Doughnut Shop. Parlor Doughnuts is a chain in the Gourmet Category, and gourmet donuts are a bit more creative, with upscale whatnots coming to the fore. Portland’s Blue Star or Albuquerque’s Rebel come to mind. Experiential donut shops have let creativity run amock, and they are my least favorite kind of donut shop–I’m talking to you, VooDoo. A Cambodian donut shop is a clean, well-lighted place that is almost certainly located in a strip center. Everything is basic but good enough, and the owners are at the counter. Cambodian donutries can have flashes of brilliance–the boudin kolache was invented in a Cambodian donut shop and that deserves a Michelin star, or at least a James Beard nomination. It’s fusion cuisine at its finest.)) and the donuts were a bit elaborate for my taste, but I’d go back. I’d certainly go back if the choice was the other place we tried, Hurts.

Hurts is experiential. It’s next door to the Trump Store on the main drag, and it’s huge for a donut shop. There was a long line for the donuts. There were flavors like cotton candy, and cookie monster, and dirt worms, and every donut seemed created for a 9-year old, which I’m not. When I got to the counter, they were out of plain glazed.

The donuts were cold and forgettable. Kris wanted to chuck them and go back to Parlor.

AirBnB

We stayed in a nice pet-friendly AirBnB on the lake on the edge of town. It was just far enough from Branson’s center to forget where we were, and the owner left us a plate of cookies. They were good home-made cookies, too. There was an old canoe and a beat up bamboo fly rod hung as decorations above the fireplace, and I took that as a good omen. I sat on the enclosed porch and read Huck Finn, and, notwithstanding the No Trespassing signs, took the dogs for walks down to the lake. I’m pretty certain those signs weren’t meant for me.

Fly Shops

There are at least a couple of fly shops in Branson, but we only went to one, River Run Outfitters. We were supposed to fish with guides from the shop, but they talked us out of going. It was cold, in the 40s, and all the floodgates on the dam were open. The wind was gusting up to 40 mph. It was dangerous, and what’s worse we weren’t likely to catch anything. They gave us free coffee and good advice on where to fish instead. I bought some mop flies.

Restaurants

Branson is not a restaurant town. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of restaurants, but they all seem to have names like Hungry Hunter or Pickin’ Porch Grill. There are lots of barbecue places, but I’ve made the mistake of eating Missouri barbecue once before, in Kansas City, and I won’t do that again. Those people eat melted cheese on brisket, which should only be done in leftover brisket enchiladas.

The Keeter Center at College of the Ozarks promised farm to table dining, and I guess it was, but mostly everything just seemed big. Big room, big appetizers, big iced tea. . . Big ideology. I don’t know, it just didn’t click.

See that dish right there? That’s the Brussels sprout nachos appetizer, which as i recall was a lot of chopped up Brussels sprouts and feta on a lot of fried wontons. Had they artfully arranged four or five of those on a plate and charged me $12, I would have eaten them and said that’s ok, but that pile of stuff for $12 was too daunting. All I could think was man-oh-man, that’s big.

All of the waiters at Keeter Center are students at College of the Ozarks, and the hostess told us all about it, and then the waiter told us all about it. It’s a free Christian college, well, free in exchange for work. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have gone there without lots of conversations with a dean.

The next night we played it safe and went to two of Branson’s sushi joints, Mitsu Neko and Wakyoto. They were fine, and there were no Brussels sprouts. There was some kale, but I think it was purely decorative.

Playlist

Missouri has produced some magnificent music, and I’m still listening to that playlist. Josephine Baker was from St. Louis, and maybe I might have enjoyed one of her shows. From Wikipedia:

Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in [Paris]. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Now that’s a costume, and there are some fun recordings of her singing jazzy French stuff.

Missouri had great jazz. You wouldn’t think it, would you? But in the 1920s, Prohibition wasn’t really enforced there, and 18th and Vine in Kansas City was as lively as anyplace in the country. The Kansas City Big Bands had their own style, blusier than New York or Chicago, with a frantic quality that makes you drive just a little faster if your foot’s on the peddle. There are great black big bands, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee, Count Basie . . . Two of the great jazz saxophonists, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both came out of Kansas City.

There’s rock ‘n roll, too. Big Joe Turner is a joy, then there’s Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Michael McDonald, and T Bone Burnett. The Beatles went to Kansas City, or at least they were going.

St. Louis Blues has been covered by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Prima, Doc Watson, Herbie Hancock, Eartha Kitt, Art Tatum, and Ella Fitzgerald, and if your name is Louis, you can still meet Judy Garland there.

Ojon Mill, Photograph of Lester Young, 1944, Time Magazine, Volume 17, Number 13, Public Domain.

Guitar

I took my old Kohno classical, and spent some time at night playing. I don’t remember what, but I’ve been working on an arrangement of Gershwin’s Somebody Loves Me. That’s likely.

Posted on

Missouri

On Monday we decided that on Friday we’d drive to Missouri, to Branson. That’s a short turnaround, but I’ve been to Missouri plenty. My Grandmother Eva–not that Grandmother Eva, the other Grandmother Eva–was born in Missouri, in Osgood near the Iowa border, in 1890. When I was five or six, circa 1963, we took her home from Texas to see her siblings. We stayed with one of her sisters, and while the house may have had electricity, it didn’t have indoor plumbing. There was a pump in the yard for water and an outhouse for other sundry stuff. It was on a gravel country road, and at night I saw fireflies for the first time. It was wonderful.

I’ve been to Missouri some since, enough to know that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is as pretty as MLB stadiums get (though I don’t recommend it in August), and that the riverfront town of Hannibal has seen better days. I’ve been to Missouri enough to know that while any Texan would tell you that Missouri barbecue is mediocre stuff, the sandwiches at Gioia’s Deli on The Hill are worth the effort. On The Hill you can still imagine Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra as children in the neighborhood’s heyday. Not so much Mark Twain and Hannibal.

Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City, 2015.

There are good fishing rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, and if we were being intellectually honest we would target native Missouri smallmouth, but we haven’t fished for trout in a while, and there are plenty of Missouri rivers stocked at one time or another with trout. In Branson there is the Ozarks’ White River at the Taneycomo Lake dam. One Missouri spring creek near Branson, Crane Creek, claims the purest strain of McCloud River redband trout in the world. They were stocked in the 1880s from eggs imported from California and supposedly dumped off a bridge by railroaders.

Records are a bit sketchy, but Crane Creek has been stocked no more recently than the 1920s. Because it was the site of the second national fish hatchery, the McCloud River redband was the original source of most of the stocked rainbow in the world. Only in Crane Creek does the original strain remain unmixed with other rainbow subspecies.

By all reports the Crane Creek trout are small, skittish, and hard to catch. The stream is narrow and overgrown, and there’s poison ivy and water moccasins. Of course that last is likely overblown, and there are more likely a lot of non-venomous northern water snakes and maybe some moccasins. It is a herpetologist’s truism that everybody thinks that every water snake is a vicious, vindictive, or aggressive cottonmouth, but they aren’t more vicious, vindictive, and aggressive than most of us, and most of the snakes you see in the water aren’t moccasins.

Anyway, it sounds like we have to fish Crane Creek.

I’ve been looking at Missouri rivers for a while, thinking we would avoid Branson. We could do it, but Branson is convenient. It’s a strange place, a tourist destination that is a distant cousin to Nashville. It is a vacation destination for devout Southern and Midwestern protestants, seemingly devoted to clean living, family entertainment, golf, lakeside condos, and fatty foods. There is fishing though, and a good fly shop. It’s about a 10-hour drive from Houston. We can take the dogs, and coming home we can spend the night in Bentonville, Arkansas. Branson eateries tend towards family entertainment and national chains. Bentonville, as the business hub of Walmart, has better places to eat.

A short note on pronunciation

Apparently there’s no correct pronunciation of Missouri. The most common pronunciations are either Missour-ee or Missour-uh, but neither is incorrect, and they aren’t even the only ones. I grew up with Missour-uh, and long assumed that since I had some Missour-uh ancestry my pronunciation must be correct, but no. Still, it’s not wrong either. Oddly, how you say Missouri isn’t governed by education, wealth, race, or even geography. It’s not a South versus Midwest thing. It’s just the luck of the draw or maybe personal taste. Some Missourans say Missour-uh, some Missour-ee, and some go back and forth between them. All things should be so accommodating.

The Missouri Compromise

The U.S. acquired Missouri in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and St. Louis became the jumping-off point for a big part of western expansion. In 1821 it became a state under the Missouri Compromise: to maintain political balance, Maine entered the Union as a Free State, while Missouri entered as a Slave State. After the admission of Missouri, no new territory north of the 36°30′ parallel could enter the Union as a slave state.

undefined

Julio Reis, Map of the United States c. 1849 (modern state borders), with the parallel 36°30′ north, Wikipedia, 2009.

The state lines in the map above are mostly modern boundaries. West Virginia wouldn’t exist until the Civil War. None of the grey states existed, except California. It’s the green line, the extension of the Mason-Dixon Line along 36°30′ that purportedly controlled American expansion for the next 30 years. See that far north border of Texas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle? The Oklahoma Panhandle was originally claimed by Texas, but when Texas entered the Union in 1845, that northern bit was above the line. To preserve the Missouri Compromise, it was cut off and left as part of the Indian Territory.

After the Missouri Compromise, there was a push among Southern slaveholding states to annex Cuba as a Slave State, to maintain Southern legislative power. It wasn’t going to happen. Cuba was valuable to Spain, and there was no real interest in annexation among most Cubans, but it’s amusing to guess whether Governor Fidel would have been a Republican or a Democrat.

The Missouri Compromise lasted until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 provided that Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as slave or free based on the votes of Kansas or Nebraska settlers. The seemingly sensible resolution threw the now-raging national slave debate into armed war. Abolitionists came to Kansas from the north, and pro-slavery Border Ruffians raided into Kansas from Missouri, and all of them brought convictions, guns, and knives. John Brown got his bones in Bloody Kansas. Kansas finally voted to enter the Union as a free state, but allowing popular local vote to determine only made the Civil War inevitable.

In 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court determined that African Americans could not be citizens, that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in its territories, and for good measure that the already superseded Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

Reynolds's Political Map of the United States 1856.jpg

New York: Wm. C. Reynolds and J. C. Jones – “Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States” (1856) from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Population and Demographics

In 1820, the 66,586 population of Missouri was .6% of the nation’s total population. By 1920, Missouri’s 3,404,055 population was a biggly 3% of the total. St. Louis was the 6th largest city in the U.S., and had two major league baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles). Kansas City was 19th. By 2020, the St. Louis metropolitan statistical area, with a population of 2,820,253, was ranked 21st. Kansas City, with 2,192,035, was 31st.

In 2020, the total Missouri population of 6,154,913 was .1% of the total U.S. population of 329.5 million. It had gone from .6% in 1820, to 3% in 1920, to .1% in 1920. Missouri still had two major league baseball teams, though one was now the Kansas City Royals. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2020. They won again this year.

Missouri’s national importance was driven in part by Mississippi River trade and Westward Expansion, and with the decline of both, the its national importance also declined. Still, Missouri is where the South and the Midwest meet, in the same way that Texas is where the South and the Southwest meet. It is a black/white population, with heavy emphasis on white. Approximately 82% of Missourians are white, with less than 5% of that population Hispanic.

About 12% of the Missouri population is black, mostly centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, and in a stretch of southeastern counties along the Mississippi River, an apparent extension of the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. That delta population is likely a remnant of slavery, and the population growth in St. Louis and Kansas City was fueled by the Great Migration, both from the South and from less populated areas in Missouri. Hannibal, for instance was 14.5% black in 1900, but only 6.1% by 2020. Conversely, St. Louis was 6.1% black in 1900, but by 2020 the greater St Louis area was 17% black.

Satchel Paige, Untitled Photo, between 1935 and 1942, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

It’s worth noting that Kansas City became an African American cultural Mecca, being, along with New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, a major jazz hub. Count Basie was from Kansas City. So was Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, and Charlie Parker. It was also the home of the Kansas City Monarchs, perhaps one of the greatest baseball conglomerations ever. Jackie Robinson jumped from the Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige played for the Monarchs, and so did Cool Papa Bell, Turkey Stearns, Wilbur Rogan, and Buck O’Neil.

Lester Young by Ojon Mili. Time Inc. – Life magazine, Volume 17, Number 13 (page 40), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44359804

The American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and are worth a special trip. And did I mention that Kauffman Stadium is one of the finest stadiums in Major League Baseball? It’s just too bad that Kansas City Barbecue isn’t better.

Of course Mark Twain is from Missouri, and T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou.

Politics

Both U.S. Senators from Missouri and four of the six Representatives are Republican. All of the six statewide elected officials, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer, and attorney general, are Republican, and there are sizable Republican majorities in the state senate and house of representatives.

In 2020, Donald Trump carried the state by 56.80% of the vote, compared to Joe Biden’s 41.41%. Biden carried only Boone, Jackson, and St. Louis Counties. Jackson is Kansas City, St. Louis is, well, St. Louis, and Boone, in the middle of the state, is Columbia, home of the University of Missouri. Like other states, less-populated areas vote Republican, urban centers and college towns vote Democratic.

2020 presidential election, Missouri, By KyleReese64 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95975673

Geography

Missouri is divided into three major geographic regions, the Ozark Highlands, the Northern Plains, and the Coastal Alluvial Plain. No mysteries here. The Northern Plains are rolling, and you can grow corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn, and corn. There are lots of streams. It’s Iowa just a wee bit south of Iowa.

The smallest region, the southeast Coastal Alluvial Plain, is an extension of the Arkansas Delta, which is just like the Mississippi Delta but west of the Mississippi. It’s flat, wet, and a good place to grow rice, and cotton. Of course cotton.

The Ozarks are the Ozarks. They extend into Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s a dome, cut into topography by erosion, faults, bluffs, rivers, and streams. It’s beautiful, dramatic country.

On the state’s eastern border there’s the Mississippi River. Cutting across the center of the state, roughly along the line that divides the Plains and the Ozarks, is the Missouri River. The Missouri meets the Mississippi at St. Louis.

Mark Twain’s Confederate Service

Mark Twain served as a Confederate militia lieutenant in Missouri, and he deserted after two weeks. Twain scholars have suggested that his desertion didn’t evidence opposition to the Confederacy, as much as concern as to the likely outcome of militia service in what was substantially Union-controlled territory. It’s pretty likely that Twain was dedicated to the South, and that his later reevaluation of the South and its cause was a principal source of his satirical brilliance. It’s hard to imagine Huck Finn written by someone who didn’t distrust most people’s pronouncements, including from time to time his own.

Osgood, Missouri, 2021.