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Show Trout Fishing on the Utah Frontier I Lm ON THB WESTERN FRONTIER WAS o mA S TRUGGLE for survival, but recreation was important in frontier life as well. So it was that many Utah pioneers turned to trout fishing: it was fun, and it put food on the table. Trout to Utah pioneers meant the cutthroat trout, the native trout of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin, which they called ' speck1ed" or ' spotted" trout. All of those names describe this beautiful fish well. The spots noted by the pioneers cover the olive- green back and become more concentrated toward the tail, while the ' cut throat" refers to two scarlet stripes under the gills. Colors along the sides vary according to the many subspecies: the gill plates are hues of pink, orange, or lavender, and the sides silver to golden brown. Utah even had its own subspecies not found anywha else. It lived in great numbers in Utah Lake and its feeder streams but is probably extinct today. Trout fishing in Utah preceded white settlement by a thousand years or more, for archaeol-ogists have found evidence of fish use by the Sevier- Fremont Culture ( A. D. 800- 1300). All of the Indians encountered by the early white explorers and settlers depended heavily upon trout for food whenever they were in the vicinity of trout- bearing streams or lakes. Trout fishing by the Indians was not, by the white man's standards, a sporting proposition. The fish were plentifhl enough that they could be speared or netted from boats along lake shores or trapped in willow baskets called weirs, which were placed across streams. A more sporting approach to trout fishing came to Utah with the very first party of Mormon settlers. Wilford Woodruff was a Connecticut Yankee who joined the Mormon church and was sent on a mission to England. During leisure hours he found himself being converted- to the English technique of fishing with artificial flies. When he returned, he brought with him an English- style cane rod and an assortment of trout flies. Before reaching Utah, the Mormon advance party under Brigham Young, of which Woodruff was a part, stopped over for a rest at Fort Bridger, Wyoming. After some of the men had attempted unsuccessfully to catch trout, Woodruff got out his fly rod and proceeded to catch all the trout he wuld carry. That evening he triumphant-ly recorded in his diary that he had clearly demonstrated the superiority of the artificial fly. Most of the other pioneers, though, were more concerned with putting food on the table than with the ethics of their fishing techniques. In other words, they caught their fish any way they could. Parley P. Pratt, who explored much of central and southern Utah in 1849, reported catching trout in their shallow spawning beds by simply flipping them out on the ground. Others borrowed their fishing techniques from the Indians. In 1854 George A. Smith wrote of a trip where three of his fiends ' amused themselves by fishing in the Provo, and caught some splendid trout, Brother ( more) THE HISTORY BLAZER ArEItrS OF UTAH'S PAST FROM THE Utah State Historical Society 300 Rio Grade Salt Lake City. LTT 84101 ( 801) 533- 3500 FAX ( 801) 533- 3303 Porter kindly furnishing the net." Trout were plentiful enough in Utah, even late in the nineteenth century, that almost anyone owld catch them. Some, like George A. Bird, who wrote the following humorous account, felt uneasy about the lack of sportsmanship. After a trip to Fish Lake in 1888, Bid wrote that he ' visited the lake early in the spring to capture some of the celebrated trout, I was in company with a friend, and landed between fifty and sixty pounds. The mode of capture is to get quietly below the fish, at about daylight in the morning, as they wriggle up the steep shallow creek to spawn, and armed with a club, strike them just behind the ears, and the fish is yours." One has to have sharp eyes to spot a trout's ears! Bird continued in a less humorous vein: ' I must acknowledge that I felt some compunctions at this mode of slaughter, for no true disciple of ' Isaac Walton' would stoop to such unskilled barbarity. But my friend had been there before, and told me to wade in, which I did. But even now, as my mind reflects upon the slaughter of those ' speckled beauties,' conscience convicts me, as a piscatorial assassin. But then, I never wuld ' catch them on the fly.'" Reports of trout catches numbering in the hundreds are common in historical reoords fhm mid- 19th- century Utah, and it is obvious that no stream or lake could long withstand fishing pressure of that kind. But fishermen were not the only enemies of the speckled trout. The cutthroat requires purer, wlder water than most other fish, including other species of trout. The pollution of streams by agriculture and livestock, along with the general warming of the water caused by timber removal, made it impossib1e for cutthroats to survive in most streams near civilization. Consequently, within the brief period of 30 years after the amval of the fist settlers, one finds complaints of trout depletion. Well before the end of the 19th century, local laws established fishing seasons and bag limits, and restocking programs had been started. Both failed to prevent the virtual disappearance of the cutthroat trout from settled areas. In 1891 Garfield County prohibited fishing in Panguitch Lab from Febrwry 15 to June 15 in an attempt to protect the trout during their spawning season, but members of the Bear Lake Stake of the Momon church had already found that such laws were difficult to enforce. Their president had announced in 1886 that ' it is altogether wrong for people to fish contrary to law, " indicating that the game laws were poorly obeyed. Restocking programs were equally ineffwtive. The cutthroat is relatively difficult to aise in captivity, so most restocking was done with rainbow or brown trout, or with other types of fish. And the cutthroat breeds readily with the rainbow, so most of those not driven out of settled areas were hybridized out of existence. Cutthroats are still available in Utah, even though they are embattled by civilization. They live for the most part in high mountain lakes and streams where Wilford Woodruffs technique is often the best way to catch them. Those who pursue them are led by a promise of something uniquely wild and beautiful- and a piece of living Utah history. See Gury Topping, " Trout Fishing on the Utab Frontier," Beehiw History 9 ( 1983). HISTORY BUZER is produced by the Utah State Historical Society and hded in part by a grant h m the Utah Stptebood Centennial Cornmission. For mae infomution about the Historical Society telephone 533- 3500. 951115 ( GT) |
