The Saint Paul globe., August 07, 1904, Image 1

About The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905

Image provided by: Minnesota Historical Society; Saint Paul, MN

                
UNLIKE the automobilist, the<
golfer, the lawn-tennis man
or even the yachtsman, the
angler must follow his" pur
suit in loneliness. Fish don't grow
amidst crowds. Therefore the non
fishing world does not begin to realize
how big a sport it has grown to be—
numbering more adherents than auto
mobiling and golf and yachting put
together.
And with aIL this growth no new
countries have been opened to the
angler. To-day, as it was when an
gling first became important enough
to have its rules and literature, the
only fishing countries that hold stand
ard game fish are the lands of the
northwest of Europe and the conti
nent of North America, meaning pri
marily the United States.
With the exception of the grand
salmon streams of Scotland, northern
England, Ireland and Norway, the
fishing of Europe is growing less, even
in spite of the rigorous fish laws that
make it as much a crime to poach a
fish as to knock down a man and rob
him of his purse.
The trout of the Thames has be
come a memory, perpetuated only by
ghastly plaster casts in fishing inns
and by annual rumors of the presence
of a monstrous survivor in one of the
upper pools. Izaak Walton's Itchen
has more fingerlings than "good fish
if I can only hold him." The great
fifty and sixty pound pike of merry
England has vanished with the mail
coach, and a ten-pound fish is worthy
nowadays of honorable mention. The
brook trout is becoming more and
more hybridized with the brown trout
in the effort to keep up a supply.
Germany, which was the English
angler's paradise once, when every
clear, cold fountain-head of river was
alive with leaping beauties of crimson
brook trout, is replacing these game
creatures more and more by the com
mercially valuable brown trout—big,
gluttonous and sluggish. Germans are
only just beginning to learn angling.
The rod and reel still interests sports
men there as novelties. Germans go
abroad with nets to draw in trout
and pike and never dream that it is
anything but excellent and pure sport.
Now the German is learning, but it
is probable that long before he ar
rives as a nation at the art of fly
fishing, the fishes that take the fly
properly will be extinct in his land—
replaced by commercial varieties.
Fish culture in Germany, though it
has advanced to a wonderful grade
of efficiency, does not consider sport.
It is all done for the increase of mar
ketable fish.
The Frenchman, who fishes with
rod and line more than the German
does, is not a true angler either. In
deed, the only true sportsmen-fisher
men in the world are the English
speaking people and the North
American Indians.
Malays. South Sea Islanders, Ha
waiians, Chinese and other Asiatics
fish, but we angle. Africans can't even
fish. South Americans kill their fish
with bows and arrows. We and the
"Injun" are the only artists—going
abroad with artist's too-ls, built ex
quisitely from bark canoe to gaff
hook, to find and lure and land the
good fi>h.
And since we are the only simon
pure article in sportsmen-fishers, our
fish culture, although carefully cal
culated to enrich the country commer
cially, is permeated by the red blood
of sportsmanship. The burly brown
trout is proscribed by State and Fed
eral authorities in almost all places
where he might interfere with My
Lord, the Salmo Fontinalis. There
is loud outcry almost everywhere
against the carp, great in girth, easy
to fear, profitable to sell, for the carp
ats the spawn of game fish. Our
streams and lakes are becoming
Edens sacred to the best of the leap
ing fighters — spotted, square-tail
trout, small-mouth black bass and
the royal'master of all the pikes, the
maskinonge.
Ever, as the game fishes of old Eu
rope dwindle in numbers, breed or
size ours grow. Soon we will actual
ly nave more good fishing in the
United States than there was when it
was a wilderness. By the time the
German and the Frenchman have be
come a nation of anglers for whom no
fish is good unless he shows himself
when he is hooked, fighting with shak
ing head and snapping jaws in mid
ar as well as in the water, they will
have to seek the United States for
their sport, just as the English do
now. There isn't a single steamship
from the other side nowadays that
doesn't bring at least one English
man who has journeyed westward
with the one purpose of fishing tor
\merican ouananiche, sea trout, brook
trout, black bass or lunge.
Uncle Sam is hatching them out for
all comers by the million. In the
ST. PAUL GLOBE.
THE WORLD'S FISH COUNTRY
MAGAZIN£j^&6TI^i
SUNDAY, AUGUST 7, 1904.
persons of many thousand employees,
ranging in grade from college pro
fessors to net-haulers, he sits in for
ty-six hatcheries, scattered from
Maine to Southern California, and
rears the dainty things from trans
parent globules of eggs to fingerling
size, when they are sent darting and
jumping into the streams.
In the past eleven years the United
States hatcheries have distributed
more than nine billions of eggs, fin
gerlings, yearlings and adult fish. Of
these, 337,000,000 were salmon. There
were 30,000,000 of brook trout, and
also as many millions of the other
varieties, such as rainbow, cutthroat,
Loch Leven and golden trout. Al
most two millions were the young
of that crimson-eyed, dauntless fighter,
the small-mouth black bass, who is
so brave that it is lucky he doesn't
reach the weight of a tarpon, for
if he did he would eat up the boat of
the angler who hooks him.
So now a man can go into the for
ests of Maine and "lam it into" the
great toque, with a record of thirty
two pounds, or the speckled trout
that run ten pounds and more in
weight. He can go to New Hamp
shire and fish for the Sunapee Lake
trout, the saibling, whose weight ri
vals that of the Maine trout.
Everywhere along the tier of the
northern States trout in a dozen game
varieties rise in pools and eddies.
And from the far north to the south,
where the waters are too warm for
trout, the black bass leaps savagely
at fly, spoon or bait, from Florida
where the large mouth grows to be
fifteen and more pounds in weight
to the cold lake waters where the
small mouth reaches five and more
pounds in size, and every ounce the
ounce of a warrior.
But the king of all in size—and
the most tempting of all fishes except
the salmon to the foreign angler on
that account —is that truly and unique
ly and exclusively American fish, Lu
cius Masquinongy, the maskinonge,
muscallonge, mascalonge, muski
nonge, muskellunge, or what else they
may name him in his thousands of
miles of water-home.
He is the Indian fish—the great
pike that Hiawatha caught. His pur-"
suit is fraught with that dark, almost'
apprehensive uncertainty that comes
from fishing in black waters for things
of unknown size. The maskinonge
that comes to the hook may turn out
to be fifteen pounds heavy, and he
may turn out to weigh seventy or
even eighty. There is never a swarthy
Indian of lake and forest in maski
nonge land who will not have a tale
to tell of a maskinonge that weighed
an even hundred.
The fish that come to hook every
day, if they do not weigh that, weigh
enough in all conscience, for forty
pounders are common, and enough
sixty-pounders are caught every sea
son to establish that as a veracious
maximum weight.
That fifteen or forty or sixty
pounds of weight is lust and muscle
and ferocity and deadly fear in one
long, snakey, quivering bundle from
! the big tail to the crocodilian snout.
The feathered hook with the cop
per spoon, trolled behind the silent
canoe, goes jumping across the lake
or glitters in the air, with an olive
barred streak behind it. The snakey
shape flashes through the air and
flashes back into the water almost
in the moment that it takes to carry
the message "a fish!" from the hand
and eye of the angler to his brain.
And before the bubbles cease ascend
ing where the fignter vanished, a pair
of lean, tooth-fringed jaws protrude
again, and out comes a wicked head,
shaken from side to side as a terrier
shakes a rat. That is the time the
spoon is tested. If it holds, the
maskinonge begins his water and
aerial tumbling, for which he has been
famous ever since the first Indian
caugjit the first maskinonge with the
first bone hook dressed with feather 1
and deer hair.
The black bass holds the .top. line
in the mysterious scale of excellences
into which the sportsman-fisherman
separates the game fishes. But oh!
for the broken- water, a dashing ca
noe running almost gunwales under,
a silent, magnificent, dirty Indian in
the stern, and a maskinonge of parts
and weight tearing away in front of
the bow, ripping the waters exactly as
a buzz-saw rips through a plank. Men
have been frightened enough by that
tearing flight to drop the rod. Fasten
ed to the end of a hand line, a good
maskinonge will turn a canoe and
move it through the water at no slow
gait. '
Ho'bked in broken water, under a
waterfall, with rapids below, he will
show the angler that he is well named
indeed when he is called the shark
of fresh water.
And when he is forced near the boat
at last, he meets an end worthy of
his ferocious appearance. The mas
kinonge fishers carry a chunk of wood
instead of a gaff-hook. They call it
the headache stick, and when the
lunge is alongside, down it comes on
his flat skull with all the power of a
supple forearm. Then it is "give him
line," for the stricken lunge goes into
a flurry like a whale, speeding off
in a great circle and putting up one
last wildly desoerate fight before he
can be boated.