Fishing…How it has Become Our Greatest Sport Part 1

Americans who went fishing in early Colonial times were confirmed believers in the old Indian adage, "The best way to catch fish is to catch fish." Needing fish for food, they didn't care how they got them. Scoop net, seine, jack light, fish trap, hook and line - they used whatever method was most likely to produce the biggest catch in the least time.

But some of them, now and then, would wander off to the nearest stream, cut and trim a sapling, tie a fish-line to its tip, bait the hook with a worm or a maggot, and fish more for the fun of it than for what they caught. They were our first sport fishermen.

Their number increased rapidly as the settlements grew and the stark struggle for survival let up a bit; and long before Paul Revere took his midnight ride - fishing had become the most widely popular of American outdoor pastimes.
It's still the favorite, by the way.

Spectator sports (ball games, racing, and so on) draw huge crowds, but most of the onlookers are repeaters who are counted over and again in the attendance records. In contrast, add to the nearly 91 million fresh-water license holders the millions who don't need licenses to wet a line – children under 18, women in many states and senior citizen generally - and you have an estimated 100 million participants, who spend around 10 billion dollars a year on their sport. Only hunting can ever approach that record!

But to get back to the early days:

Trout were the fresh-water favorites although south of the Potomac the fish called by that name usually were black bass, which weren't given scientific recognition-as a distinct species until 1802. North of the Potomac, or in the mountains south of it, "trout" meant the native brookie. From Nova Scotia southward to Georgia, fast-running streams -cool, crystal-clear, untainted by man's pollution-teemed with these succulent, beautiful game fish.

In addition, the rivers from the St. Lawrence to the Connecticut had big annual runs of Atlantic salmon, and most of them from the St. John in New Brunswick to the St. Johns in Florida had runs of shad-netted in such quantities that sometimes they were sold by the wagonload for fertilizer. Myriads of black bass leaped in the streams and bayous of the South. Immense schools of bluefish, striped bass, weakfish, and other salt-water game fish thronged the bays, and only the inept came home empty-handed.

We can't help envying those old-timers the fishing they could enjoy almost at their doorsteps, but no present day angler would be tempted to break the Tenth Commandment by coveting the tackle they had to use. Its purpose was to yank the fish out of the water, not to give the fisherman a chance to use his skill. The first step in that direction came when the peeled sapling was displaced by a tapered natural cane or reed pole, with the line tied to its tip and wound around it when not in use - a rig we still use today in the South.

Then came the crude rod with wire line guides and a small wooden "wheel," with a frame and handle devised by the local tinsmith, lashed to the butt. More often than not this reel was a thread spool the angler snitched from his wife's workbasket - which is why some Kentuckians still call a reel a "spool."

Long before the colonies got a powder-and-shot divorce from England's King George III thousands of Americans in every walk of life had become sport fishermen, and a small tackle industry had grown up. About halfway through the 1100's, fly fishing for salmon and trout became popular among British landowners, and a few wealthy Americans who visited England brought fly tackle home with them. The rods were long and heavy, but they were a big improvement over ours. American tackle makers copied them, and also adapted them to live-bait fishing and trolling.

The sportiest copies - shaped out of a single piece of red cedar - were whippy and comparatively light, but so weak that only an expert could play a decent size trout without serious risk of breakage. The better lines were of twisted horsehair or silk; the cheaper ones of hemp, flax, or cotton. Silkworm gut was used for leaders, and flies either were imported or copied from English patterns.

President George Washington set his fellow citizens of the new U.S.A. a good example by going fishing. He wasn't a fly caster, but catching striped bass rockfish to him - from a punt anchored on the Potomac River off his home at Mount Vernon was one of his favorite diversions. (More than half of our Presidents, by the way, have been fishermen, and at least three - Cleveland, Hoover, and F. D. Roosevelt - rate as experts.)