The Game Fish, of the Northern States and British Provinces / With an account of the salmon and sea-trout fishing of Canada and New Brunswick, together with simple directions for tying artificial flies, etc., etc.

by Robert Barnwell Roosevelt

The finest worms are to be found in tanyards; they should be placed on the top of damp moss, left for a night or two to work themselves clean, and then placed in other moss sprinkled with milk. They become strong, light colored and lively, and should be threaded on a fine hook by passing the point in at the head of the worm and out half-way down the side; then in, half up the side of another, and forced nearly to the head. Worms, if cast as in fly-fishing, are very attractive, and will frequently kill an immense number of fish. There is much skill in casting so as not to tear off the bait, and yet to cover an extent of water.

In rapid streams, whether with bait or fly, always fish down stream; there is less noise, the line is kept taught, the fly looks more natural, and unless the wind is strong against you, it will be much easier and pleasanter fishing. Move the bait continually; keep it in motion under all circumstances; this is the great secret of bait-fishing.

I have also heard of shrimp preserved in whisky being used, and think they might answer for fish that have just run from the salt water; but as frequent experiment with the live shrimp has proved their inferiority to minnow, I have little faith in them.

The trout is admitted to be the most beautiful of all our fish; not so large nor powerful as the salmon, he is much more numerous, abounding in all the brooks and rivulets of our northern States. He lives at our very doors; in the stream that meanders across yon meadow, where the haymakers are now busy with their scythes, we have taken him in our early days; down yonder in that wood, there is a brook filled with bright, lively little fellows; and away over there we know of pools where there are splendid ones. Who has not said or thought such words as he stood in the bright summer’s day under the grateful shade of the piazza running round the old country house where he played, a boy?

He does not make the nerves thrill and tingle like the salmon, he does not leap so madly into the air nor make such fierce, resolute rushes, he has not the silver sides nor the great strength; but he is beautiful as the sunset sky, brave as bravery itself, and is our own home darling. How he flashes upon the sight as he grasps the spurious insect, and turns down with a quick little slap of the tail! How he darts hither and thither when he finds he is hooked! How persistently he struggles till enveloped in the net! And then with what heart-rending sighs he breathes away his life!

There is no fish like him. Lay your prize on a bed of moss, which is his natural resting-place; look at the exquisite hues like shotten silk, the dark spots, the carmine specks, the single first white ray in his fins, and the rich red of the second extending to the lower edge of the abdomen; the greenish-mottled back, the silver below—what a picture for the painter, if his brush could catch the evanescent tints. How proudly and fondly we gaze on our beautiful prize, not with the mere rude, brutal pride in securing so much booty, such a sum in money value, or a delightful dish for the table, but with an affectation that is hard to explain to those who are not anglers. The sportsman is more fond of the game he pursues and more anxious to preserve it from destruction than the most pretentious humanitarian of animal worshippers. The angler is proverbially the most gentle of men, he is fond of nature, peaceable, contemplative, patient; he admires the grandeur of the woods, the rugged strength of the rocks, and the changing splendor of the sky. He listens with pleasure to the murmur of the brook, the songs of the birds, and the rustle of the wind.

The man who kills to kill, who is not satisfied with reasonable sport, who slays unfairly or out of season, who adds one wanton pang, that man receives the contempt of all good sportsmen and deserves the felon’s doom. Of such there are but few.

“We seek this, our favorite fish, in early Spring, when the ice has just melted, and the cold winds remind one forcibly of bleak December, and when we find him in the salt water streams, especially of Long Island and Cape Cod; but we love most to follow him in the early Summer, along the merry streams of old Orange, or the mountain brooks of Sullivan County. Where the air is full of gladness, and the trees are heavy with foliage—where the birds are singing upon every bough, and the grass is redolent of violets and early flowers. There we wade the cold brooks, the leafy branches bowing us a welcome as we pass—the water rippling over the hidden rocks, and telling us, in its wayward way, of the fine fish it carries in its bosom. With creel upon our shoulder and rod in hand, we reck not of the hours, and only when the sinking sun warns of the approaching darkness, do we seek, with sharpened appetite, the hospitable country inn, and the comfortable supper that our prey will furnish forth.

The brooks of Long Island, especially on the southern shore, abound with trout. But they are few in comparison with the hordes that once swarmed in the streams of Sullivan and Orange counties, and in fact all the lower tier of counties in this State, before the Erie Railroad was built, and opened the land to the crowd of market men. I am proud to say I have travelled that country when it took the stage coach twelve hours to go twenty-four miles, and when, if we were in a hurry, we walked, and sent our baggage by the coach. Now you are jerked along high above our favorite meadows, directly through our wildest hills, and often under our best streams, at the rate of forty miles an hour, and yet people call that an improvement. As well might you lug a man out of bed at night, drag him a dozen times round his room, and fling him back into bed, and say he was improved by the operation. No one wants to be lugged out of bed, precisely as no one wanted to travel beyond Sullivan County; the best shooting and fishing in the world was to be found there.

When the railroad was first opened, the country was literally overrun, and Bashe’s Kill, Pine Kill, the Sandberg, the Mon Gaup and Callicoon, and even Beaver Kill, which we thought were inexhaustible, were fished out. For many years trout had almost ceased from out of the waters, but the horrible public, having their attention drawn to the Adirondacks, gave it a little rest, and now the fishing is good.