 All right. Well, I'm pleased to be here. My name is James Thule, and I'm the Trout and Salmonnard librarian here at MSU and I'm pleased to be able to be here tonight and introduce our 2023 Trout and Salmonnard lecturer, Jen Brown. I've known Jen since meeting here. We're just talking about this and we're not sure whether we met at a wild trout conference or whether we met when she was doing research for her dissertation or master's in specials, but I stay here that we met during when she was up in special doing research So that's what I'm gonna stick with For her book for her dissertation which eventually became her book trout culture how fly fishing forever changed Rocky Mountain West Which is a great read for those of you who haven't read it. I I highly suggest it Jen's been a great friend of the library and a great friend of the University She participated in our oral history project, which was wonderful and had some great and interesting answers to some of the questions And she also helped me coordinate on one of the projects that we did around Montana stream access laws Which was wonderful. She knew a lot of the players involved so we Traveled down and we're able to interview a lot of folks that sort of directly involved our stream access laws and getting Those instituted here in the state, which are some of the best in the country. They really give us Access to our waters. It is kind of unprecedented. It's really wonderful And what was great about that project is a lot of those people have passed since not great that they passed, but it's great that we Collected their stories and preserved those prior to that Jen is here tonight as our lecturer, but in a larger sense She's really here because the MSc library chose to create the world's largest most Comprehensive comprehensive collection of resources on try to sell monitors in the world None of this lecture collections, etc. Would be possible without the generosity generosity of our donors both big and small Who have really helped us make this collection and do things like the oral history project provide this lecture all those type of Good things so that's been wonderful Jen is a great example of why we created this collection We wanted to be the world's most complete wine-ranging resource for all sorts of research Related to these amazing species of fish We wanted to help researchers like her to discover new fit new Information interpret existing data and create new research that helps to guide our collective decisions on fisheries So can make sure they're still available to those that will come after us What we do is is essentially help preserve information from past and the present that in any way relates to try to sell monitors You've heard the phrase those who forget the past are bound to repeat it Archives exist so that we as a society don't forget the past so that we at least have that information Available so that we don't forget the mistakes or discuss successes that we've had And then we can learn from history We've got an amazing collection of material. We've got everything from books on fly tying to poetry game laws a day back over 500 years and yes 500 years So we do have books that have been sitting on somebody's bookshelf for five centuries And if you come in for a tour, I will let you hold that in your hands So I encourage any of you who'd like to come in for a tour. We've got some really cool stuff some great books some Some great archival collections and some really cool things that you can check out and in special Let's see so we've also done things like our our collecting our archives so our Manuscript collections, and we have some wonderful one of those Tom's Wayne's papers a k best But Lily but was instrumental in getting this collection started his son Chris is with us somewhere tonight There he is so I know many ways this collection would not exist without Bruce Morton one of our former deans and Bod really get in this going and get in the donors line to help us create this collection and Collaborate these resources. I mentioned the oral history project earlier. We've interviewed now about 300 370 or so individuals from about 70 nations around the world on angling all of that is available open access and it's a Great great treasure trove of data for researchers So currently I'm using our collection to teach students information literacy and critical thinking skills through the lens of angling So it's kind of a backdoor. I kind of feel like does anybody remember the karate kid Mr. Miyagi when he told him to paint the fence and he was really teaching karate So we're talking a lot about fishing, but it's really a lot about critical thinking skills and Information literacy so that might be a surprise to some of my students who are here in the audience tonight, but anyway So it's important that our students obviously become great critical thinkers of the skills that will serve them well throughout their career as students and throughout their lives So we're all here tonight because of Jen we get to her hear her Tell us a tale of flies and Western fly fishing that I know is going to be interesting fun because she is both of those things I am pleased that in some ways our her research has brought her full circle from a student in our special collections library to be in our 2023 Trout and Salmon at lecture So thank you all for coming tonight again I'm so pleased to be able to introduce my friend colleague occasional co-conspirator and our 2023 Trout and Salmon at lecture Jen Brown. Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming a great turn out tonight I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be in Bozeman again and talking to you all about fly fishing and trout So this is wonderful, and I will say yes the trout collection here in our special collections Is indeed world-class and that angling oral history project in there is amazing, too So what I'd like to do tonight is give you some historical vignettes about fishing and trout. That's why you're here hopefully and Leave time at the end for any questions. You may have so to start does anyone know what Western fly pattern that is? El caracadas very good. Guess what that wasn't even one of our five flies. That's a bonus fly Okay Okay, fly number one for you all does anyone know what this fly is No, good good guesses though okay, it's called the professor and This is a fly pattern, and it was invented by a professor actually an eccentric philosophy professor in Edinburgh Scotland and the story goes that one day he's out fishing and he runs out of flies Right the horror of it. So he gets inventive and he starts taking the Petals of a buttercup flower and some grass and he ties it around the hook and Apparently it worked and later he would replace the buttercup flowers with Yellow tinsel and replace the grass with feathers and you have the professor and this is one of the flies that was featured in Mary Orvis Marbury's favorite flies and fishing There now how is this a Western pattern well early Western fly fishers often use this pattern And what do you think it imitates on Western River rivers? Stone flies. Yeah, right so stone fly imitation the yellow is reportedly what These early fly fishers that were showing up in the West were using and now John Wilson the inventor He reportedly also was the first person to Describe the vastness of the British Empire as one so big that the Sun never sets on it And you can see that in fly fishing too with many of the materials used at the time and a lot of these Different materials that came from empires and world trade were showcased in Mary Orvis Marbury's book Favorite flies and fishing now she was the daughter of Charles Orvis of the Orvis company who? started the company the year of his daughter's birth and then Mary Orvis Marbury she wrote this book she Corresponded with anglers across the West and across the world and cataloged all of these Victorian fancy flies This is kind of what they all look like there's the professor on the page and then she's told little stories about them as well and what these Flies show and here's another bonus fly This is the jock Scott. I won't quiz you because it's right up there on the screen and it tells you with this But this is a great way to think about how Imperialism changes fly fishing because the jock Scott that's another one of those well-known fancy flies comes from the UK and It's made with silk. It's made with tinsel and it's made from the feathers of birds from five different continents All right, so it really is like an empire on a hook and let me just tell you a little bit about these So if we have the Toucan red macaw blue macaque from South America Jungle cock from India black turkey from North America Guinea-fell from the Philippines or Africa Bustard from Europe India or Africa and if we look at the jock Scott and the professor What it tells us is the European roots of Western fly fishing But that's not quite so simple as we'll find out here shortly, but what it brings me to is a Little aside, right? Let's go back in history a little bit further so how old is fly fishing where did it come from and Dancers it's pretty old So some key takeaways on the history of fly fishing is that one it evolves as a subsistence activity, right? people fly fished to catch food All right, and what's interesting also about fly fishing is that it evolves as a subsistence activity separately in North America in Europe in Japan and elsewhere around the world and then eventually some of these subsistence fishers in Europe and Japan they start selling them in local markets and you have the emergence of fly fishers who are contributing to these small-scale artisanal fisheries and then Only later do we start seeing fly fishing be considered a sport Right, it's the fly fishing that we know comes from the modern way era and the fly fishing how we practice it today Was really benefited by industrial techniques and as imperialism as I showed you so Here's the history of the world the human history from Paleolithic times to the modern era So if we're looking back at the history of fly fishing I'll go back a step further and say let's look at the history of angling and angling is defined as Fishing with a hook in a line and then fly fishing is a form of angling As well. So if we look at the history of angling Do you all think it's in what era of human history does angling come in from the use of fire to the French? revolution Anyone want to guess? Yeah, Neolithic and Paleolithic and so you have archaeological evidence of angling dating back to 42,000 years ago And you have the world's oldest existing fish hook is about 23,000 years old and so that's Into the kind of between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras All right, so angling has this really really long history and I want to compare that to kind of what's going on in human history, so World's oldest existing fish hook 23,000 years before present and The one for North America What is about 11,000 years old? All right, and so if we look at these dates compared to human history use of fire emerges of how 200,000 years ago give or take a hundred thousand years Humans invented agriculture and domesticated plants and animals about ten to twelve thousand years ago And then they started using copper and then later iron Metals for tools about six thousand years ago So if we think about this long history of angling People angle people fished with a hook in line long before they did things like Wrote their stories down use the wheel right that Angling has this very long history that predates Much of what we think of as human civilization Which I think is pretty interesting Sorry for this historical aside, but I am a history professor, so There's going to be a lot of history now fly fishing Has a definitive red written record dating back to 200 AD when the Roman Claudius Eleonis or alien Elean, I should say wrote about Macedonian fly fishing in his book De Natura and Amalium and that was about 280 so this is right in the midst of the Roman Empire and it's at the tail Tail end of the great Han dynasty in China and so what you see here is again There's fly fishing and it's right in the middle of all the major developments of the world Okay, so when does fly fishing move from being a subsistence activity to a sport Well, it happens in the late Middle Ages in the early modern era and in this time period you start seeing European books start talking not just about how to catch fish and where to catch fish But the fishing is kind of fun and it's good for recreation is very a spiritual activity and so you have many early books that are starting to Think about fly fishing that way The Haslender Breviary is a recently discovered text that is the oldest European text on fly fishing that we know of right now and then Dane Burner is a treatise of fishing with an angle came along in 1496 she describes fly patterns. She describes different types of Ways to fish and when to fish and she also talks about how Fishing is fun for the soul It's a good recreational activity and you see that in the Spanish text too from Fernando Bacerto who wrote dialogue of a hunter and then Fisher in 1539 and Bacerto like these other publications starts talking about fly fishing as a sport almost right and he says Fishing is divine and human and divine in that it saves the soul and human in that it pleases the body with repose Right. He's not just trying to catch fish here. He's enjoying it. So How does this compare to what's going on in the early modern world on the human history side? Well, if you believe the fine people of the internet who never lie the first flush toilet was in 1596 and so thinking about fishing and sports predates Modern plumbing if you will There okay, so let's move to the modern era though any guesses Okay, so this is called a medium olive quill and it was a dry fly that was invented and tied by the father of dry fly fishing Frederick Hallford and Englishman and he was really credited with starting the dry fly Revolution and this is kind of where we see Fly fishing become very modern and so in his book floating flies and how to dress them he starts looking at Entomology and this is really the kind of time period where you see match the hatch come along as well, so Here's Hallford studying at his desk and his books and he has multiple books by the way But floating flies is one of the earliest ones It has all of these very detailed descriptions of mayfly nymphs and then he has all of his imitator Nymphs that kind of are made to match those different species of mayflies that he's coming across and so it's based on the careful study but these dry flies they are making all of those Victorian fancy flies like the jock scott and like the professor obsolete and Is the strife lie revolution is really helped by the modern era and One of the things about the modern era and the strife lie revolution was that it is Benefiting from the industrialization and imperialism of the era and so if you think about Modern fly fishing is really due to things like modern manufacturing methods. So the dry fly revolution was about Totally transforming the sport of fly fishing because you had new reels you had new fishing rods You had new lines and leaders and flies and all of these new inventions Made it possible to take a tiny dry fly cast it upstream into the wind and at a rising truck So the dry fly revolutions kind of key here and so some of the things that come out of it is one Reels that are made from modern Manufacturing methods and Charles Orvis is real 1874 is probably the most well known of these as well and our reels today that we fish with Have changed very little since then and then of course there's also the modern rediscovery of eyed hooks and then anglers also benefit by Getting different types of materials through empires and trade and that sort of thing And this is where you see silk bamboo or split bamboo. Excuse me and silk lines Come out in fly fishing and so American anglers they use Calcutta and later Tonkin bamboo and British anglers they used Greenheart actually from British Guiana and These bamboo were taken and then they were kind of split into six strips modern Planing techniques split into six strips cut glued back together Sanded some more and you had a split bamboo fly rod And then they had silk lines and silkworm gut leaders and these came from places like China and India and Italy and All of this made fly fishing a lot easier right and dry flies too Now leading also to the dry fly of revolution is the spread of trout earlier, but before I get to that This is a quiz So this I hope you all were paying attention because I want to know is this grasshopper casting a modern fly rod No, why not? No real. Yes. Good. Right. It's tied directly on to the end. That's a very old-timey fly fishing thing What else do you see does anyone catch anything else? Yeah, you can see the bamboo nods. So this not a split bamboo rod. So this is just like right before the dry fly revolution and the changes in the rods and this is a great book by the way that they have in the trout collection called fishing in American waters is one of the earliest not the earliest in terms of American fishing literature, but I think it's the most limsical and fun of them all fishing in American waters Okay, so what else is leading to the dry fly revolution and people wanting to fish dry flies trout are being spread everywhere Rainbow trout brown trout and brook trout are being spread across the world And if you think about it historically, then trout are modern species, right? They're only made possible in places like the Rocky Mountains Due to steam transportation, right both steam ships and railroads Through empire and spreading places and also just through artificial propagation They start seeing the merge in popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Right, and here's the map on that and you can kind of see here, right? The Don't get quite of a sense of that, but you can see the native ranges of rainbow trout which are native to the west coast of North America and the Pacific is also On the Kamchatka Peninsula over in Russia on the other side of the Pacific and brown trout are native to Europe and Eastern brook trout are native to eastern North America, but you can see the places that they start to become naturalized in the range and that's places like Western North America Western South America Australia New Zealand South Africa many of the settler societies where Europeans are starting to settle and they want to fish for a trout So trout become very popular, but this is kind of fueling that dry fly revolution and that brings us to number three because non-native trout are starting to show up in the west so same with non-native fly fishers and they're coming across very diverse fishing cultures so this is fly number three and Fly is used in quotes because I've snuck in what could be bait fishing gear here and I deeply apologize Okay, so does anyone guess what that line is made of anyone want to venture to guess I heard blacks. What was the Horse hair. Yes. And so this is actually a Salish-Kudinite artifact. It's a manufactured hook and Braided palomino horse hair and this is found in the Frank Bird Lindermen collection at There I even say that other university on the western side of the state So the Salish-Kudinite artifact it shows us a lot of things it shows that one is that the West has very diverse fishing cultures and it really depends upon Where in the West you are right if you're looking just out the north northern Rockies you're in five six different watersheds and It depends on what river you're in and what species are available and also what group and culture you have as Well, so there's a lot of diversity within Western fishing cultures Especially for indigenous people and these are very diverse dependent on kind of time and place and as I said Things so the Lemhi Shoshone and Bannock now They're kind of now in Idaho, but they spent a lot of time kind of traveling throughout the Idaho Wyoming Montana region and so this would be one of the groups that would have fished in this area along the three forks and Over into you know the rest of Southwestern Montana and kind of across on my pass on into the Idaho side of things And they had all sorts of instruments to fish with spears gorges So a gorge have you all are you all familiar with that? No, so a gorge is it's just like a straight bone Implement that you know can kind of vary in size from a couple inches to six inches or more and It's fished like a hook so both sides are sharpened It's very straight and you can fish it just like you'd fish a hook You could have bait on it or not bait on it But when the fish eat it it gorges and gorges itself into say their gills or the mouth and then you can just Bring it in like you would bring a fish on a hook in they also use traps and wears and baskets And they had bone hooks. They had wood hooks. They would later get hooks through trade the fur trappers and fur traders, but then just later with settlement More of the wooden hooks and so the shoshone manic they they ate a lot of fish and they traded fish with their neighbors and Fish was a big trade item for them If you go south and I just have a few examples just to give you a sense of the diverseness if you go south and look at some of the ute bands they define themselves literally by Themselves fishing right and so you have different the fish eater bands and the close to water bands and the UN nation If you go elsewhere in the West some people didn't eat as many fish right and the crow fished occasionally, but They was an error a big part of their diet right bison was the central part of their diet But they did eat fish to supplement that and they did eat fish in times of scarcity So another kind of thing about these diverse fishing cultures is sometimes they're mixing sometimes they're Colliding and so settlers when they start showing up in the 1850s and 60s and later They're using a lot of the same things that the native fishers are using traps spears nets there was a story about these Settlers in Colorado who were using pitchforks And then for in many of the mining camps like Bannock and elsewhere or a lot of the railroad camps or workers They use dynamite quite often And that was a popular way and then of course we also have at the same time leisure class angling right we have some of these settlers are just focused on sport and they're focused on The fly fishing of it all right They're not really trying to catch a boatload of fish with dynamite They just want to go out and fish for trout and so Who out of all of these people has all the power? It's those leisure class fly fishers and they're going to have all the power to regulate the fisheries they're going to have all the power to Exclude people from the fisheries if they want to and this is something that you see is one of those kind of continued colonial legacies Of that, but there's also a lot of cultural mixing This is interesting too right and that's what fly number three shows you right is that that? metal hook had to come from somewhere and so you have kind of mixing of Euro-American and indigenous fishing techniques During the railroad era there were quite a few indigenous guides along the railroads and Then something that we think of is really like a Western hallmark for Western flies our deer hair and hairling flies But those really were it came from Eastern indigenous techniques too, so there's quite a bit of mixing within these fishing cultures as well Okay, so if fly fishing dates back to ancient times and trout are almost everywhere When does Western fly fishing come along? That brings us to fly number four, which some of you might get hopefully Any guesses? Pots. Yes. This is the sandy mite. It was from a Missoula fly developer named Franz B. Potts. Now Potts was a Wig maker he was a barber and a wig maker and he used those skills to develop woven hair bodies and Woven Hackle made out of hair and he panted that first in 1925 and then also in 1934 and these flies there was a whole series of mite flies. They're like kind of helgromite, right? They're supposed to be like Stone fly salmon fly nymphs and there was like the sandy mite the lady mite mr. Might buddy might there's a whole whole series of them and pot actually Developed this technique. He panted it and then he had young college women from the University of Montana Tie a lot of his flies. He had his fly shop over in Missoula as well and so Pot was really the one of the earliest Montana fly tires Montana developers and His flies are very expensive so in the 30s His flies sold for four dollars per dozen and That was very expensive the time period because normal regular flies actually sold for about $1 per dozen, right? But these are kind of time consuming they're very carefully made if you could zoom in more on the bodies and Apparently when people fish them and they still fish them, right because they're still being Tied and sold and fly shops today is that if you keep fishing them they get frayed and then it catches more fish Too so that was the one thing about the sandy nights and the mite things But it was a sense of like Western fly fishing and this is where you have the emergence of those Western fly fishing traditions. So Hello, okay, so in the early 20th century What you start seeing are fly shops and sporting tackle shops kind of spring out throughout the West like they were always there in the Railroad era, but they started fishing starts growing in popularity in the 1910s and 1920s and Not only it's just fishing is popular but it becomes a central part of the tourism and recreation economy in the West and So that fuels even more fly shops to sprout out and you have people like Franz Potts who are Creating flies specifically for Montana rivers and a lot of the homegrown traditions as especially in Montana Right, we're looking at large weight of nymphs Right, which could be poaching if you were Frederick Hallford That would be illegal in the chalk streams of England, right? Because it was all fishing upstream with a dry fly only anything else is just poaching So all of us Western fly fishers are essentially poachers and other people's eyes but another kind of aspect of Western fly fishing patterns are that They're coming from local materials a lot of deer hair and elk hair there were things like a fly called the picket pin and that was a Developed by Jack Bainy who was a Missoula fly maker and it was made out of gopher The picket pin was the name for a ground squirrel As well and then you know a lot of stone flies and a lot of salmon flies and that's really what you see emerging Is this very distinctive Western fly fishing tradition and this kind of it comes out in the 1920s to the 1950s and As the industry grew so too did it its advertisements and its booster is on so in the 1920s and 30s local governments and state governments in the West are embarking on all of this kind of road building Right making kind of gravel roads into more modern roads with the advent of You know the 1920s car culture and then another round of car Road building after World War two and then they started kind of selling come to the West and the big big sell for many of these Tourism advertisements was trout right like you can get to our trout streams of which Montana has 32,000 miles and they have 4600 miles of improved highways And so they're selling the trout fishing and the fly fishing experience to tourists And then they're kind of also if you think about it It's like this fine line because they're selling and extolling modern conveniences But they are doing so by being like go out into the wilderness and Montana's wild There's some roads, but not too many roads. And so there's like this fine line between what's modern and also why come visit and Go out there okay, ooh Another bonus fly if you all don't know this I'm going to be very disappointed Bunion bug. Yes. This was the fly made famous by a river runs through it, right the Orange salmon fly the Bunion bug Version of that that was made out of a cork body and kind of stiff hairline flies from a Missoula fly tire named Norman means or a Paul Bunion as he was known around the state and he tied all of these series of Bunion bugs and he developed them on Rock Creek over East of Missoula to kind of fish for salmon flies and stone flies on Rock Creek And so they were very buoyant and they were very popular so pots flies These flies as well that are just very much known for being Western very well known early patterns Okay, one more Western fly is Anyone from butte by the way Okay, this is a butte Yes, this is a George Grant fly is the brown and orange color back now George Grant was a long time Angler he came from a working-class background in butte and He had his own fly shop and then he was also well known as a writer and a conservationist and he tied flies like this so what he did is he actually Invented his own way of weaving hackle just like friends pot But he had a different one and he panted his hair woven hackles In 1938 and so George Grant's flies are known for being these woven hackles as well It's just a lot of sound fly patterns and streamers and that sort of thing That's a lot of fly fishers develop patterns like this And I wanted to talk about George Grant because he's kind of an interesting character Now he's from butte so butte people fish the big hole a lot and George Grant actually fished the big hole for over 50 years right he was also known as a writer and An amateur historian and he documented many of the fly patterns of Montana and of the West and so he kind of knew them all and he has all the stories in this book and I should say that The trout collection over here in special collections actually has the George Grant papers in there And so there's a lot of different Writings from George Grant correspondence books like this and then also a lot in his involvement in trout unlimited and so George Grant was a member of The butte chapter of the trout unlimited and they called themselves the river rats right, so butte butte America love it and So George Grant actually wrote a newsletter for the butte unlimited club and it was called the river rat And he had various things in this every issue was a little bit different He would have kind of recipes and how to tie certain flies or you'd have like old descriptions of flies And who made them in Montana? He would also write about conservation Frequently and just write about like issues going on in the big hole and that sort of thing And so one of the issues that Grant worked on In starting in the early 60s as he was working against the proposed rightfully dam on the big hole And so the rightfully dam was going to dam one of the lower portions of the big hole near Glen and Grant got together and With his like sporting and fly fishing friends. He got together with and helped build a coalition of Sport fishermen ranchers along the big hole as well as conservation groups around the state and They were able to defeat this dam The rightfully dam and this is the river rat newsletter and this is the one where he's fighting against the Rightfully dam. So what happens though with the rightfully dam is that they defeated in 62 George Grant also by the way was instrumental in passing the 1962 Montana streambed preservation Act for Conservation of rivers, but then the rightfully dam it rears its head again And they try to build it again in the 1970s And so this is the the second time he's fighting against building that dam and like the previous time he has this great coalition of sport fishing buddies and ranchers and Conservationists and they defeat the the dam again. And so why bring this up? Well, I Wanted to talk about it tonight because it's a great success story. It's anyone fish the big hole river by the way Oh, it's lovely, right? So it's like an amazing float And it's just this wild character, right? It's a long, you know a nice freestone river and that's because of people like George Grant And there were other success stories as well There's you know, Dan Bailey who's well known for his fly shock over in Livingston He had a lot of Western fly patterns and I was kind of torn on what to use But those would have been great examples as well And one of the things he was working against was the building of the Allen spur dam on the Yellowstone which also is defeated and These are the same guys that are later Working for Montana stream access laws, too So I think that what's interesting here, and I think that's the the lasting legacy of Western fly fishing is that a lot of the Western fly fishers They're helping to protect and preserve Wild rivers and wild trout and this is kind of an interesting aspect to it right because many the work of fly fishers for the conservation river rivers for the conservation of fish and trout and for public access it remains vitally important to Fly fishing in Montana and the rest of the West today And I think that's like a great way to think about the legacy of this very very long history of fly fishing and trout is that Fly fishers have been the vanguard of conservation and of access in Montana, and I hope that remains so in the future Okay, thank you So if you're interested in hearing more stories about Western fishing you can check out my book It's called trout cultures published by the University of Washington Press But it's available on most places and then I also have a podcast It's a nonfiction audio storing podcast storytelling podcast and what I do is I take oral histories of people down along the Gulf of Mexico where I live now and I tell stories of people in nature, and you can follow me On Instagram at the Gulf podcast or you can find it on Apple podcast and all the major pop podcasting platforms as well as YouTube But I'd like to hear all of your questions So open it up for questions Yes Right because it's also like Well, this is not work that I've done. I'm a modern historian So and what what I do is I rely on the work of archaeologists to tell me Yes, this is the world's oldest fish hook and this is the oldest fish hook in North America You know, I suspect the biggest challenge is that all of these early fish hooks are made out of bone and shell And so they're very fragile. So I suspect that angling dates back a lot longer than that But yeah, good question. Sorry can't answer not my wheelhouse things Yeah, and so if you remember all that early literature from Dane burners and those sorts of people they're talking about like don't keep too many and Release the small ones back and so you can actually like trace catch and release in the literature back to the 1500s And what's interesting in Europe today though is that there's some backlash against catch and release, right? So it's like a mainstay in Montana, but there are some some of the states in Germany have actually banned catch and release and and so there's It hasn't kind of remained monolithic as catch and release over time, but that's kind of what's going on presently over there it has to do with kind of Animal welfare issues and then the kind of backlash with like working-class sporting people are like yes We want to eat the fish and so a lot of it is thinking of like catch and release makes no sense because you're supposed to eat the fish and It's damaging to the fish's welfare. So it's really in Europe that is coming from like more of an animal rights standpoint. Yeah Good question Other questions. Yes Okay, all right Okay, yes Okay, I think we have some questions over here. Yes Well first they had to all almost disappear for anyone to care about native trout, right? And so I'm actually you see in the West certain species of cutthroat trout are Endangered or ghosting like really early like 1892 or something, but concern about it is Usually what fishing game departments that is they they started trying to stalk them elsewhere in mountain lakes in other states as like a population backup and then the real big push for native trout preservation comes in like the 1970s in 1980s and by that time the historic populations of all almost all the cutthroat trout subspecies in the West are Nearly gone, but this is that's kind of the emergence. So it kind of happens right also during the wild trout eras people are like thinking and Getting rid of their hatcheries and that sort of management too now in terms of thinking about Taking Rainbow trout which are really invasive around the world and getting rid of them to put Put native fish back in those places those starts of projects start emerging really in like the 1990s or something. So it's really actually very recent. Yeah Yes Yeah, I mean there's a huge difference between American fly fishing and English and European fly fishing just because of that because the public the people own the fish they own the water and the earliest laws come from like 1622 for access and Making sure that everyone in the United States can kind of access fish and that sort of and trout in New England and that sort of thing and in England though, it's all privately owned and so the only people who are able to access trout and salmon streams and Britain are largely like the people who are very rich. And so what I think it shows and how it works out over time is that It's more democratic Right and conservation is a little more democratic. You see that a lot in Montana maybe less so in some of the other states But yeah, there's definitely a huge divide within that now what what influences the flies and how Western Fishing evolves really doesn't have to do too much with access But it has to do with what are the local insects? What kind of fish are in the stream and what you know, what will they eat? Yeah I think it's just because you know a hook is like an angle Right and also kind of England angle land, right? It's kind of the same root word, right of that But yeah, I did I don't know but I suspect it's just from the shape of the hook Well, yeah, they're talking about like feathers on hooks and Macedonian ways of like there is like a long description of how Macedonians use this different type of fishing where They're using, you know different types of fur and feathers and that sort of thing And so there are like people argue I'm not a an ancient historian, but there are people who argue that there there are earlier ones But I think the the agreement there is aliens book on the nature of animals. Yeah Mm-hmm Well, you know, we also just pick up roadkill, so I'm trying to think someone help me as there are some birds that are Western patterns that are Becoming harder to get I know a lot of birds fall under the 1918 migratory bird treaty act But a lot of the feathers that Western fly fishers use are like common things like pheasant and you know Mallard and things that you could readily come across and aren't like a migratory bird Hmm Yeah, that is a great book by the way Yeah, yeah Well, so a lot of you know in the feathers sleeve They're tying flies like this and they're tying the Jock Scott and some of these people who are really into tying those old Victorian fly patterns. They don't even fish They're just like, you know practicing fly fishing that guy in the book actually was he wasn't a fisher But yeah, I can't think of any Western ones off the top of my head at this point Oh, I don't know. I you know, I kind of think like 1940s as a guess maybe earlier I don't know on that. Yeah, I Would have to look I'd have to think about that a little bit But yeah, that becomes really common right it's like and you don't even have to have exotic birds for really cool feathers You can have just like different types of chicken breeds that work very well, and that's really what a lot of people use. Yeah Great questions Yes, yeah, so What the story I'm trying to tell is I thought it would be I was like, okay, I was invited up to give this lecture What do I want to talk about? I mold some things. I'm like, this would be a neat thing But I didn't think about the five flies I was like, I'm just gonna tell some history of it and then I picked some flies to fit some of the narrative there and yeah part of the theme though is that There's this shift front to dry flies and imitators and that sort of thing and a lot of it is These sporting ideals the fly patterns the ideas are moving back and forth across the Atlantic through a really vibrant print culture in the English language between English anglers like Hallford and then another dry fly person Who's more of like the father of North American dry flies like Theodore Gordon and the Northeast or in United States? And so they're corresponding and Western fly fishers are also aware of this. So it's kind of Happening across the continent, right? It's just like building up at the same time Yeah, I mean you really see this like in the railroad era is like there are guides and there's so and there's like Chambers of commerce and guides and stuff that are selling like come will teach you fly fishing Out in the West and it only grows since then I mean we think about kind of the tourism and outdoor recreation economy It's like mid 20th century, but it kind of predates that and there's there's really this big push And so the guides in Montana and the West there they're teaching a lot of the dudes coming out to do drenches They're just coming out to fish But they're they're not only teaching them how to fish they're teaching them conservation They're teaching them catch and release techniques and really catch and release in the West came from a lot of the guides Yes Well, they're at one so they they kind of evolve separately and so Japan there is a Tenkara You know you might be familiar with us like Tenkara fly fishing It's kind of a came it was big in like starting about 10 years ago That's been big in Japan since then and so Tenkara fly fishing is much like how Europeans and other places fly fish them no real and you have Basically like a long pole and then tied to the end is your line So there's it's just tied to the end and then you fish for that and this evolved in Japan and like mountain streams where people are fishing and it also becomes a local market thing where Some of these Japanese fishermen are now starting to sell the trout to Local ends and that sort of thing and what's different about Japan though is it only becomes a recreational activity later? like a little bit in the Tokugawa era in the 1900s, but really Tenkara becomes like revived in the 1960s and 1980s and Japanese Fly fishers are finding these old texts and learning about some of these old flies that way Okay, thanks Yeah, definitely like vices and stuff. So there's a lot of fly fishers who Used to be able to tie with their hands right you just need like kind of the thread and stuff and Lee Wolf was one of those people apparently he could tie a size 28 grizzly grizzly atoms in his hand But not a lot of people can do that right we use very modern vices and bovers and sparrows and that sort of thing in all made of metal Yeah, thank you so much Jen. I'm Darlene Rossman on the Dean of the Library at MSU and Want to actually give Jen something to take back with her besides her memories of this occasion So here's a bag of MSU goodies for you. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome So Just want to thank you all for coming the turnout is great in the number of questions You had says to me that what Jen had to say really spoke to you, so I'm thrilled to see this kind of turnout I actually fly fish myself. It's not a requirement of my job But it's something that's really I think part of being in Montana is the least experiencing that at some point and I remember my second fly fishing trip out at slew Creek in Yellowstone I caught a huge fish On my second time out and I remember saying that to somebody standing near me I said this is only my second time and he kind of looked at me like Yeah Okay, don't brag don't do that But I want to remind you that One of the reasons we're able to do things like this is because of your support of our library and our archives and special collections So anytime that you give us funding it helps us have events like this So I encourage you to continue to support the library in that way and it comes back to benefit you in the long run I'd like to thank a few people here Especially Jim Thule who as he mentioned is our trout and salmonid librarian and he Knew Jen and was able to bring her in here. So that was a great connection. He made I'd also like to thank From our administrative office for doing a lot of logistics as well as Gavin Hertzog who's back in the back I want to acknowledge Jodi Allison banell our head of archives and special collections And we have Marie Holland here She's from our friends of the library board and what's greeting you when you got here and Deb Peters who's our Friends of the library board president is here as well. So thank you to all those folks And I encourage you to come to the MSU library if you haven't been to our archives and special collections It's on the second floor of the library You can make an appointment and come in and you can see specific of collections Or we're glad to also just show you around in general and many of our things are also online So you can visit through our website if you don't want to come into the library to do that kind of tour So I'm going to encourage you to exit out this door. There's some food outside here I also encourage you to eat that share some fish tails out in the hallway and Please come back next year. We'll have another lecture about this time of year. So thank you very much