Fly-fishing is a story of oscillating tensions between the masses and elite; tradition and innovation; regional against national concerns
, running up from Baltimore, has long been synonymous with great deeds. It was a route for escaped slaves, heading for Pennsylvania. It carried Abraham Lincoln to Gettysburg in 1863, and bore his body, 17 months later, on a leg of its journey home to Illinois. It is a hiking trail now, shaded by sycamore and willow. But for the pen-and-brush duo behind this column, the old railroad remains auspicious, as the access-point to a deep pool of the Gunpowder river, where trout lie.
They kept 12 feet apart, mind, while chatting and scrambling down the riverbank. This seemed not only sensible but representative of what fly-fishing is. It is a solo activity. Yet the technical demands of casting a long line to deliver a feathered hook to the water with, ideally, the delicacy of an insect alighting make its practitioners prone to lively exchanges of information: on rods, water, flies and so forth.
Fly-fishing’s success in America reflects above all the country’s natural bounty. Within a few decades of the technique being mainly practised by British officers, homesick for their own chalk streams, Americans were fly-fishing in diverse conditions for bass and many species of salmon and trout. This led them to innovate; some American fly patterns were based on native American lures. Yet the fly-fishing establishment remained concentrated on the Anglocentric east coast.
An exploding rail network opened up new angling paradises to thousands of first-generation fishers. The connection between infrastructure and wilderness was sometimes overt; the owners of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad offered a $20 gold piece to anyone who caught a 10lb trout alongside its tracks. Other entrepreneurs also seized the opportunity fly-fishing presented. Wisconsin’s fly-tying industry would soon produce over 10m lures a year.
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