Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West

Abstract

Beginning with Arthur F. McEvoy's The Fisherman's Problem (1986) and Theodore Steinberg's Nature Incorporated (1991), environmental historians have produced many aquatic-oriented studies of western and eastern North America. Aside from Margaret Beattie Bogue's Fishing the Great Lakes (2000), however, these studies have ignored inland fisheries. Jen Corrinne Brown's Trout Culture helps fill this absence by showing how Rocky Mountain streams were molded into “a virtual troutopia” (p. 6). Brown traces the rise of a transnational sport-fishing culture with an entitled preference for game species. She shows how anglers used technology and law to reengineer aquatic environs to favor preferred species such as brook trout, brown trout, and rainbow trout, and she reveals how anglers destroyed many native species. This is the most sustained examination yet of how anglers built a vast hatchery infrastructure that thoroughly and intentionally disrupted the transmontane West. Along the way Trout Culture explores the inner world of fly-fishers, showing how lure craft reflected evolving ideas about biology and ecology, how dams sometimes improved trout habitat, and how the fetishization of “native fish” eventually led to the naturalization of invasive trout species.