The history of fly fishing has been long and fascinating—a saga of technological innovation and conceptual development with its own literature and cast of characters. Over the years fly fishing has evolved from a simple pastime to something of a science and an art form. Numerous individuals, each in his own small way, have been responsible for advancing the craft. It’s very possible that we ourselves, through our own love of the sport, might make a contribution to its future.
Ancient Oriental writings indicate that 4,000 years ago, during the Shang Dynasty in China, an artificial fly was used to catch fish. Despite that reference, most historians place the beginnings of the sport in Macedonia (northern Greece), at about the fourth century B.C.—more than 2,200 years ago. The ancient writer Aelian (230 to 170 B.C.) wrote that the Macedonians observed an insect hovering near and over water, that the insect did not resemble a common wasp, a house fly, or a bee, but, as Aelian said, it has something of each of these. He described the Macedonians’ feathered imitation of the insect: two feathers from a cock’s wattle fastened to a hook wrapped in red or crimson wool. Aelian also explained the use of a very long rod to which a line and a fly were attached, to deceive “a speckled fish” that lived in those waters.
These early writings merely describe how humans were fishing a fraudulent fly. It was not until 1496 that the first basic “how-to” book of fly fishing appeared. Called The Boke of St. Albans, this volume was a group of instructional manuals, providing instruction in such gentlemanly sports as fishing, falconry, and hunting.
The fishing portion was written by Dame Juliana Berners, at the time Prioress of the Nunnery of Sope well, near St. Albans, England, and was entitled “Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle.” Berners covered such things as material for rods (the middle of green hazel; the top of blackthorn, crabtree, medlar, or juniper; the butt of willow, hazel or aspen . . .) and lines (horsehair), the best time of day to fish and, most important, 12 flies that should be used. She even included a simple code of conduct for fishing on private land, and with other anglers.
In 1653, an Englishman who was to become the patron saint of fishing, Izaak Walton, published his The Compleat Angler. Walton was not exactly an advocate of fly fishing—the book dealt chiefly with bait fishing—but he did give a current description of the sport as it was then practiced. The Compleat Angler was enormously popular, rivaling the Bible in sales. Six editions were published, and it was not until the last of these that Walton asked a close fishing companion, Charles Cotton, to write a special section on fly fishing, which was published in 1676.
Cotton, a true specialist, described in detail how to taper and weave together the various types of horsehair to form a line for rods that were 18 feet long. Most important, he provided a full description of some 65 different flies that should be used over the expanse of an entire fishing year. This may be the first recognition that insect activity changed monthly, requiring a corresponding change in flies.
Although the 1700s did bring other works, it was not until the early 19th century that the sport began to change significantly. Equipment became more advanced. Literature revealed ever more precise technique and insect-fly relationship. Most important, the sport was beginning to grow in North America. Because skills and information had become more highly developed, this period has become known as “the scientific era.”
The patron saint of fishing, lzaak Walton.
Up until that time, most flies were used with little regard as to what they imitated. A few inquisitive souls did ponder why certain flies worked at certain times, but they were not prominent. In 1836, Alfred Ronalds wrote The Fly Fisher’s Entomology, which is probably the first book to explain the various aquatic insects and their importance to trout. Ronalds not only categorized some of the insects that occupied the streams in England, he also gave some descriptions about how to imitate them. He did his work so well that even today the book is a valued reference for those anglers lucky enough to have found it.
Heretofore, most fly fishing was done with a wet or subsurface fly. That was only natural, since the hooks were heavy and the materials water absorbent. At the same time, actual surface feeding by fish was not going unnoticed by the observant Frederick M. Halford, an Englishman who was to perfect the techniques and flies that led directly to the dry fly fishing of today. His books, Floating Flies and How to Dress Them (1886), and Dry Fly Fishing in Theory and Practice (1889), brought him a legion of followers. In fact, Halford’s popularity was so great that for many of the fishermen of his time dry fly fishing became the only way to fish.
Halford had a philosophical counterpart, G.E.M. Skues, who felt that if surface feeding was absent one should not simply retire to his pint of ale. Instead, said Skues, in his book, Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream (1910), precisely tied subaquatic forms should be used to increase the angler’s opportunities. Both Halford and Skues were monumental figures in their sport, one through his contributions to dry fly fishing and the other through his serious revisions of nymph techniques (that is, fishing with patterns that imitate insects’ immature stages).
The 1800s also brought important changes in equipment. Lines changed from horsehair to silk. The crude reels (or winches, or winds, as they were then called) that had been in use in the late 1700s became outmoded. Now that anglers were storing and casting line, a full-functioning reel became a necessity. By the end of the 19th century, the reel had evolved into a prototype of the reels we use today.
The most significant advance in equipment was the development of the bamboo fly rod—and it was an American, not an English, innovation. In 1845, a Pennsylvania violin maker, Samuel Phillippe, laminated split segments of bamboo together to create a strong, flexible rod with casting qualities superior to those of any material of the past. Bamboo completely changed the structure of the sport. Fishermen were charmed by the ease and fluidity of motion made possible by bamboo. It was such a giant leap forward that bamboo rods revolutionalized the sport forever.
A set of fine old fly-fishing equipment, from the 1860s and ’70s. Note the lightweight spoked reel and hand-wound rod grip.
From a historical standpoint, the arrival of fly fishing in North America during the 19th century was probably the sport’s single most important development. Toward the end of the 1700s, the American colonist could finally lay down his pick, plow, hammer, and musket long enough to devote himself to pastimes more for leisure than for survival. Fishermen began casting flies on American waters, and with the diversity of waters available, improvements in technique and equipment came rapidly. Once purely the domain of the Englishman, fly fishing was about to enter into what I call the “American Period.”
In the years that followed, North American names became preeminent in the sport. Hiram Leonard, who constructed his first six-strip bamboo rods in Bangor, Maine, in 1870, was probably foremost among the new American innovators. Many of the people who worked with Leonard went on to make their own contributions to the art of rod building. F.E. Thomas was certainly one of these, as were Hiram and Loman Hawes, E.H. Edwards, and E.F. Payne, whose rods were cherished and whose skill was later perpetuated by his son Jim up through World War II. Other craftsmen who developed rods in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s were Dickerson, Garrison, Gillum, Halstead and Young, and Winston and Powell. Today the rodmaking craft perfected by these men still flourishes under the names Orvis, Thomas and Thomas, and the very fine G.H. Howells.
As this 1872 Currier & Ives print shows, fly-fishing garb and equipment were different back then, but the pleasure of hooking a big fish was the same.
At the turn of the century, America began to create its own fishing legends. One of these was Theodore Gordon, from the Catskills of New York, who is affectionately referred to as the “Father of American Fishing.” A sickly, small, frail man, Gordon corresponded regularly with Halford in England concerning the tying and fishing of the dry fly. Gordon’s waters, however, were much swifter, and the hatches different, than on the trout streams of England. He quickly developed his own imitations of hatches occurring on his beloved stream, the Neversink, in upstate New York. He invented the famous Gordon Quill (a.k.a. Quill Gordon), which is still used today. He was a very private man, and little is known about his personal life, but to the fishing public he remains the single most significant American in the history of the sport.
By World War I, North American anglers were developing their own fishing skills and publications. The American counterparts of Halford and Skues were George LaBranche, who in 1914 published The Dry Fly and Fast Water, and Edward Ringwood Hewitt, who gave us Telling on the Trout (1926) and Better Trout Streams (1931). LaBranche’s books became American classics, supplanting the British texts (which were based on the flat chalk streams of England) and speaking to the demands of the fast-moving waters of New York’s Catskills and Pennsylvania’s Broadheads. Hewitt was fascinated by the ecology of trout and trout streams, and, in fact, did some of the initial research in the field. He also was the inventor of the very famous “bivisible” flies, which were tied as searching flies, or nondescript patterns used when feeding activity was absent.
The man often called “the father of American fly fishing,” Theodore Gordon.
Other books would become equally important. Trout Flies by Preston Jennings came out in 1935, and probably the most important “bible” produced for the American fly fisherman was Trout, by Ray Bergman, in 1938. I read it as a boy, and from it I gleaned much of my early understanding of both the fish and the sport.
Before the Second World War, many other people, too numerous to name, contributed to the lore of fishing, both nationally and internationally. The sport had now reached the proportions of a national pastime, with practitioners in every walk of life. But war would take the angler to the trenches of Europe and the ocean beaches of the Pacific, away from his beloved streams. The war’s impact on fly fishing would not come in more conceptual innovation, but indirectly through research into new synthetic materials. These amazing materials would change the sport forever. After the war, we entered into what I call the “Synthetic Period.”
Up until this time, bamboo was the principal material used for fly rods. Other materials were tried, but bamboo remained the standard. The war brought us fiberglass. Introduced in 1946, it was destined to put a serious dent in the bamboo rod market. Just as bamboo had once supplanted several other fibers as the choice for fishing rods, fiberglass now supplanted bamboo.
Concurrently with fiberglass rods came the development of synthetic fly lines, which would alter the sport immeasurably. Until the mid-1950s silk, drastically refined since the early 1800s, was still the best fly fishing line money could buy. Unfortunately silk was not durable. And, to say the least, it was troublesome, because it had to be dressed before each fishing outing. A company in Midland, Michigan, Scientific Angler, developed a method of applying and tapering polyvinyl chloride to a Dacron-type core to produce a trouble-free floating line that made silk fly lines nonexistent almost overnight.
In addition to new lines, the 1950s brought extruded nylon materials to replace silk gut material for leaders. Gone forever were the moistening tins that the otherwise stiff gut leader required for elasticity.
Postwar writing on fly fishing also turned a corner. For the most part, the Depression-era fishermen were not necessarily entomology-minded, although they did understand the relationship of insect to fish. Their fly boxes usually contained a series of patterns that they knew, or had heard, worked. In a general way, these patterns simulated various flies upon which trout were known to feed, but they were not necessarily oriented to the aquatic insects actually at hand. More precise information and imitations were necessary, and the new literature responded with a more exacting approach to insects and flies.
An early significant work, Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations (1947), by Art Flick, although written for the Catskills streams in and around the author’s beloved Schoharie, described both natural mayflies and the patterns used to imitate them.
In 1950, Vincent Marinaro wrote A Modern Dryfly Code. Its most significant lessons for the fly fishing world centered on the trout’s “window” (that is, his range of vision), his feeding selectivity, and the significance of a fly’s silhouette as it appears to the trout. His greatest creation was the “thorax-wing style” fly, so widely used today.
The first book to describe the hatches in U.S. ecosystems, not only of the Western mountains and the Rockies, but also those of the well-fished Eastern and Midwestern streams, was Matching the Hatch, by Ernest Schwiebert. This, the first of many groundbreaking studies that Schwiebert has produced, was completed in 1955 while the author was still an undergraduate. For all anglers, it remains one of the most significant books on the mayfly, as well as other aquatic organisms and their imitations.
The late 1950s and the 1960s were not without their own how-to books. If Ray Bergman’s Trout was the standard text for pre-war fishermen, Joe Brooks’ books carried the banner for the next two decades. I had the privilege to guide Joe and his lovely wife, Mary, in the years before his death. He was not only a great fisherman but a fine gentleman. His Complete Book of Fly Fishing (1958) discussed all aspects of trout fly fishing, but might have been the first significant treatment of saltwater fly fishing, of which he is today considered a pioneer. In 1972, Joe Brooks published his final book, Trout Fishing, still widely used as a guide for the novice angler.
Fly tying also became popular during this period, even to the average fisherman. In 1951, William Blades, perhaps the greatest fly tying talent since the 1930s, published Fishing Flies and Fly Tying. Blades tied flies beautifully and creatively. His flies had an exactness of appearance unlike anything seen up until that time.
This was an important period for anglers throughout the world. A fundamental transition was about to take place in how fishermen viewed their sport and treated the stream environment. Writers like Schwiebert and Marinaro had planted the seeds for greater appreciation of precise entomology, which now not only sprouted but exploded. In the 1970s, we entered what I call the “Enlightenment Period.”
Whether the book Selective Trout, published in 1971 by Dr. Carl Richards and Doug Swisher, created the attitudes of the 1970s can be debated, but without question their work made a greater impression than any previous book. Selective Trout changed the consciousness of the everyday fisherman, as well as instructional technique promulgated today. The great significance of the work lay in its treatment of entomology and fish selectivity, leading to the introduction of a new selection of flies designed to imitate specific species of mayflies. The new patterns, called “no hackles,” have become the standard for selective trout on selective water. Critics question the originality of no-hackles, pointing out that Berners and Walton had created similar, albeit cruder, patterns hundreds of years earlier. In any case, the no-hackles re-formed the conventional patterns into more precise imitations of known species of mayfly.
Other insect-oriented books followed this landmark work. Not only the mayfly, but also the stonefly and the caddisfly, became the subject of whole volumes. Hatches, by Bob Nastasi and Al Caucci; Caddisflies, by Gary LaFontaine; Stoneflies, by Carl Richards, Doug Swisher and Fred Arbona, Jr., and Mayflies, the Angler and the Trout, by Fred Arbona, Jr. are a few examples of the books that have made a lasting impact.
The 1970s also produced a single replacement for all the previous how-to books. Trout, by Ernest Schwiebert, two volumes and some 1,700 pages in length, is monumental in its depth concerning all subjects of fly fishing.
With their outstanding strength and light weight, graphite rods are preferred today by most anglers.
This period has not been without its advances in equipment. In 1973, the introduction of graphite as a material for fly rods rendered all other types passé. Graphite rods were extraordinarily light and strong, and they retained the best qualities of their forebears. Boron rods, introduced in the 1980s, are considered a new advance, but they do not now represent the kind of departure from past limitations that graphite offered. Today, new directions in graphite appear to be setting the directions of fly rods for the future.
In general, though, the question of the future of the sport is open to speculation. New techniques will always be developed. I feel that advances will not necessarily be conceptual but will come about because of still more wonderous synthetic materials from which more durable and exacting fly imitations can be made. I also foresee the use of transparent hooks to further refine the optical illusions we work so hard to create, as well as synthetic material for rods, reels, and lines. Who knows? We might even develop the indestructible wader!
But product development will be of secondary importance to our concern for the streams and waterways that make our sport possible. As man encroaches upon the environment and industrialization continues, with consequences ranging from organic pollution to acid rain, anglers will have to step forward and take action to preserve the sport of fishing. This may be the greatest challenge to the angler yet.
Now that we have seen where the sport has been and where it may be headed, it’s time for you to get involved. Your first step is to learn about the basic equipment necessary to perform your duties as a fly fisherman.
Always buy your gear—particularly rods and reels—from a reputable fly-fishing dealer.
