The Sportsman Tourist in the Muskellunge Country

Welcome to Discovering the Northwoods from the Manitowish Waters Historical Society. We will take you on a journey through our local history with the help of primary source documentation. To learn more about this rich history or about the historical society – check out our website at mwhistory.org. There you will find blog posts, show notes, our YouTube Channel, and a full transcription of this episode including maps and photographs.

As with many historical works from this era, there are phrases, terms, and descriptions that are inappropriate to our modern sensibilities. The Manitowish Waters Historical Society in no way condones these offensive remarks or passages. For this episode, we altered some of the offensive and derogative phrases. The original document is attached in the show notes if you’d like to read this publication in its entirety for educational purposes and accurate historical context. 

In this episode, we’re revisiting a fascinating article from Forest and Stream Magazine, published in 1892. Richard Gear Hobbs takes us on a fishing trip to the Northwoods, offering a unique snapshot of late 19th-century life in America’s wilderness. From fishing on the Manitowish River to encountering the hardy lumbermen of the region, Hobbs’ account provides a rich window into the outdoor culture and the challenges of the time. From the wonderful narration of Sarah Krembs, we will dive into this historical account and explore what these experiences can teach us about the past.

 

Transcript

Forest and Stream Magazine, v.38, January  – June, 1892

Do you recollect how sweet the click of a reel sounds as you take out your fishing tackle after a year’s rest, and prepare for the summer’s outing? It makes you think of the Kingfisher stringer azure loops from tree to tree where the silver birch gleams as white from its shadow in the water as from its place on the shore: of the smoke curling up from the campfire, and drifting away in a blue cloud through the silent aisles of the forest. What pictures and emotions that old reel recall! My wife said it sounded good and she launched off into a vivid description of a big strike she had once on a northern lake and a big fish that got away. But she was not to go with me this time. Indeed I was left to go alone. Tom, the most superb of all camp companions, had gone off to Michigan. Stanley was tied to his bank desk. Ira and Lawrence were wandering amid the glories of Yellowstone and being gloriously bled by the Park hotel keeps.

Being deserted by these I had nothing to do but go alone, for all others seemed skeptical when told of the big fish in Wisconsin. Some of brother Hough’s true stories about that region would have palsied them. However, mine was grief with compensation. If you go to the woods companionless, you need not remain so. All wild things come closer to you then. Nature takes you nearer to her heart, and talks to you more plainly. You hear her say things that could not be heard at all if there were the noises of human voices about. Nature is shy and still when man is talking. Then, too, if you are alone in your excursion to the woods and waters, you can camp under any tree you choose, cast your line in the waters that look the likeliest to you, and tell your fish stories when you get home with the sweet consciousness that there is no witness to your little improvements upon the truth. 

It was raining straight down when the train brought me to Manitowish on the Milwaukee, Lake Shore & Western road, early on a late August morning. It was a sodden, determined-never-to-quit kind of rain. The only hotel in the little settlement had a saloon for its front room — not a very congenial place for this writer. The dam at Rest Lake was my objective. This dam makes the largest reservoir in the State. It backs the water up and deepens it in Rest, Stone, Manitowish, Spider, Clear, and Island Lakes. These are magnificent sheets of water, and the lumbermen have a vast reservoir, on the ice of which they dump their logs in the winter from which they feed the Manitowish River during the great spring drive. 

About 1 o’clock I got my outfit into an old, leaky boat, with a muscular guide at the oars, for a fourteen mile pull up to the dam. The Manitowish River would be called a creek in Illinois. But then, though an athlete could go over it at one good jump in places, it is clear and often deep. Henry, the guide, thought we might catch a few fish on the way up. This sounded well, and out came an old rod and its wrappings. Ah, what a moment it is when you are just at the gateway of a region famous for its big fish and you joint up for the first cast! The hopes and dreams of a whole year are about to be realized. You tingle to your fingertips with an exaltation of mind and body. You can’t get the line through the guides fast enough. You have absolute confidence in your good fortune. You can easily imagine a big fellow lying down there in the swirling depths just panting for a chance at your hook. 

We stopped at a place where the water swept under some low-growing bushes – a deep eddy which looked very fishy. Henry tied up the boat and got out to catch some frogs for bait. But he was too big and slow. He tried to cover them with a landing net, a method I have seen commended in Forest and Stream. But it is a poor way. Henry only succeeded in breaking the hoop of the landing net. There is a knack in catching frogs, as in almost anything else. You mustn’t be too fast, but you must be fast enough. The very best thing to catch frogs with is what a man is likely to have along with him most of the time, his hand. One can get within caution. Move the hand out slowly to within about 18 inches of the batrachian, then dart it out as swiftly as possible with a grab and the game is yours. Do not try to put the hand down on the frog from above or you will miss him, but start straight at him like a flash. The guide said he had never seen it done that way. We soon had frogs enough. By the way, do you know that frogs eat each other? One day, several years ago I was filling a bucket with them for a fishing trip when I discovered a big bull sitting stolidly in the sun, on a lily pad, with the feet of one of his smaller brethren sticking out of his mouth. The conclusion was inevitable. Frogs are cannibals. They eat their own kind. 

But to get back to the Manitowish River. Where the water swept under the bushes in the bend I dropped a green frog. It had hardly gotten out of sight when there came a good tug on the rod. The fish was fast and after a fair fight lay in the boat, a three-pound pike. A friend of his escaped with the next frog after being hooked and played for at least five minutes. Then I put on a diminutive croaker, not much bigger than the end of one’s finger. It was an unattractive little fellow but had barely gotten into the water when it was seized. I thought at first I had a bass, but when the fish came into the boat I found it was a pike, and out of its mouth came the frog of which I had been robbed a few minutes before. Talk about greed. That pike was an old glutton. He was not content with having been swung around on the cold hook for several minutes, but wanted a second frog with steel sauce. I do not believe, from this and similar experiences, that a fish suffers from being hooked in the mouth. We stopped at several other places, and when evening came had a good string of bass and pike, but were less than half way to the dam. But we reached a place where an Irishman had found a bit of pine land which had been overlooked and had homesteaded it. He was a shrewd son of Erin, had a good sized clearing for a garden, a fairly comfortable log shack, and was building himself the beet house I saw in that country. He made us welcome. His good wife cooked us a hearty supper and we spread our blankets on the floor of the half finished new house. The night was frosty. Indeed, they had frost every month last summer up there. That is not unusual. We were not that night, or any other night, troubled with mosquitoes. It was getting too cool for them. Don’t go into northern Wisconsin in midsummer. The fish won’t bite then the mosquitoes will. Life will be a burden. You will remember your trip as a nightmare. Camping out you will consider a delusion and a snare, and the joys of fishing nil. But when the frosty nights and clear days of late August and September come on, quit grabbing for gold, get north where the air in bracing and spicy with the breath of the pine woods, and a cuddle down on the generous and kindly breast of old mother Earth. You have something to live for if you never yet been sung to sleep by the northern pines.

The next morning we got an early start up stream. At many of the bends in the river the water has scooped out the sandy bottom and made a hole a few yards square and from 4 to 10 feet deep. The bushes usually hand low over these, and sometimes catch drift. The current slackens at these points, and here are the favorite lurking places of the lustiest small-mouth bass it was ever my good fortune to hook. A green frog dropped above and allowed to float just under the edge of the drift or bushes would, in nearly every case, call forward a bronze warrior of superb fighting qualities. It takes good work to keep these fellows from fouling the line, their life in swiftly running water seems to make them more muscular than their fellows in the lake. They have the advantage of the current, too, against the rod, and make good use of it, so that the gith with one of them is always a lively one.

We reached the dam about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. When we pulled the fish out for inspection, there were 44 of them. Six were muskellunge, caught in a little lake, really but an enlargement of the river the heaviest of these weighed 6lbs. And they averaged 3lbs. There were 19 small mouth bass; the heaviest weighing 5 lbs. And the smallest 1 1/4 lbs. Here were 19 pike – good fellows– total weight 86lbs. Not bad for a little more than one day’s fishing. Indeed, I began to feel that I was something of a fish hog, with that fine string, until I thought of the poor stay-at-homes and started Henry off down the river to hurry the fish away on the night express to the fellows who could not go along. 

At the dam is a logging camp. In summer it is comparatively deserted. But Captain Henry of Eau Claire one of the genial gentlemen whom it does one’s soul good to meet, one of the chief lumbermen of that region had turned this camp into a sort of summer hotel, so that it was a pleasant, unique stopping place. The Captain’s family was there for a few weeks’ outing. There was Jack the “clerk” of the hotel, Charley and Johnnie the [Jewish] cooks, Perry, the dam keeper, with several other attachees of the place. There was a handful of guides waiting for the pecunious sportsman. There were several other fishermen there, among the number E. Vliet, general ticket agent of M.L.S. & W., and the American Consul General at Constantinople. 

This lumber camp is a peculiar place, a building constructed of huge pine logs– the whole perhaps 70 ft long and 30 ft wide. The comb of the roof is about 12 ft from the floor. The roof runs from end to end of the building, but the building itself is pierced through the middle with an open passage way or “alley.” Along each side of the large room are two rows of bunks. The place will accommodate 75 or 80 men in the logging season. With plenty of blankets and a good bit of hemlock browse for feathers, it was a fine place to sleep. And when the day’s sport was over the fisherman and guides gathered about the big stove in the center of the long room, to talk over the haps and mishaps of the day. 

Captain Henry and his land-looker, Mr. Smith, came in one day from a trip they took to inspect some timber, reporting that they had found a good sized little lake which was not on any map. Mr. Smith had furnished a hook and line from his pocketbook and the Captain had with a cranberry for bait, caught a green bass off the shore. With a piece of this for bait he had another in tow when the hook broke. He said they could see hundreds of ravenous fellows in the clear water, and proposed that we go after them. Loading a boat with tent, blankets, and a generous supply of provisions, we started – the Captain, Mr. Smith, Hugh, the captain’s boy, nine years old, and myself. Our way lay through Rest, Stone, Spider, and Island Lakes, the latter the most beautiful of the group. Then for several miles up the outlet of Big Lake, pushing our way among fallen trees and over shallow places, camping at dusk beside this outlet at the point where we would leave it in the morning to push over way through the timber to the newly found lake. The tent we soon pitched, the coffee boiling, the bacon fried, and the welcome supper earthen, not, however, before the floor of the tent had been shingled with plenty of fragrant balsam boughs. The first thing after pitching a tent is to fix a good bed; supper can wait a little, but it is a poor plan to delay fixing the feather bed. 

Lying there that night the Captain told me of the strange life the lumberman leads. In his early life, he was a landlooker and cruiser. All winter he and his partner would travel through the woods, sleeping at night in a tent, with the snow for a bed, the mercury way below zero, a simple A tent over them, open at one end to let in the heat from the big fire built in front. The wages of such work were very high, and so he got his start in life. Then he told of the life of the men on the drives in the spring, working fifteen or sixteen hours per day at the hardest kind of toil. It is not the life of a sybarite that these hardy men lead, and if they are rough and reckless sometimes, perhaps the exposure and hardships of their life may have something to do with it. One thing is sure they have generous hearts, and the sportsman who fail among them is royally treated, provided always that he is not a braggart. The fellow who knows it all and can do it all is as much of a nuisance in a lumber camp as anywhere else. 

We were lulled to sleep by the lapping of the little stream beside which the tent was pitched. When the gray dawn came it was raining. Instead of being ready to start at daylight through the timber, it was late before breakfast was over. We could hear an occasional gun up toward Big Lake where the Indians were gathered at the wild rice rice beds. They go every year and harvest the rice. Pushing their canoes among the rice they tie bunches of the ripened heads together, drawing them together from each side, and beat out the grain which falls into the boat. An Indian will gather several bushels a day.  We left the tent snugly tied up, hoping no prowling Indian would disturb it. This was not likely, for Captain Henry had blazed his mark into a couple of trees, and most of the Indians would recognize this mark and would not care to incur the owner’s wrath. Many of these woodman have a peculiar mark of their own, made up of notches and blazes, which they are sure to leave on some tree where they have camped or worked. Smith led the way through the dripping timber, traveling by compass and breaking brush. After him went the Captain blazing the trees, then study little Hugh, the person bringing up the rear with a bucket of live bait. It’s slow traveling in that fashion, and it took us over an hour to go two miles. But it was worth the effort to get there: that little lake was swarming with green bass. We fished only a little while and caught nearly a hundred. If we had a boat and could have gotten out to more favorable places I believe we could have loaded it to the water’s edge in a little while. But what was the use. We had all we wanted to carry back to camp. Some of them would weigh 1 1/7 lbs; none weighed much less than 1 lbs. They were ravenous and gamy. 

There are certainly two kings of big-mouth bass in Northern Wisconsin. In the one kind, mainly the sort we caught in that lake, the lines which define the back and belly are much more nearly parallel, and in proportion to their size these fish are not nearly so thick from side to side as the other variety. They have a clearly defined black line running from gill-covers to tail along the middle of their sides, especially seen when in the water. They have no red ring about the iris of the eye like their chunkier cousins. They always go in schools, and if frightened from amount the lily-pads or an old treetop, will dart away and in a minute come cautiously back to see what it was that frightened them. I never saw the other variety of big mouths act this way, or the small smalls either. It is the other variety that grow to 6 or 8lbs in size, and Smith told me of one lake where they ran up to 10lbs lots of them. I’m going there next summer. Now there is as much difference in these two varieties as between either of them and the small mouth, and no classification is at all accurate which does not recognize these striking differences. 

Our arms and backs ached with the loads of fish when we got back to the tent. It was cold and lowry and we waited till the next morning to return to the dam. It is right certain that the man who is fortunate enough to wet his line in that newly-located lake, next summer, will get all the fish he wants for one day, if he goes about it in the right fashion. How did the fish get into those Northern lakes which have neither inlet or outlet? Perhaps the wildfowl carry the eggs on their feet. Possibly the eagles and fishhawks have dropped yet living fish into these sequestered waters. In these ways it may be they have been peopled so they now teem with finny clans, to the great delight of the fisherman. 

 

Richard Gear Hobbs