Trout Culture

How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West

Jen Corrinne Brown

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780295994574
• eBook ISBN: 9780295805818
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Biological Sciences

From beer labels to literary classics like A River Runs Through It, trout fishing is a beloved feature of the iconography of the American West. But as Jen Brown demonstrates in Trout Culture: How Fly Fishing Forever Changed the Rocky Mountain West, the popular conception of Rocky Mountain trout fishing as a quintessential experience of communion with nature belies the sport's long history of environmental manipulation, engineering, and, ultimately, transformation. A fly-fishing enthusiast herself, Brown places the rise of recreational trout fishing in a local and global context. Globally, she shows how the European sport of fly-fishing came to be a defining, tourist-attracting feature of the expanding 19th-century American West. Locally, she traces the way that the burgeoning fly-fishing tourist industry shaped the environmental, economic, and social development of the Western United States: introducing and stocking favored fish species, eradicating the less favored native "trash fish, " changing the courses of waterways, and leading to conflicts with Native Americans' fishing and territorial rights. Through this analysis, Brown demonstrates that the majestic trout streams often considered a timeless feature of the American West are in fact the product of countless human interventions adding up to a profound manipulation of the Rocky Mountain environment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMwEkKj9jg

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Headwaters
• 2. Trout Empire
• 3. Trout Culture
• 4. Trash Fish
• 5. Lunkers
• 6. Wild Trout
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index