We had now about as many fish as we cared to carry to camp, and started back up river. On our way we met Lieutenant Thompson, of the Third Infantry--also a member of our party--who had left camp about the same time we did, and we stopped and watched him fish awhile. The lieutenant is a veteran fly-fisherman, and it is a pleasure to see him wield his graceful little split bamboo rod, and handle the large vigorous trout found in this stream. I had my camera with me and exposed a plate on him in the act of playing a two-pounder while holding a string of six others in his left hand, and though I did not give it quite enough time, it turned out fairly well. He had also filled his creel, and on our return to camp we hung our total catch, with several others that General Marcy had taken, on a pair of elk horns and got a good negative of the whole outfit.
Trout grow to prodigious sizes in the Bitter Root, as well as in several other streams in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Washington Territory. The Indians frequently spear them through the ice, or take them in nets, some of these weighing ten to twelve pounds each. But these large ones rarely rise to the fly. However, Colonel Gibson, of the U. S. A., commanding at Fort Missoula, took one on a fly that weighed nine pounds and two ounces, and other instances have been recorded in which they have been taken by this method nearly as large. They have frequently been taken on live bait, and have been known to attack a small trout that had been hooked on a fly, before he could be landed.
While I was hunting in the Bitter Root Mountains in the fall of '83, a carpenter, who was building a bridge across the Bitter Root, near Corvallis, conceived the idea of fishing for trout with a set hook. He rigged a heavy hook and line, baiting with a live minnow, tied it to a willow that overhung one of the deep pools, and left it over night. By this means he secured three of these monster trout in a week, that weighed from nine to eleven and a half pounds each.
The supply of trout in the Bitter Root seems to be almost unlimited, for it has been fished extensively for ten years past, and yet a man may catch twenty-five to fifty pounds a day any time during the season, and is almost sure to do so if he is at all skillful or "lucky." I know a native Bitter Rooter who, during the summer and fall of '84, fished for the market, and averaged thirty pounds a day all through the season, which he sold in Missoula at twenty-five cents a pound. Of course, the majority of the ranchmen along the stream do little or no fishing, but the officers and men at Fort Missoula do an immense amount of it, as do the residents of the town of Missoula; and visiting sportsmen from the East take out hundreds of pounds every season. But the stream is so large and long, and its net-work of tributaries so vast, and furnish such fine spawning and breeding grounds, that it is safe to say there will be trout here a century hence. The heathen Chinee has never been permitted to ply his infamous dynamite cartridge here, or in any of the streams of this vicinity, as he has long been doing in Colorado, Nevada, and elsewhere, and this fact alone would account for the unimpaired supply in these streams.