Lately I have been catching many rainbow trout. Traditionally I fish bass, favoring an aggressive and relatively forgiving fish who is indifferent to my choice of fly or precision of cast. But changing times led me to a new fishing hole that is full of rainbows — that brightly colored occupant of fish hatcheries for the last century and a half.
Now rainbow trout, like myself, are not native Marylanders but instead have a fascinating historical journey that could be paraphrased as “Go East, Young Man!”
The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is a salmonid native to the rivers feeding into the Pacific Ocean in Asia and North America. So how did a fish, whose native range was California to Kamchatka, end up in Maryland?
That was largely the doing of a Harvard educated theologian, the Rev. Livingston Stone.
After spending a few years as a Unitarian minister, the Rev. Stone was driven outdoors and upstream by ill health. In 1864, Stone established his first hatchery, Cold Springs Trout Ponds in Charlestown, N.H., producing food fish for urban markets in one of the first commercial hatcheries in the country.
In 1871, the first federal wildlife agency was created, the U.S. Fish Commission, and Stone was named U.S. Deputy Fish Commissioner in 1872. In that post, Stone was sent far afield to California to open new territory for conservation. After more than a week traveling by rail, stagecoach, ferry and foot to reach northern California’s remote McCloud River in 1872, Stone established what would become the first national fish hatchery, called “Baird Station.”
Impressively, Stone was shipping salmon eggs across the continent back to the East Coast in his first year at the station. The Native McCloud Wintu tribe also introduced Stone and other fish culturists to the previously West Coast-limited rainbow trout, a species that would come to dominate fish hatcheries in the 20th century. Stone wrote the definitive text on "Domesticated Trout: How to Breed and Grow Them" (1873), and soon federal and state fish hatcheries were breeding rainbow trout across the continent to restore depleted fisheries. Stone was a fish evangelist who believed hatchery-raised trout could feed a hungry and growing nation still recovering from the Civil War.
The ascendancy of rainbows was due to two traits. First, as Stone discovered nearly 150 years ago, they are fish well adapted to hatcheries and a wide variety of habitats. Today about 100 million rainbows leave U.S. hatcheries every year. Hagerstown’s Albert Powell Hatchery continues that tradition, producing voluminous rainbows for the whole state. If you have caught a rainbow anywhere in Maryland, there is a good chance it is a Hagerstown native.
The second benefit of rainbows is they are a great sport fish. As a fly fisherman, I can attest that they fight hard and leap high, making even the smallest rainbows a challenge and joy to land.
Today rainbows are found in lakes and streams in every state in the U.S. and every province in Canada, in 45 countries, and every continent except Antarctica. Therefore, the next time you catch a rainbow, remember you have caught a world traveler and a living symbol of the American conservation movement.
Mark Madison is a historian, a Hagerstonian and an avid angler.
September 20, 2020 at 09:45AM
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Chasing Rainbows: A fish tale - Herald-Mail Media
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