One of the earliest stories about trout fishing in Yellowstone National Park was written by an adventurous East Coast woman. It was 1897 when Mary Trowbridge Townsend’s byline was attached to an "Outing" magazine story simply titled “A Woman’s Trout-Fishing in Yellowstone Park.” The story begins with a very detailed description of the area around the Firehole River, a waterway where she said there was “the finest trout-fishing in the Park.”
From a river’s beginnings in the snow-capped mountains to its meeting with a ocean, it is common for its courses to have more than one name—No Name Creek flows into a Rock Creek, joined by a Boulder Creek, and so-on down the river. At the Wyoming’s “Wedding of the Waters,” just south of Thermopolis, however, a river simply changes its name from Wind River to Bighorn River—same river, no joining of tributaries, just a different name.
One hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries was created to investigate commercial fish decline and oversee restoration efforts.
“God did never make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling,” wrote Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler, published in 1676. Though written in the archaic English of the mid 1600’s, The Compleat Angler remains one of the most reprinted books in the English language.