Cutthroat Anglers

[Diane Merkel]

I have no clue about anglers, but this story sounds fishy for several reasons:

What’s going on?

Cutthroat. It sounds like a pirate term, but it’s really a kind of fish that western anglers go gaga over.

In a new book from Patagonia, Greg French’s “The Imperiled Cutthroat” is an impassioned saga.

Yellowstone was the world’s first national park and from antiquity to today, a fishing mecca. The cutthroat that live there are descended from Pacific trout, which, about two million years ago, divided into rainbow trout and cutthroat trout. (Rainbows generally have 58 to 60 chromosomes, cutthroat always have 66).

French’s book is an extensive travelogue through the prairies, streams, mountains and tributaries of Yellowstone’s 3,400-square mile vastness. He compares it to modern-day Mongolia, a place of unspoiled beauty just beginning to feel the effects of angling pressure.

Cutthroat fishing even played a small role in Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. Many of his men were recreational anglers. Indeed, one, Major Benteen, was known to Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull’s men in their Lakota language as, “the officer on the big white horse who carries a fine fishing rod.”

When one of his Benteen’s battalions, under the command of General George Cooke, got ambushed by Crazy Horse and had to scramble for cover, even though they got separated from the main force, many fortuitously missed the massacre at Little Big Horn. On the very day Custer’s 200-plus men were wiped out, a band of Cooke’s men, unknowingly, were two rivers over, fishing cutthroat.

Article: www.capecodtimes.com/sports/20160504/fishing-around-whole-lot-of-quackery

Diane

[tubman13]

Diane,
As an aside the Cutthroat are greatly now endangered due to the introduction of Lake Trout, by misguided fishermen. Much like the Snake Fish introduced in the Mid-Atlantic streams and rivers by the Chinese which are playing hell with the eco-balance.