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  President Harry Truman, with a Puget Sound "blackmouth", and Governor Mon C. Wallgren to his right, abourd the M.V. Olympus in 1945.   Once attracting about as many participants as the combined attendance of Seattle's three major league teams, salmon fishing was Washington's first major league sport. In past years this state's catch exceeded the combined sport salmon catches of California, Oregon, British Columbia and Alaska. Since then, Washington anglers often choose to travel to British Columbia or Alaska to catch salmon - many of which originate in Washington! In Washington's Sport of Kings the development of salmon angling...

Mona Bell, probably in 1936 on her world cruise. The location is not identified.   EDITH MONA BELL WAS BORN JANUARY 13, 1890, IN EAST GRAND FORKS,  MINNESOTA, AN EASTERN SUBURB OF GRAND FORKS, NORTH DAKOTA. SHE WAS ONE OF THREE CHILDREN OF ESTHER M. MOLSON AND HENRY H. BELL. The Bells owned a grocery store, which Esther ran most of the time because Henry traveled for his job building grain silos. Mona later would tell her son that her father was an alcoholic and, when home, frequently was drunk. Mona always was tall for her age, and she grew into...

    A Poaching Client Q: What's your least favorite kind of client? LaFontaine: Definitely the hard-driving types who consider the fish as an object is my least favorite client. Let me tell you a quick story. It's fairly well known around West Yellowstone. I was guiding on the Madison. I guided there for four years. In all my years of guiding I've only had two bad clients. I love to be with people. One of these two bad clients came in, told me his name (let's say his first name was Stephan), and said, "I'm hiring you to be...

 Early Years in an Angling Paradise       Sportfishing came to the region we will call "Trout Country" during the nineteenth century as privileged persons sought untainted waters from which to enjoy salmonid populations. Many of the sport fishers, and therefore fly fishers, were from the old world. Little record on sport-fishing in western America was kept through the nineteenth century, but anglers such as William Drummond Stewart and Sir Rose Lambart Price, sport-seeking British noblemen, related to European civilization the wonders of western trout populations. One of the first accounts of an American fly fishing western waters comes...

  The world is replete with examples of fisheries that once were. Whether it be bluefin tuna, coral reef fishes of southeast Asia, the northern cod of eastern Canada, Atlantic salmon throughout most of their range or the chinook and steelhead runs of California's Central Valley and northern coast and the Columbia, to name but a few, the story has been the same. The human animal has consistently placed a lower value on fish than the economies that have grown to compete for them and, eventually, against them. The end result—each generation of us lowers the bar and redefines a...