190 Book of the Black Bass. 



British works on angling. It certainly has not been used 

 there within my recollection. For a century the British 

 angler has used the single-action reel for all branches of 

 fishing. 



James Lane Allen has shown that the good people of 

 the bine-grass region of Kentucky exhibit many of the dis- 

 tinctive traits and customs of their English and Scotch- 

 Irish ancestors; but in no feature is this heredity more 

 pronounced than in their love for angling. With them, 

 angling is the outward manifestation and practice of an in- 

 herent and inherited attribute,, and is in no sense a fad or 

 hobby. 



Black-bass fishing, as an art, had its origin on the his- 

 toric soil of Old Kentucky, in that particular portion 

 known as " God's own country " — the blue-grass section. 

 It was especially the counties of Fayette, Bourbon, Wood- 

 ford, Scott and Harrison that were renowned for their 

 skilled anglers, who fished the then famous streams of the 

 Kentucky Eiver, its tributary, the Elkhom, and the Lick- 

 ing, Stoner and other adjacent waters. 



At that time the Kentucky Eiver was a free-flowing 

 stream, without dams between Frankfort and its mouth. 

 It abounded in black bass, pike-perch (called " salmon"), 

 pike and occasionally a mascalonge. I have seen heads of 

 the three last-named species from the Kentucky, Ohio and 

 Tennessee rivers, preserved as trophies by old-time anglers, 

 from fish which must have weighed almost forty pounds. 



ilost of these anglers were among the best and brightest 

 and most intelligent and cultivated men of that period, 

 who adorned the several professions or were the lordly 

 proprietors of vast domains of perennial green. Among 

 others may be mentioned the well-known Kentucky fam- 

 ily names of Clay, Bedford, Hume, Brown, Morris, Bibb, 



