THE OREGON SPORTSMAN 107 
more than most strangers will care to undertake. But waist-deep and 
shoulder deep the Rogue River angler of the first class will do. How 
he does it is an art not taken on at once by the stranger. Little by 
little the local man learns the bottom of the river—iearns how to 
balance against it. There is quite an art in wading fast water, and a 
skillful mountaineer will cross a river where a tenderfoot would lose 
his footing at once. It is enough to say that the successful Rogue 
River angler must be game to go in above waist-deep and be able to 
stand securely enough to cast a very long line, even when thus half 
submerged. 
The fish have grown cunning of late years. They lie entirely out 
of reach from the shore. Wade your best, you yet must do fifty, 
sixty or seventy feet of line, and must keep your wits about you all 
the time. The fish itself has no mercy on tne angler; and, in turn, 
the angler himself feels at liberty to beach a steelhead whenever he 
gets the chance. 
Sometimes large takes are made, but of late days the man who 
kills half a dozen steelheads in a day is doing very well. His fish 
may run from three to eight, ten, or even twelve pounds. These larger 
fish in this bold and rushing water are, under the conditions that 
ubsolutely govern the sport, almost impossible to stop. Skillful anglers 
are content if they kill one out of every six that strike. Indeed, take 
steelhead angling all the way through, the angler rarely breaks fifty 
fifty with his quarry. 
There are two schools of Rogue River steelhead anglers—those 
who stick to the fly and those who take to the spoon. The spoon used 
on the Rogue River is a singular affair, always of copper and very 
large—about the size proper for muskellunge angling in the Middle 
West. Once in a while a genuine salmon will strike one of these 
spoons, and cases have been known where forty-pound fish have been 
killed by a trout angler. This spoon is usually handled as the frog 
fisherman for bass works his frog bait—by means of a giant cane pole 
and a line about as long as the pole. 
You will see some of the local anglers—once in a while mere 
boys—wading down the middle of this river, at times making a cross 
ing from side to side; and every moment you expect to see them 
rushed downstream, and: so an end of it. But they pick their way 
along gingerly, slowly, more than waist-deep very often, sometimes 
supporting themselves with the butt of the cane pole—the reel is com- 
monly put up five feet or so above the bottom of the pole in order to 
keep it dry. As such an angler wades down the stream he flogs the 
water on both sides as far as he can reach, and is able to fish very 
handily the fast waters and the heads of pools lying below the rapids. 
It is perhaps true that more steelheads are caught on the cane pole 
and copper spoon than in any other way. Let no effete Kasterner sneer 
at this sport, for the betting is ten to one that he himself cannot 
practice it. The art of holding one’s footing on the smooth rock or on 
the uneven lava surfaces is one not picked up in a day. 
The lesser school of steelhead anglers stick to the artificial fly; 
in fact, they are salmon anglers par excellence, though they are 
obliged to wade in order to angle—they cannot, as in the case of many 
Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Quebec and Norway salmon waters, 
fish from the shore or from a boat. 
The steelhead acts very much like Salmo salar; but, being a little 
more active and not quite so heavy as his greater cousin, he will hang 
more to white water and less to the pools. At the bottom or at the 
edge of some long, rough ridge of white water, where the waves run 
four or five feet high, he will lie behind some protecting rock, much 
