159 
April, 1922 
upon the possibility o£ building up and 
maintaining good angling. A careful 
limnological investigation showed that 
with the exception of food and spawning 
grounds, every other condition (both 
physical and biological) was well suited 
to either the ouananiche or the steelhead 
trout or both. The lack of spawning 
grounds, of course, could not be reme- 
1 died, as both these varieties require 
good-sized running streams for repro- 
duction ; but as long as we would have 
to depend on annual restocking to keep 
up a good supply for fishing, this was of 
little consequence. It was found that an 
ample food supply could easily be built 
up by the introduction of suitable food 
fishes, for the water was swarming with 
the microscopic crustaceans upon which 
these small food varieties subsist. 
Following the report, instructions were 
given to go ahead and develop the fish- 
ing according to plans worked out by 
the investigation, and in the spring of 
1919 smelt fry to the number of 3,500,- 
000 were planted as a preliminary step 
towards reestablishing the food balance 
destroyed by the lake trout. 
On October 29 and 30, 1919, we plant- 
ed in this lake 2,102 steelhead and 1,264 
land-locked salmon yearlings, averaging 
about 8 inches in length. In 1920 we 
turned out 3,072 steelhead and salmon 
yearlings from 6 to 9 inches. The spring 
of 1921 we again hatched and planted 
3,000,000 smelt fry, and in the fall turned 
out approximately 3,000 more of the 
steelhead and salmon yearlings. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Although the writer did not personally 
have an opportunity to fish this lake the 
summer following the introduction of 
the trout and salmon, it was reported that 
many of these fish were taken, weighing 
as heavy as 2 pounds. This is a most 
remarkable growth for the short time 
they had been out — not more than 8 or 
9 months, especially when it is taken into 
consideration that for almost 6 months 
of this time the lake was covered with 
ice, and the growth at these times is 
ordinarily much less rapid than during 
the summer. 
With the opening of the season of 
1921, wonderful reports began reaching 
us of the big fish that were being taken. 
None of the local fishermen seemed to 
know just whether they were steelhead 
or ouananiche, Imt they all described 
them as being “bright as a bar of silver 
and as long as their arms.” 
I T was the middle of June before the 
writer could get the spare time to 
have a whack at these fish himself, al- 
though the distance is only a few miles 
from the Fisheries at Tuxedo. It cer- 
tainly was not a very promising day for 
fishing, either, with a cold, northeast 
wind ruffling up the white caps all over 
the lake. 
Being alone made it even more difflcult 
to handle the boat and the rod at the 
same time, but I finally got the old steel- 
craft away from the shore and the rod 
unlimbered and the line straightened out 
to the proper length. I was using a 
7F2-foot bamboo trolling-rod, large mul- 
tiplying reel carrying 100 yards of black 
silk line and a good-sized nickel spoon, 
with a single snelled hook baited with a 
bunch of worms. This is the trolling 
lure that we have found by long experi- 
ence is the most taking for ouananiche 
and steelhead in our own lakes at Tux- 
edo Park, where thousands of these fish 
have been taken in a single season. 
To make a long story short, although 
I lost a good many nice fish by having 
them jump into the air before I could let 
loose of the oars, grab my rod and get 
control of the line, I succeeded in land- 
ing four fish, running from 2)4 to 4 
pounds. .All of them were ouananiche, 
and never in my experience with this 
fish from many waters have I seen such 
splendidily proportioned, beautifully col- 
ored land-locked salmon. Nor could any 
of the lakes of Maine or Canada have 
produced any harder-fought battles than 
these fish gave me at little Sterling Lake. 
While no steelhead trout were taken 
on this trip, later in the summer I se- 
cured specimens of this trout weighing 
as high as 4)4 pounds, and in color and 
condition and fighting qualities the equal 
of any that ever came out of the Rogue 
River in Oregon. This 4)4-pound .steel- 
head put up one of the hardest fights I 
have ever seen made by a fish of that 
weight, coming out of the water at least 
15 times before being netted. 
{Continued on page 184) 
BOYHOOD EXCURSIONS FOR TROUT 
EXPLOITING THE FISHING POSSIBILITIES OF THE TINY STREAMS OF 
THE NEIGHBORHOOD WAS ATTENDED WITH MANY AN ADVENTURE 
T he very words, “trout fishing,” 
seem to trail the fragrance of the 
wilderness and to murmur the 
echo of its voices. Happy is the 
man to whom they bring up pictures of 
green days in the Catskills or the Adi- 
rondacks, gray days in the Maine woods 
or the Canadian bush, or golden days in 
the Sierra-s. 
And yet I know that when I turn the 
pages of such memory pictures, those 
over which I linger longest, with a yearn- 
ing that is unlike any other, are all im- 
pressed with images of April and early 
May on one or other of a few tiny 
streams lying within ten miles of the 
northerly line of New York City — four 
of them in the Bronx watershed, one 
flowing north into the Hudson and one 
tumbling westward down the long inland 
slope of the Palisades to empty into the 
Tenakill. 
There was, and is, something rather 
perplexing about the presence of wild 
trout in streams so small and so acces- 
sible, flowing through country so thickly 
settled, comparatively, as the region was 
then, and had been, indeed, since Revo- 
lutionary and even Colonial days. Yet 
I do not remember ever meeting another 
By CHARLES BUXTON GOING 
fisherman, or even fishing boy (except my 
own companions of the day), on any one 
of the ecstatic Saturdays in all the four 
seasons through which I watched the 
wild flowers open and the warblers arrive 
along those small Westchester brooks. 
True, the country was rough in a small 
way — hilly, with many rocky outcrops, 
much glaciated — so little tempting to the 
farmer that the wooded ridges between 
village and village were generally left 
wild over areas large enough to afford 
haunts for squirrel, skunk, coon and 
other small fur ; the brush lots made am- 
ple cover for rabbits, and some of the 
wetter swamps harbored bitterns and 
even a few wood-duck. The resident 
population lived on, but not of, the .soil — 
suburbanites, or at most villagers, trad- 
ing and traveling on beaten tracks and 
leaving the spaces between .the network 
of roads little vexed by their feet. 
I wonder, indeed, whether there are 
not trout there yet. There were, ten 
years ago ; but one stream then was 
posted, and two others were tracked by 
a beaten path from end to end, with 
broadly tramped standing places at every 
good hole, and fish were to be caught 
only in second-grade water which might 
be overlooked by any but a minutely care- 
ful angler. A fourth brook — the most 
wonderful because it was the brook of 
first discovery — was completely camou- 
flaged and lost in a garish new villa 
colony. 
E boys were deplorably late in dis- 
covering the trout-fishing opportu- 
nities thus hidden at our back doors. 
Our earlier rovings had extended chiefly 
over the two valleys just ea.st of the 
Hudson, either along the Sawmill stream 
(which held only suckers, chub, redfin 
shiners and similar coarse fish), or more 
to the southward through the big swamp 
wbich is now part of ^^^n Cortlandt 
Park. Our farthest and wildest explora- 
tions eastward and northward ended at 
a winding pond in which there were 
pickerel and big sunfish that would take 
the fly, and a few mergansers which we 
stalked tirelessly, feverishly, and to them 
quite harmlessly, all through the autumn 
and winter. 
Then came Tom Barry, vehement to 
the point of incoherence, with the amaz- 
ing declaration that there were trout in 
McLean’s brook. His story would have 
{Continued on page 185) 
