FOREST AND STREAM 
799 
The Grayling In Michig an 
Why and How “The Flower 
Of Fishes” was Exterminated 
— Doubtful Whether any 
Are Left in That State 
By W. B. Mershon. 
Photo by W. B. Mershon 
A FEW SHOTS AT RANDOM. 
(Continued from page 796.) 
book containing English. It is modestly priced 
at twelve thousand dollars. 
While perhaps correctly described as the first 
English sporting book—although it really is not 
the first book in which Englishmen first saw 
their language in print, it is not by any means 
the first book on sports ever written. When it 
v.mes to that Homer himself was not such a 
bad sporting writer, and going back further yet, 
is it not true that descriptions of sport and natu¬ 
ral history furnished the first written evidence 
■of man’s intelligence? How about prehistoric 
man and his carvings and painting of animals, 
so charmingly touched on by Professor Osborn 
in his new book on the “Man Of The Stone 
Age” and in Professor Sollas’ volume, “Ancient 
Hunters?” Prehistoric authors, however, were 
not writing sporting books; they were simply 
setting down the anything but dry routine of 
their everyday life. 
How George Raymond, who died recently at 
Morristown, New Jersey, would have loved the 
book of Saint Albans. He possessed what was 
without doubt the finest library of books on sport 
and outdoor life in America. He told the writer 
a few years since that he intended to keep on 
■collecting as long as he lived, and the private 
catalogue which he issued for his friends re¬ 
vealed what a treasure house his library—a sep¬ 
arate building constructed solely for the purpose 
of housing his collection—contained. This 
library will be a gold mine if it ever comes on 
the market. That is the worst part of making a 
collection, for if the books are not bestowed 
specifically by will, the courts usually order the 
■executors to sell them. Still, what would the 
rest of us do if chances like these never offered? 
Everybody has seen the little side baskets 
which are placed on motor cycles in order to 
give the rest of the family a chance of an occa¬ 
sional outing or spilling. Popular Mechanics 
■now tells of an improvement in the way of a 
side basket which can be unscrewed and used as 
.a canoe. This thing, it says, is attached to the 
main jigger by means of “winged nuts.” A very 
good description by the way, both as to equip¬ 
ment and otherwise for the crew. 
The old steel rod does not enter much into 
the poetry of angling literature, but it does most 
of the prose work in actual fishing life. Perhaps 
the steel rod looks a little bit dilapidated as you 
go over it now. It ought to, from the amount 
■of work you make it do in the summer season. 
A little shellac dissolved in alcohol, a little Venice 
turpentine and lamp black makes a good varnish 
to finish up the outside, but repairs are so cheap 
that the best thing to do is to send it back to the 
Bristol company and receive in return what looks 
like a new rod. The writer has one of these 
rods which he has been using for a dozen years, 
and with which he has caught at a low estimate 
a thousand bass, not including a lot of trout and 
some big pike, going as high as 26 pounds. Don’t 
get indignant at this seeming slaughter, for by 
far the greater number of the fish were returned 
to the water uninjured and still fighting. Yet 
that rod to-day is about as good as it ever was. 
I HAVE noticed the reference to me in Mr. 
Bradford’s article on the grayling. Some 
years ago I gave Forest and, Sream an arti¬ 
cle on the grayling. It was illustrated with the 
last grayling pictures I ever took, and I guess the 
pictures of the last grayling. 
I am certain that the Michigan grayling and 
the Montana grayling are different. I have 
caught both of them. We have repeatedly plant¬ 
ed the Montana grayling here in Michigan, and 
never yet knew one to live through the second 
year after planting, and thousands of them have 
been put in our old Michigan grayling streams. 
Furthermore, the condition of these streams 
are practically the same as when the Michigan 
grayling was the only fish therein, except that 
now brook trout and the rainbow trout are in 
them. 
It is quite generally believed that with the ad¬ 
vent of the brook trout, a fall spawner, that the 
grayling, a spring spawner, met its doom. Un¬ 
doubtedly the brook trout did have a lot to do 
with the extermination of Michigan grayling, but 
another thing that probably had its influence 
too, was the flooding of the streams by the lum¬ 
bermen. The grayling lived in a sandy bottom 
stream. The Upper Au Sable, the Pere Mar¬ 
quette, the Little Manistee, the Black, the Stur¬ 
geon and a dozen more noted grayling streams, 
all sandy bottom, yellow sand streams that flowed 
through the jackpine plains in the northern part 
of the lower peninsula of Michigan. These 
sands were shifting. The grayling did not lurk 
under the bank like a trout but liked the open 
places. You would find them more often in a 
pool in the center of the stream than you would 
in a hole under the bank. 
Now the spring time was the time the logs 
were run by the lumbermen, the head waters 
of these streams would be dammed and once a 
day or once every two days when a sufficient 
head water had accumulated, the dam would be 
suddenly opened and the logs would be swept 
on their way down stream toward the main 
booms within reach of the saw mill. This flood 
would sweep the logs for several miles and then 
subside and leave them until another flood 
picked them up and carried them farther on their 
way. The gouging out of the sandy bottom 
with the onrush of the saw logs, cutting out in 
some places and covering up of others by the 
rush of water, unquestionably destroyed the 
spring deposited spawn of the grayling. 
The last grayling that I, or any of my friends, 
took was on the Black River on June 3rd, 1906. 
The year previous we had taken forty grayling 
from that same locality, a party of six or eight 
of us fishing for a week. We had not expected 
to get more than half a dozen grayling even that 
year, we were on a trout fishing expedition. 
From reading Mr. Bradford’s article one 
would get the impression that grayling were still 
to be found in the lower Michigan streams. I 
do not believe there is a single one left any more 
than there is a passenger pigeon. There is a 
stream in the Upper Peninsula that we have 
known contained a few grayling for a good 
many years. We who have had this knowledge 
have hardly dared breathe it for fear it would 
be fished to death and the last of its race, the 
gentleman of all fish—the aristocrat of our 
streams, would banish forever. A more deli¬ 
cious pan fish never grew, provided it would jump 
from the stream into the frying pan. In other 
words, it wanted to be used very soon after 
taken. It would not keep like a trout for it soon 
lost its delicious flavor. 
We always used small flies and had to play the 
fish delicately as it had a very tender mouth, and 
it rushed and leaped and sideways darted with 
its great dorsal fin as an inverted centerboard 
and sent a thrill to the angler’s nerves. 
Now if logging destroyed our Michigan gray¬ 
ling and Montana graying are the same, why is 
it that they will not now thrive in our streams 
that the logging is now past? If they are the 
same, then it must be because of the brook trout 
which were introduced into these streams that 
formerly were natural grayling streams and con¬ 
tained no other fish. Fred Mather told me as 
far back as 1876 that he had never been able to 
raise Michigan grayling artificially. He said: 
“A grayling will die in water if the temperature 
reaches 72.” Another thing I never yet caught 
a grayling that weighed two pounds, and I have 
caught hundreds and hundreds of them. I have 
had a number that would weigh one and three- 
quarter pounds. I have weighed them time and 
time and again. So when people talk of two 
pound grayling, or over two pounds, I have 
made up my mind that they were guessing at it. 
Warburton Pike, whose “Barren Ground of 
Northern Canada” is a classic and first told the 
world about the great quantity of wild life in the 
barren lands, died recently in England. He went 
from British Columbia to England, hoping to be 
of aid to the mother country. 
