From Whence We Came…

There is no denying the influence of the British on my pursued passion of fishing the dry fly. Despite various mentions both here and in England of casting common wet flies which were taken upon the surface before sinking, there are British patterns specifically designed to float which were tied and known as early as 1850, and likely earlier.

Much of our American development of dry fly fishing practices occurred here in the Catskill Mountain region and on neighboring waters in northeastern Pennsylvania, beginning near the close of the nineteenth century. We too have our early tales of fishing wet flies dry, but the major developments came as a result of Theodore Gordon and his correspondences with the British dry fly maestro Frederick Halford. Gordon influenced local anglers with his flies, tied in accordance with Halford’s theories and modified per Gordon’s own trials and observations on Catskill rivers. I cannot help but be curious as to whether Theodore Gordon tied and fished any patterns in that older soft hackled dry fly style.

Our best information on Gordon is still John MacDonald’s 1948 collection of his notes, letters, and articles published in England’s Fishing Gazette and some early American sporting journals. “The Complete Fly Fisherman, The Notes and Letters of Theodore Gordon” is an interesting book, one I have read twice to date, and it gives us our best glimpse of one of our true fly fishing icons. I have no recollection of any mention of the combination of stiff cock’s hackle and softer gamebird hackles to collar a fly to be fished upon the surface. It will take another reading and a search to see if there is something included which memory fails to recall.

Recently, I wrote about an excellent article on this soft hackle style of dry fly sent to me by a friend. The author found a number of patterns of this style published by Frederick Halford in his listing of one hundred best flies. It seems likely that at least one or two of these would have been included in the dozens of sample flies Mr. Halford mailed to Mr. Gordon.