From Banning TNT to Scanning DNA

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Banning TNT Scanning DNA

FROM TO

What 100-plus years of fisheries management says about Montana and its people. By Amber Steed and Tom Dickson

12 MAY–JUNE 2017 FWP.MT.GOV/MTOUTDOORS

LEFT TO RIGHT: MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY ARCHIVES; MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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ou can learn a lot about Mon- fish, they have always insisted that the state economy. That resource extraction could tana’s changing values and prior- maintain abundant populations. How the damage water, soil, native vegetation, and ities over the past century by Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Fisheries fish and wildlife was of little concern—at first. Montana’s window of seemingly instudying the state’s literature, art, Division has responded to that challenge over the past century is a story of evolving exhaustible natural resources was brief. and politics—and fisheries management. It’s true. How Montanans regard their public values, scientific breakthroughs, and Bison, elk, beaver, and other land animals were nearly gone from most of the state by streams, rivers, lakes, and fish populations— political leadership. the late 1800s. Fisheries suffered, too. and how the state has responded—underExplosives, seines, poisons, and other scores a growing appreciation of and desire Extract at all costs to protect these and other natural resources. Trout conservation was the last thing anyone destructive or large-scale harvest methods People have always wanted to catch fish considered in the spring of 1886, when, on rapidly depleted trout populations. New in Montana—from trout in remote mountain the first log drive down the Blackfoot River, dams stopped fish from reaching spawning lakes and scenic valley rivers to, in later 20 million board feet of timber was sent waters. Irrigators drained creeks to water years, walleye and other species in vast downstream to the Montana Improvement crops in late summer. Communities used reservoirs. Historically, Salish and Kootenai Company’s Bonner mill. At the time, and streams as sewage canals. As early as 1891, Indians captured spawning bull trout using for decades thereafter, Montanans sawed, the U.S. Fish Commission reported that it willow traps and rock weirs. In the late 19th mined, and plowed as much timber, miner- “did not find any fish” when netting the century, commercial fishermen netted als, and prairie as possible to feed the state’s Clark Fork near Deer Lodge because of truckloads of trout for local markets. Fami- increasing population and fuel its burgeoning toxic runoff from copper smelting upstream in the Butte-Anaconda area. lies in the early 1900s used hook Intent as they were on building and line to fill baskets of fish to stock their larders. towns, railroads, dams, mines, Recreational angling also has and more, it took a while for Mona long history here. “I amused tanans to notice that fish stocks, myself in fishing,” Captain Meripreviously so abundant, were wether Lewis wrote in 1805 after dwindling. One of Montana’s first catching westslope cutthroat fishing regulations, passed in trout below the Great Falls of the 1899, made it illegal to use dynaMissouri River. Today flotillas of mite (known as “giant powder”) drift boats moving down the for “catching, stunning, or killing Madison, Bighorn, Yellowstone, fish.” Other early regulations and Bitterroot Rivers in midrequired a license to fish, registrasummer embody that passion. tion of all fish ponds with the For some anglers, fishing for naBoard of Fish and Game Commistive species—cutthroat trout and sioners (established in 1895), fish EARLY PERSEPCTIVES ﬔe journals of Lewis and Clark (above) were the first documentation of the northern Rockies’ abundant fisheries. sauger especially—has become a screens on irrigation intakes to Early settlers and then recreationists, like these at Yellowstone pleasure in itself. prevent stranding fish in hay National Park (right) exploited the resource, assuming it was limitless. No matter why Montanans fields, and that mills stop dumping

MONTANA OUTDOORS

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