Old Missoula

“The Blackfoot Scourge” – ‘Skipper’ Lofting – the E-Bar-L and the Blackfoot River – by Red Smith

Red Smith was probably the widest read columnist to ever write about fishing in Montana. According to Wikipedia, by the early 1960’s Smith’s column reached 275 newspapers in the U. S. and about 225 foreign ones. He began writing articles about the Blackfoot River in 1963, long before it hit the fishing world like a tornado, courtesy of the movie “A River Runs Through It.” A broadly popular sports writer, Smith won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976, something that Chicago professor Norman Maclean could not do. But Smith never won any prizes for his fishing ability. Far from it, he occasionally mocked himself in that regard, which is one of the reasons his columns are highly entertaining even today. When he fished the Blackfoot River, Smith was often accompanied by another man who really was a ‘first class’ fisherman, Colin “Skipper” Lofting.

“Skipper” Lofting was fishing the Blackfoot River for a long while before writer Smith visited there in the 1960’s. Lofting actually lived near the river at one time, trying his hand at the ranching life. He was fortunate enough to come from a well-heeled family, something not uncommon with many others who resided off and on in Montana. The Blackfoot seemed to attract its share of these types, sometimes with varying results. During the decade and a half that Smith wrote about the Blackfoot River, “Skipper” Lofting often resided in the summer at the E-Bar-L dude ranch at Greenough, Montana. He was a son of the renowned writer Hugh Lofting, creator of the Dr. Dolittle children’s books. Hugh Lofting was a soldier who started writing his Dolittle books using letters he had written to his children during WW1. The Greenough E-Bar-L ranch was created about the same time by a wealthy Chicago family (Potter) that recognized the benefits of living there – and still does to this day.

Fabulous fishing in the Blackfoot River was no secret in the early days, but it had to compete with many other popular Western Montana streams and lakes. For example, Rock Creek near Clinton was a more popular ‘Blue Ribbon’ trout stream until the early 1980’s. Still, the Blackfoot mystique seemed to involve more than fishing even in those days. While not inaccessible it somehow managed to retain an element of wistful isolation. The area attracted several extremely wealthy Chicago residents, as well as the sons and relatives of other prominent families who counted their money using strings of 0’s. Think Dupont, Boissevain, Greenough, Clark, Hammond, Lindberg, Hunter, Tevis, Kelley, Koessler, Blair and Brown. Classic educations be damned, as some of their children hove to the saddle and abandoned the complicated lives of medicine and other professions. “Skipper” Lofting didn’t want that life. He spent time as a 15-year-old working on a South Dakota dude ranch and found a calling. Later, as an adult he worked for the Rodeo Cowboys Association, admiring the people in that craft and their credo. He often wrote about them, publishing articles about rodeo life in several prominent magazines. One of his notable articles (as co-author) appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1959, profiling Teddy Roosevelt III and his wife as they trained Labradors.

Fishing was another important part of “Skipper” Lofting’s life. Red Smith often described him in mythic terms that were later reserved for another mythical Blackfoot fisherman, Paul Maclean. When Smith received a copy of Norman Maclean’s book not long after it was finished, he had already extolled the one and only “Skipper” Lofting – “the Clearwater Killer” – “Scourge of the Blackfoot,” for over 10 years in his columns.

In 1963 Smith wrote, “Watching Skipper Lofting wade these streams is the next best thing to watching somebody walk on water. Skipper is a writer, a former steeplechase rider, a former cowboy, a former artist, a former leader of a guitar band, a former bronc rider, who had a ranch on the Clearwater until he went into the Air Force in World War II.” He forgot to mention “Skipper” was a pilot. That column provoked other Montana writers to respond and issue warnings.

Ray Rocene, the iconic Missoulian sports writer for half a century, wrote the following in June, 1963:

“This Will Bring Them”

“This will bring more of the darned furriners in to fish out our waters” was terse comment of [a] native Montanan when he read New York Herald Tribune syndicated column written by Red Smith, sports columnist, of trip into the Blackfoot and E-Bar-L ranch, sent us by John Hutchens[1]. Fishing host was Skipper Lofting called “Scourge of the Blackfoot,” Smith claims he was skunked, after floundering in the foaming Blackfoot rapids and the rolling Clearwater cobblestones. Smith says Lofting as fisherman covers three times as much as any human, “Red” found he was not an animal designed to go on forever leaping from ledge to boulder to fallen log, fighting up cataracts and rapids, whipping every pool into white souffle, following railroad ties not spaced for comfortable walking, wading gravelly runs described as fords, limping back to ranch bruised, troutless and therefore ashamed. . . But that syndicated tale should bring hundreds of visitors eager to fish wild open country, and soon.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/349641365/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

 

The following day Rocene wrote more comments regarding the Smith Column:

“Red Smith has tale of second day’s offensive against rainbow of Blackfoot and Clearwater, “Red” contributing two trout after snapping line off just above hook on two coachmen. Says he fell in the creek, finding the Blackfoot and Clearwater better equipped for throwing a fisherman down and running him over than any in the world. Blackfoot described as roaring stream of deep, heavy water, the Clearwater floored with slippery bottom, skiing one downstream.

“Cedric, 11-inch rainbow featured in first story, who on opening day had batted dry flies back with his nose, opened his mouth and was caught. Eating him easiest about story. Bunyan bug was used to simulate salmon fly and that brought results for “Red’s” guide who knows water and fishes it with single-minded purpose.

“Real Attraction”

“Another “Red” syndicated feature and the rush for Skipper Lofting’s ranch will be on with plenty of New Yorkers eager to fish along side of Air Force veteran, a modest killer always ready to scratch up limit mess.”

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Whether “Skipper” Lofting’s guiding business was a profitable one, Smith doesn’t say. The venerable E-Bar-L dude ranch still survives, with no end in sight. Smith later fished and hunted with Lofting in other places and wrote about it in other columns. The fatal “Attraction” warning issued by Hutchens and Rocene seemed unfounded for a few more decades. Hordes of fly fishermen never showed up, but the 1992 Redford movie would accomplish that task visually when he and Brad Pitt brought the Blackfoot mystique to the screen. Never mind that the screen’s scenery merely imitated the real thing, as did the mechanical fish. “Skipper Lofting,” who then quietly resided in Pennsylvania, may have had some remorse, but “Red” Smith had already passed away. They may have understood that new generations would experience halcyon days on the Blackfoot River with the same reverence that others before them had borne.

Colin “Skipper” Lofting was married to Ida Kerr Lofting for 58 years and lived most of his life near West Grove, Pennsylvania, dying in 1997 at the age of 82. They were parents of a son and two daughters.

 

A website dedicated to Ida Kerr Lofting shares some moments from their past: http://idalofting.blogspot.com/

 

What did ‘Red’ Smith have to say about the Norman Maclean book, “A River Runs Through It.” At least publicly, it wasn’t much.[2]

In 1976 Smith wrote, “The snow and ice were melting in the sun. For the first time in many weeks, the earth was soft underfoot. A cardinal was chasing his wife through the larch trees and the air smelled of springtime. In the mail came page proofs of a book called ‘A River Runs Through It,’ by Norman Maclean, who was Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1973. The first paragraph reads:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in Western Montana and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.

“He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

“As if that weren’t enough to reawaken dreams of days on the Blackfoot in Montana – Professor Maclean’s home stream – here came another book, not page proofs but a finished work of exquisite art. Its simple title is “Trout Flies” and its author, Richard Salmon, is an artist of patience, imagination and noble skills. . . “

 

Several of Red Smiths ‘Fishing the Blackfoot’ columns appear below.

 

Red Smith [6/17 1963]

Trout Fishing In Montana

Greenough, Mont. – Lewis and Clark never had it so tough when they were here. Meriweather Lewis was spoiled by soft living in the White House – he was the Pierre Salinger of his day, secretary to President Jefferson – and his journal is one big bellyache about thieving Indians, voracious “musquetoes,” and such epicurean delights as horseflesh, dogmeat and roots which “seem to posess very active properties, for after supping on them we were swelled to such a degree as to be scarcely able to breathe.”

They thought that was rough, but in 1805 they didn’t have to go fishing with Skipper Lofting, the Clearwater Killer, the Scourge of the Blackfoot.

What’s more, when Lewis paused at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clearwater, he had the young [Indian lady] Sacajawea, the Bird Woman of the Shoshone tribe, along to coffet (sic) him.

No such creature comforts soften existence for the fishing companion of Skipper Lofting. Led by that sworn enemy of the rainbow trout, you scale the mountain and plumb the swamp, you crash through thickets of alder and bramble and thorny wild rose, you flounder in the foaming rapids of the Blackfoot, and skip perilously over the greasy, rolling cobblestones of the Clearwater.

Many hours later you limp back to the E Bar L Ranch, bruised, bleeding, lame, troutless and ashamed. Skipper’s creel is full.

MEAT FOR TABLE

Orders were to deliver ingredients of a fish dinner at the ranch. It did not seem an impossible challenge, for at this early date only a few dudes are in residence, and Skipper said these rivers held trout enough to fill every belly in Missoula and Great Falls. If they did, they still do.

The Blackfoot, plunging southwestward past crag and through canyon, is joined on ranch property by the Clearwater flowing down from the north.

Smack in the middle of the Clearwater’s mouth is one great snaggle-tooth of rock rising from the boiling foam. Lewis made note of this landmark, mentioning that an antelope was killed here to vary the diets of roots and berries. The guy was always thinking of his stomach.

A little above this point, Skipper parked beside a gravelly run which he described as a ford. He eyed his companion’s new rubber-soled waders.

“You really ought to have felt bottom here,” he said. “We want to fish from the other side, and these rocks are like wet soap. Oh, well the Clearwater’s fairly warm here, compared to the Blackfoot. Here’s a stick might do as a wading staff.”

THE LEGS GO FIRST

By sorcery, incantation, prayer and bottomless courage, the crossing was negotiated. At the leader’s suggestion, a dry fly was floated under an alder growing out from a grassy bank. On the second or third cast, there was a tiny spurt of water beside the fly but the hook touched nothing.

“That’s Cedric,” Skipper said, recognizing the fish. “He’ll wait around for us. We’d better go overland to the big river.”

We hiked through a pine grove with an undergrowth of fragrant sage, scrambled up an embankment to a little-used spur of the Northern Pacific, and followed the rails south.

Railroad ties are not spaced for comfortable walking, even if walking in armpit waders could be made comfortable anywhere. It soon became evident that what is true of aging ballplayers and boxers is equally true of eldering sportswriters – the legs go first.

At last the anglers slid down a steep escarpment to the west bank of the Blackfoot.

At this season the Blackfoot is a turgid gray-green, but the river makes a great curve here beside the railroad right-of-way and for 10 or 15 feet out from the bank the flow fed in from the Clearwater is only slightly cloudy.

CEDRIC IS WAITING

The day had begun at 6:30 a.m. It ended about 5 p.m., not because any creels were filled, not because the mid-June sun wasn’t still bright above the snow-dusted peak of Sheep Mountain, but because the human animal is not designed to go on forever leaping from ledge to boulder to fallen log, fighting up cataracts and rapids, whipping every pool into a white souffle.

Skipper Lofting is a cheat. He violates all the rules, casting his fly upon the waters instead of into treetops. He has worked these streams every summer for 30 years. He wades confidently and fast, covering three times as much water as an ordinary human. He is also one hell of a fine fisherman.

He had four trout in his creel, two presentable and two splendid. His companion was – well, er, skunked.

I can’t understand it,” Skipper said. “But the salmon flies ought to be out in a day or so and then you’ll see. Meanwhile, there’s always Cedric.”

 

The above article appeared in the Lancaster New Era on June 17, 1963.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/562562717/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Bblackfoot

 

All Trout Give Up When ‘Skip’ Strikes [6/18/1963]

Greenough, Mont., – Cedric is dead and et. Cedric was an 11-inch rainbow trout that lived under an alder on the bank of the Clearwater River. He wasn’t a bad trout, just mischievous. He waited for fishermen to pitch dry flies his way, which he batted back with his nose, like a soccer player.

He would have made a first rate center forward, but he opened his mouth. Killing him brought a pang. Eating him was easy.

Everything got better on the second day’s offensive against the rainbow of the Clearwater and the Blackfoot. Almost everything, that is.

Skipper Lofting, who had taken only four fish the first day, took ten the second. “I managed to scratch up my limit,” is the way he put it, a modest killer.

His companion, who had suffered skunkage in the opening skirmish, got slightly unskunked. He contributed two trout to the table of the E Bar L ranch. They were not remarkable, except for stupidity.

The Well-Dressed Rainbow

He, Skipper’s companion, hooked two larger trout and broke them off by an ingenious method. For a day and a half he had plunged through thickets and waddled through pools, wriggled across boulders and tripped over logs, casting his fly upon the riffles and waiting poised for the strike quivering with anticipation.

At last there was a flash of yellow beneath the fly. Now! Pour the steel to him! Up came the rod tip, violent as a crime of passion. Up came the line and leader too, snapped off just above the hook.

To do this once is amateurish but, in the circumstances, perhaps forgivable. To do it twice in fairly quick succession is compounding a felony.

There are now two rainbow in the Blackfoot, each wearing a royal coachman size 10 as a nose-ring. Chances are they are the envy of every other fish in the river. The style could sweep the whole Blackfoot Valley, like the Jackie Kennedy hair-do, which apparently was popular with the Flathead Indians hereabout when Lewis and Clark came through in 1805.

“They used combs, of which they are very fond,” the Explorer’s Journal notes, “and indeed, contrive without the aid of them to keep their hair in very good order.”

The Old Swimmin’ Hole

On that second day’s campaign, he (still companion) fell in the crick. He filled his waders, put a knot on his shin, doused his dry flies and soaked his cigarettes into a brown glob.

The water was not warm, in the sense that ice is warm, yet the experience produced a feeling of inward warmth, for this is a guy who has been falling in cricks since early childhood. He has fallen in cricks from Finnish Lapland to Wisconsin, from Alaska to Chile. No fishing expedition is complete without it.

For throwing a fisherman down and running him over, no trout streams in the world are better equipped than the Blackfoot and the Clearwater.

The Blackfoot offers deceptively firm footing, great big rocks free of vegetation, but it is a roaring stream of deep, heavy water that can pick an angler up and flip him like a calf at branding time.

The Clearwater, warmer and milder, is floored with green slime. Caught in the current, you simply ski downstream over soap-slick cobbles, waiting for the splash you know will come. It does.

The Killer

Watching Skipper Lofting wade these streams is the next best thing to watching somebody walk on water. Skipper is a writer, a former steeplechase rider, a former cowboy, a former artist, a former leader of a guitar band, a former bronc rider, who had a ranch on the Clearwater until he went into the Air Force in World War II.

He knows this water and he fishes it with implacable vengeful, single-minded purpose which would intimidate a killer whale. The trout sees him come ploughing up the current, his left hand clutching the willows in lieu of a lifeline, his right brandishing a rod like a night stick.

He is casting a big pink monstrosity called a bunyan[3] bug. This is supposed to simulate the salmony fly, a critter that might easily be mistaken for a Sikorsky helicopter but on the water the lure looks like a lettuce and tomato salad with Russian dressing.

The fish know it’s nothing good to eat, but they also know the fisherman. “Oh hell,” they say, “what’s the bloody use?” and they give up.

 

The above article appeared in the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, N.Y.) on June 18, 1963.

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Old Canoe Paddle Is Free-Swimming Demon [7/4/1964]

By Red Smith

Greenough, Mont. – Old Canoe Paddle is skulking behind a rock in the Clearwater River, picking on bugs and bear and other creatures smaller than he is, and feeling pretty proud of himself. He doesn’t know about the mouthful of barbed steel he’s going to get.

It took two days to locate Old Canoe Paddle, who is one of two rainbow trout marked for death by the Skipper Lofting family of Cosa Nostra. The other lives in the Blackfoot River under a half-uprooted cedar tree. He has won two decisions in two days, but the way he’s been sloughed in the face, he must look like Ezzard Charles after the first Marciano fight.

On the first day, Skipper drove down the hill from the E-Bar-L Ranch to the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clearwater. “The big river,” he said, meaning the Blackfoot, “is flat impossible. You shoulda been here in 1925.”

This was a switch. Usually they say, “you shoulda been here last week,” but it seems that if you want to fish the Blackfoot you should have come any time inside the last 40 years. A few weeks ago, the Blackfoot kicked up its wildest flood in half-a-century. Although the river is receding now, it still looks like a vanilla milkshake, except along the right bank below the mouth of the Clearwater where the current from the smaller stream, hugging the shore, makes a dark stripe of fairly-clean water about 15 feet wide.

Reasoning that a discerning trout could see a fly in this comparatively-clear stuff, Skipper decided the campaign would open about a quarter-mile below the Clearwater’s mouth, at the foot of a big bend. The bank is high here, a steeply-slanting wall of cobblestones, boulders and driftwood tossed up by the flood at least 8 feet above the present water line.

The salmon fly hatch was on, and still is. The salmon fly is a large, emaciated apricot with four translucent wings. In flight he looks like a helicopter with rotors fore and aft. To trout he looks like the Chef’s Special.

Time To Dine On The Lures

For a while, though, the imitation salmon flies being cast on the water looked to the trout like imitations. Then fish began to feed. The lesser member of Cosa Nostra caught a rainbow, big enough to brag about on the Beaverkill or Neversink in the Catskills, but not on the Blackfoot.

Then Skipper began to yip. Every time he yelled, a rainbow leaped high with a hook in his face. Downstream, Skipper’s companion was trying to claw lure and leader out of a tree. He poked a live salmon fly off his neck, flung it out in the current, and watched. Just below an overhanging cedar there was a splash like a fat man going off the high board. The bug departed this world.

The feeding period had lasted half-an-hour and now it ended abruptly. There was another take, but exclusively for Skipper. He took his limit, wonderfully fit, fat trout running a pound to a pound-and-a-half, gaudily painted.

Next day they split up, Skipper returning to the bend of the Blackfoot, the other ploughing up the Clearwater.

It was in a deep pool studded with boulders, that Old Canoe Paddle showed. The guy had been catching and releasing small trout, mostly rainbow, one cutthroat and one German brown. He had never been happier; the phone didn’t ring once. Then he looked up and here was Old Canoe Paddle.

The fish arched out of water like a porpoise at play. His head was back in before his tail emerged, he was that long. Long as your leg. Hell, long as Wilt Chamberlain’s leg. The smack of his tail on the surface gave him his name.

The guy took thought. He sat down and smoked a cigarette. He dried a fly and doused it with gunk to be sure it would float. He was using a Humpie, which is pearl without price in this country, treasured above blondes.

Old Canoe Paddle didn’t treasure the Humpie. He didn’t want the next offering, a nameless thing from Abercrombie & Fitch. He didn’t want Joe’s Hopper, a lifelike imitation of a grasshopper. The hell with Old Canoe Paddle, there’d be another day.

The guy went back and met Skipper, whose creel was heavy. “These are nice,” Skipper said, “but under that cedar tree I got into a monster. I’d forgot he was your fish until he hit. Then I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, here’s where I lose my last friend.’ I could feel he wasn’t well hooked and I tried to play him. When he tore loose, I was almost glad.”

 

The above article appeared in the Indianapolis News (Indianapolis, Indiana) on July 4, 1964.

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Glob of Feathers No Philly Eagle [7/5/1964]

Greenough, Mont. – A golden eagle soared in lazy circles, gazing down with ill-concealed contempt at the fishermen who wallowed up to their navels in the Blackfoot River. Chances are he had never seen anything sillier than grown men threatening the indifferent trout with those long, skinny sticks when anybody knew the way to get fish for dinner was to plummet out of the sky and sink your talons into one.

“That reminds me”, Skipper Lofting, said, dropping his dry fly at the head of a riffle, “you must meet Junior. Chances are you’ll want an interview with him.”

Junior is Baby Bald Eagle, hatched this spring in the top of a huge ponderosa pine a couple of miles up the Clearwater River from the E-Bar-L Ranch. Perhaps someday he’ll grow up to pose as the majestic symbol of American might, with a quiver of arrows in one hand, an olive branch in the other, and a necktie reading “E Pluribus Unum” in his aquiline face. But right now he’s a loafer sponging off his folks.

“He’s not very bright,” Skipper said. “He’s been taking pre-flight training and his groundwork is awful. Can’t seem to get the hang of aero-dynamics. He’ll climb up on the edge of the nest and spread his wings till an updraft lifts him about 18 inches. Then plotch, down in the nest, and he’s all tuckered out. Lies down like a dog, stretched on his side.”

Mama Can’t Read

A fellow don’t like to say it, but Junior is a lousy name for an eagle. He could have been called Sonny, after the Eagles’ quarterback, or at least young Bednarik. But Skipper found him and named him Junior, and that’s that.

Mellow evening sunshine was like honey on the green valley of the Clearwater as Skipper drove up the bumpy, meandering trail. Long shadows mottled the lovely landscape. Skipper led a party of six, including Shammy, a genteel Labrador Retriever the color of a vicuna coat.

“There,” he said, pulling up at the base of a tall, cone-shaped hill, “in that telephone booth.” He pointed to a great, untidy tangle of sticks and debris about halfway up the hill in the scraggly top of a ponderosa. It looked like a poorly constructed outhouse and it was deserted. Suddenly from farther up came the sound of a rusty hinge on a swinging door.

“That’s Mama,” Skipper said, though this was plainly ridiculous. That discordant screetching bore no resemblance to the distress call of Eagle Patrol, Troop Five, Boy Scouts of America, Green Bay, Wis., which was a clear, prolonged cry of “kreee!”

“Mama never read the scout manual,” Skipper said apologetically, “So she doesn’t know how an eagle’s supposed to scream. Come on.”

Solo Flight

Now he was no longer Colin M. Lofting, steeplechase jockey, author, artist, cowboy, bucking horse rider, guitar player, angler and dove shooter. He was Sir Edmund Hillary leading his Sherpas in an assault on Everest.

“Here’s Junior,” he called from the crest. “Do you want that interview, or don’t you?”

Junior was a disheveled glob of feathers in the topmost branches of another ponderosa. His perch was level with the summit, enabling the climber to look him square in the eye at a 40-foot range. Obviously he had soloed to this point from the nest and he wasn’t about to trust himself any further to the insubstantial air.

Shrieking imprecations, Mama wheeled great loops, her head and fantail gleaming white. Some day, no doubt, Junior would be an equally dressy bird but now he was a shabby dark brindle from crown to ankle. He was a hell-of-a-baby, as big as Bobby Ussery, with a Durante nose. How he was ever packed into an egg is one of nature’s mysteries.

Spoiled Brat

“Wonder where the Old Man is,” Skipper said.

“Probably this is his night to go bowling.”

“I don’t think so,” Skipper said. “Mom and Pop are hard-working peasant stock. Scrimp and save, and nothing too good for their son. First time, I saw ‘em, I was fishing the pool down there and one of ‘em came in about six feet over me. It was like a storm shutter sailing over my head. Grabbed a squawfish and flew off and was back in a matter of seconds, just working and slaving to feed this moocher.”

“What does he need with fish?” somebody asked, slapping. “These mosquitoes are big enough to make a full meal.”

“You going to interview him or not?” Skipper said.

“Okay, Junior, what do you think of the Wright Brothers? Think they’ll ever get it off the ground?”

Junior shook his head. It was a considered opinion that if the creator meant eagles to fly he’d equip them with Pratt-Whitney motors.

The above article appeared in The Democrat and Chronicle on July 5, 1964

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Fish Beat Anglers But It Was Close [7/6/1964]

This is being written in the middle of the Big Sky, an airborne retreat after several days of guerrilla warfare against the rainbow trout of the Blackfoot and Clearwater Rivers. Far below, seen in glimpses through the scattered clouds, is the wrinkled but lovely face of Montana, the dark, irregular patches of forest on mountains capped with snow, the Kelly-green meadows soon to turn brown, the tortured gorges where the rivers still run yellow from the floods of a month ago.

The retreat isn’t quite a rout. It might be called a planned withdrawal to positions previously prepared on West 41^st Street, Manhattan. Still, this is no time for the band to break out with the triumphal march from Aida.

To be truthful, in this skirmish in man’s recurrent struggle to prove himself smarter than fish, the fish earned a clear shade.

To be sure, both sides suffered casualties, and the scars being carried home are honorable scars. A sharp-edged rock in the Blackfoot was responsible for the knot on the leg shin where a band-aid covers the broken skin. The scab on the end of the nose is the work of the mid-day sun, not the knuckles of a cowboy in Jonesy’s bar on the road to Missoula. If Skipper Lofting, squiring a daughter down the aisle a fortnight hence, walks with a bronc-rider’s limp, it’s because of the eight-foot boulder that bucked him off as he poured the steel to the rainbow.

Why Men Fish

On a shelf at home is a book entitled, “Why Fish Bite and Why They Don’t.” If memory serves, it is the work of an ichthyological authority at Rutgers and is, no doubt, scientifically sound. Maybe before another visit to this wide and handsome land there will be an opportunity to read it and write a companion work: “Why Men Fish and Why They Shouldn’t.”

Conditions could hardly have been more promising than they seemed at the outset. The Blackfoot was still high from the worst floods in half a century and the waters still looked like something to feed the pigs. The Clearwater, though, was in beautiful shape and the salmon fly hatch was just starting.

A year ago the arrival of these creepy, crawly, ugly, hairy, apricot-colored critters was greeted with joy by the robins swooping above the stream to gobble them in flight, and the fish which sprang feloniously upon the bugs as they hit the water.

This year’s hatch, coming on later than usual because summer was retarded, was the heaviest Skipper ever saw, and he has been fishing this water for more than 30 years. Maybe that was the trouble; even trout can get too much of a good thing.

The Blackfoot was so clotted with feed that the fish didn’t have to rise for their goodies. As a young man with spinning tackle demonstrated, they were lying near the bottom, gorging themselves on sunken bugs.

The young man was encouraged fishing a pool known elegantly to the local trouting gentry as a “swill hole.” It is, in most seasons, heavily populated by squawfish, suckers and other such trash. However, this kid kept hauling out handsome trout, using a weighted hook baited with a wad of live salmon flies.

For the nobler souls floating artificials, there were occasional widely spaced feeding periods when trout of fair size and surpassing beauty, fat and sassy and in gaudy numbers running a pound to a pound and a half, rose to the lures with some enthusiasm. But the brief spells of activity were comparatively rare.

Old Canoe Paddle

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that the big ones got away. Generally speaking, the big ones didn’t come around.

Skipper did put to death the smart-aleck that lived under a cedar tree on the Blackfoot. That fresh punk had been hooked and lost by the expedition’s junior member, hooked and lost by Skipper himself. Then he tried a third time.

He’d been pulling that wise stuff altogether too long,” Skipper said, displaying the colorful contents of his creel.

Unless some Fourth of July bait fisherman from Missoula conked him with a ball of worms, Old Canoe Paddle still lurks behind his rock in the Clearwater.

Old Canoe Paddle is the Sonny Liston of trout, big and ugly, but a reluctant battler. He showed himself just once and thereafter declined all challenges to come out and fight.

 

The above article appeared in The Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, N. Y.) on July 6, 1964.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/137027960/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

 

Trout Fishing In Montana Land by Red Smith [6/28/1965]

Greenough, Montana – West of Great Falls, the car climbed the forested slopes of the Continental Divide, crossed Rogers Pass and started down into the Blackfoot watershed. It was a spotless day coming on to the soft evening. In a valley meadow to the left of the highway a deer browsed alone. A little further on, a beaver sat beside a pond thinking about wood-cutting.

Skipper Lofting was at the wheel, foaming slightly at the lips like an eager colt. For most of his 49 years, Skipper Lofting has led a perfectly normal existence as steeplechase jock, cowboy, saddle bronc rider, author, artist, rancher, photographer, guitar player, song-writer, hawk-trapper, dove-killer and president and chief pilot of Confidence Airlines (one motor, two seats, no paying passengers.)

These occupations, however, are only disguises for the real Colin M. Lofting, trout fisherman. For more than 30 summers he has been coming back to this green valley for mortal combat with the resident rainbow. So when he comes west across the Divide and catches scent of ponderosa pine, muscles jerk, nerves twitch, and a thin froth appears at the mouth.

Soon the Blackfoot was alongside the road, boiling between full banks, milky with silt. At this stage of a tardy summer it was hopeless for fly fishing, but then the car turned left for the E Bar L Ranch, following the Clearwater to its confluence with the Blackfoot. The Clearwater, which flows down from Snow Mountain to the north through a chain of holding lakes, was darkly pure. Skipper sighed with relief and gunned the car up the hill to the ranch, flushing a covey of evening grosbeaks out of a lilac bush just coming to full bloom.

En Garde

Morning was like the evening, sparkling and mild. On the horizon the shiny peaks of Mule Mountain, Crescent, Matt and Pyramid gleamed white. At the highway bridge over the Clearwater, an osprey seeking meat for the table, same as the fisherman, dived and came up empty. It was an omen.

Skipper drove upstream along a rutted trail through meadows and birch groves, pulling up at a spot he had named, out of painful experience, Frustration Point. The river slows and widens here between marshy, brushy banks. It’s a sort of piscatorial pool hall frequented by some of the larger loafers of the rainbows population, but it is armpit wading, a wind can make casting a fly hazardous to eye and ear, and the fish are persnickety about their diet.

“There,” Skipper said, “is a brace of baldpate widgeons, Mr. and Mrs. And there’s Mother Mallard with her son.”

He walked into the stream, flyrod at the ready like D’Artagnan’s sword. The battle was joined. The widgeons took hasty flight. Mother Mallard swam swiftly downstream, glancing back repeatedly to make sure Junior was skittering after her.

First Blood

Half an hour passed. Three-quarters. Skipper was puzzled. There was a sizable hatch of flies out, and this usually brings flocks of swallows and robins to swoop over the water, flying with mouths open like airline stewardesses, scooping in bugs. The birds were absent and not even trash fish were moving.

The expedition moved upstream and down, trying pools proved in the past. Skipper picked up a couple of small, foolish rainbow and released them. His companion waded and cast for exercise. After an hour or so his arm was so tired that, changing flies and trying to thread the leader through the eye he was like a lush with the morning-after-shakes.

It was about 11 a.m. when Skipper raised his first fish. It was a rather tractable rainbow of perhaps ten inches. Oh, alright, then. Nine, Eight? It was breakfast-sized, but he had sad innocent eyes. He was sent home to tell his friends about the bug that bit back.

Soon after, a fly was dropped in a spot that looked promising, though the water is still high enough to obscure the outlines of pools and make “reading” the stream difficult. The guess was right. A fish lived there and resented intruders.

Les Damned Escargots

He played it the way the book says. He hit with a slap. He leaped, all red and shiny. He ran downstream to borrow weight from the current. He sulked, shaking his head. He came up the current slowly, ran again, then yielded stubbornly.

He wasn’t exactly a trophy fish for the mantel piece, not even Willie Shoemaker’s mantel piece. But he was fat and lovely and far too sassy for his own health, eminently eatable. Skipper, who had walked down to the Clearwater’s mouth and worked back up, came along as the fish was being cleaned.

The belly was full of tiny snails.

Skipper had five rainbow in the basket. Four of them looked like something less than predatory, except to a gnat, but one was highly respectable. As the day wore on he added a beauty of a pound or more, rolled and missed two others twice that size.

He said it almost seemed to him that the water might be practically on the verge of becoming nearly fishable. His companion kept brooding about that belly full of snails. When trout are feeding on the bottom they can be downright snooty about flies on the surface. And it’s tough to float a snail.

The above article appeared in The Lancaster New Era on June 28, 1965.

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View of Sports by Red Smith [6/28/1965]

Greenough, Mont. – This is the valley of the Blackfoot River, trout country, where the rainbow can compare favorably in size with Sonny Liston and unfavorably in disposition with Machine Gun Kelley, though at the moment they’re all as coyly elusive as a blonde in a lumber camp. It is also cowboy country, as the visitor can discover by walking into any saloon.

There he will see, instead of a slate with yesterday’s baseball scores chalked on it, a poster with a picture of Jim Tescher stuck like a burr on the bucking horse, Trail’s End, advertising a rodeo down the pike a piece in Drummond or Butte or Wolf Point.

Out here the folk know about Mickey Mantle and the Yankees but the best those characters can hope for is second billing to Dean Oliver. Out here it is an article of faith that Dean Oliver is the greatest living athlete and the chances are he is.

Chances are he is, because it is a simple fact that the toughest athletes in the world are rodeo cowboys and the best rodeo cowboy in the world is Dean Oliver, calf-roper, steer-wrestler and connoisseur of money.

Dean Oliver is a great big hunk of rawhide and whalebone, 6-foot-3 and 200 pounds with the reflexes of a diamond-back rattler, the co-ordination of a black panther and the combative zeal of a sailor on shore leave. For a decade he has so dominated his field that the second-best calf roper in the world, Glen Franklin, has the biggest set of ulcers west of Muncie, Indiana.

At the advanced age of 35 going on 36, Oliver is riding hell-for-leather after the only rodeo record he hasn’t already shattered. In 1960 he won $28,841 roping calves for the all-time earnings record in any event. Starting that same year, he has been world champion roper for five years in a row, another record.

Having won seven roping titles, he shares with Jim Shoulders, the bull-rider, and Toots Mansfield, another roper, the record for the most championships in one event. That’s the mark he’s aiming to break with an eighth title this year. At this writing he and Franklin are running cheek-to-jowl, with about $13,000 each.

Even if Franklin should beat him – and Joe Louis can testify that if you keep on climbing into the ring long enough, some kid named Marciano will come along ultimately to knock you out of it – even if Oliver doesn’t win the roping title, he’ll have his third all-around championship dead in his sights.

Rodeo titles are decided on most money won. Anybody who has won money in two or more events is eligible for the all-around championship. Between roping and steer wrestling, Oliver already has collected about $6,800, the highest total reached this early in the season in 10 years.

With his speed and size and strength, Oliver has everything a bull-dogger needs but for a long time he felt that considering the money he could make with a rope, he’d be foolish to risk disabling injury in Greco-Roman combat with steers. In 1956 when he was defending his first roping title, a buddy named Billy Hogue entered him in a wrestling event by telephone, as a gag.

Dean threw his steer and went on to place with eight of his next nine. That brought him to the big money show in Madison Square Garden where he entered both events. Early in the meet he got far ahead in roping, needing only one more calf to win. Then a steer broke his left leg.

The injury cost him victory in the roping event, which was bad enough. But what was worse he said, “I couldn’t walk and had to take taxis.”

Sometimes, sitting at home in Boise among silver-mounted saddles and championship belt buckles that clutter his trophy room, he can forget the hungry boyhood hours in a soup line in Nampa, Idaho. But he remembers whenever he hears a taxi meter click.

After the smash in New York, he didn’t dog again until the very end of the 1960 season when $28,000 in roping purses had him in position to grab off more swag if he could score in the second event. He tried the steers in the Cow Palace in San Francisco but his timing was off and he couldn’t qualify.

The next year he qualified for the All-Around by winning, $46 bull-dogging in Edmonton, Alta. He was second in the All-Around that year, but took a lot more than $46 worth of razzing from the career doggers. He shut them up by going back to Edmonton and winning both calf-roping and steer-wrestling.

There have been ropers who could win big only with a certain horse. Oliver’s great mount was Mickey, the sorrel gelding off whose back he set the money record in 1960. When Mickey was injured in July of 1963, Oliver bought another horse for a record $5,000 but the mount didn’t fit him. Even so, he repeated as champion with other horses.

After that, nobody attributed his success to a horse. Putting the credit where it belonged, they took to calling Oliver The Rope, though they pronounce it “Wope” because of the way he handles his r’s. They quote a classic line delivered after he got through a rodeo before the showers caught the last runs:

“Golly, I’m glad I didn’t have to draw up in the we-wuns because I sure hate to wope in the wain.”

 

The above article appeared in The Glen Falls Times on June 28, 1965.

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Bright Sunshine Dull Fishing by Red Smith [6/29/1965]

Greenough, Mont. – For two days the pattern was constant – bright morning sunshine and dull morning fishing, maybe a brief flurry of feeding before noon and another about mid-afternoon. Then clouds would build up, thunder would roll down the mountains and the trout would go down for keeps.

The guy with Skipper Lofting forgot what the sun always did to his damask complexion. His cap was a dashing model bought at the pro shop in St. Louis, inscribed “USGA Open Championship 1965, Bellerive CC” it gave him the rakish air of a complete sportsman but his nose peeled down to the kernel just the same.

“A trifle scabby,” Skipper conceded judiciously, “but it makes you look healthy, in a leprous sort of way.”

On the third day the weather socked in. The sky settled down on the tops of the ponderosa pines and dripped. Even swaddled in foul weather gear, the hardy outdoorsmen regarded the Clearwater’s invigorating flow of snow water as they would a broken hip.

For the addict, though, the sight of feeding fish making blips and blurps on the surface pumps enough adrenalin to heat a cowbarn in January. When Skipper had walked upstream and the other was still pulling on waders, trout started working in the rain-spattered pool. Cozy as a blonde in mink, the guy stepped into the stream.

The Game Is On

The Clearwater’s rocky bottom is carpeted with algae somewhat slicker than wet soap. This particular pool is floored with cobblestones that roll under foot, giving spice to the sport. Moving a cowardly inch at a time, the angler teetered out until he could cast to the edge of a strong, curving run. In the chop of the current, a good fish rose with a taunting splash.

The trout waited until the fly had floated over him 15 or 20 times. Finally the drift brought it down exactly to his taste, or maybe he wearied of hide and seek. He came up with a rush, and the game was on for young and old.

The guy had lost his landing net and Skipper had produced a spare with a broken frame inexpertly mended with tire tape. The rainbow had leaped three times and peeled off line on repeated rushes. Now as he was brought to the net, the current folded the broken frame away from him. Twice he slid past before he could be lifted ashore.

Other trout were still on the move. It looked like one of those days that have kept Skipper coming back here for more than 30 years, but in five minutes all activity died.

The Creel Was Empty

When Skipper returned, his creel was empty. He had caught and released several small rainbow. The he had got into a German brown long enough to go 2 ½ pounds but so emaciated it didn’t exceed one. It was turned loose with instructions to practice the Canadian Air Force Exercises.

There was a break for lunch beside a lovely stretch in the woods above the Eagle’s Nest, a huge untidy litter of sticks high in a scraggly old pine. A year ago Skipper, who has a good deal of mountain goat in him, had led a party to a hilltop overlooking the Nest and pointed out Junior, a slop among eaglets. Junior’s parents were trying to teach him to fly but the half-grown bum was too cowardly to solo. Just sat with his face open waiting for the folks to bring him squawfish.

This year the nest is in terrible shape. From the ground, the sky shows through in a dozen places. The joint needs re-roofing, new rain gutters and a paint job but evidently carpenters are as hard to get in Montana as in Connecticut. The hovel was untenanted, but suddenly Mrs. Eagle was wheeling overhead, screaming implications, her head and fantail gleaming white. Judging from the language she was using, she had a home and a new brood nearby.

“Same old story,” Skipper said, “Pop had a good year in squawfish and the old lady insisted on moving to the suburbs.”

Nothing Moves in Water

Usually the meal hours of fish and fishermen coincide. A guy can stumble over boulders and flounder up rapids all morning without results but let him unwrap a sandwich, and the critters start working.

This day was an exception. Nothing moved in the water, but there was life elsewhere. A Bullock’s oriole, gaudy in orange, yellow and black, messed around in a bush beside the stream. Two yellowish birds – not goldfinch, perhaps pine siskins – paused briefly and departed. A hummingbird, treading air, sampled some alder blossoms and moved on.

Overhead, a red shouldered hawk circled, emitting a prolonged, diminishing whistle like a punctured tire.

It was a great day for bird study.

 

The above article appeared in the Lancaster New Era on June 29, 1965.

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Views of Sports by Red Smith [7/1/1965]

Greenough, Mont. – The Bullock’s orioles and pine siskins, the hawks and magpies were more co-operative than the fish, and the last full days on the Clearwater River had degenerated into a bird walk. The weather wasn’t improving noticeably either.

The morning rains had passed but now a wind sprang up, freshening by the minute. It was a cold wind, erratic and gusty, promising a barbed hook in the nose of anybody trying to cast a fly off Frustration Point. Yet the memory of notable victories scored in other years on this broad pool drew Skipper Lofting and his companion irresistibly back.

In the morning Skipper had taken and released a number of small rainbow and one German brown of noble length but as emaciated as a basketball player. The guy with him had one strapping rainbow in the creel, taken as hostage in the day’s opening skirmish. After that first sharp passage at arms, unwelcome peace had descended.

The pair stretched out on the bank, backs to the wind, and watched miniature squalls race across the pool. Nothing else moved. No feeding trout broke the wrinkled surface, no swallows swooped over the water searching for bugs. The big winged apricots called salmon flies, which usually infest the willows in late June to the delight of the robins and the leaping joy of the trout, had not yet appeared in this belated summer.

“Well,” Skipper said at length, “we’ve time for one last shot at the mouth of Blanchard Creek.”

Blanchard Creek flows into the Clearwater just below the highway to Missoula. Skipper plowed through brush to reach the mouth and the other took to the river just below, wading out to a spit of sand and gravel at the tail of a pool.

It was near the outer bank where the current, swinging around a wide bend to the left, piled up against a tangle of dead brush and angled out toward midstream. The river ran dark and deep under a v-shaped opening in the brush.

In the literature of outdoor magazines, Old Doc, the unsuccessful but kindly obstetrician with unclean fingernails, always drops a fly into spots like this with exquisite accuracy and invariably an explosion of water follows. In outdoor fiction trout always explode, they never just try to eat a fly.

In real life, this angler emulates Old Doc faithfully up to the point where his first cast hangs in the shrubbery. An explosion of language follows when he fills his waders floundering after the fly.

This time the fly started straight for the welcoming thicket. It was a thing called Joe’s Hopper, a concoction that might resemble a grasshopper if a grasshopper had a yellow body of fluffy wool. At the last instant, a gust caught it and dropped it daintily into the deepest recess of that opening.

As Izaak Walton is my judge, there was an explosion. Or anyway, a fine big spotch. Something all shimmery gold shot out of there. It was a brown trout, a German brown fit for a Dutch princess. He leaped three times going down the stream, then turned and flexed his muscles.

This was no job for a broken landing net. “Yipe!” yelled the guy at the end of the stick. “Yipe!” he yelled once more, with feeling.

Old Doc, alias Skipper Lofting, came crashing through the jungle. He waded out with an unbroken net. The trout was still strong, fighting the spring of the rod, yielding line inch by grudging inch.

He came past Skipper who stabbed with the net and missed.

“Tell him to hold still,” Skipper said. “Does he know he’s got to stand up for a column?”

He eased the net into water below the fish and trout coasted in. Skipper carried him ashore where he lay fat and tawny on the bank, wearing his spots like medals.

The above article appeared in The Glen Falls Times on July 1, 1965

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Montana Bambi Strikes Romance by Red Smith [7/28/1967]

Greenough, Mont., July 27

It took Lewis and Clark about 14 months to get here from St. Louis. Northwest Orient makes it faster but not much, considering that the flight starts from Minneapolis which is closer. Still, in spite of buffalo herds and hostile Indians, the plane usually gets to Missoula. After that, with Skipper Lofting driving, it’s less than an hour to the E Bar L Ranch on its green hill overlooking the Blackfoot Valley 4000 feet in the sky.

In the next few days there will be fish killed and eaten, tales told and swallowed. Up to now it has been only practice, a few hours flinging flies into the Blackfoot for spiritual preparation, a few tales like the one Chuck Law brought home about the deer who likes people.

Chuck is from California, an annual visitor to the ranch. With his pretty daughter, Caroline, he was jockeying his jeep through the woods hauling a rubber raft upriver to a pool above Box Cannon. Knowing the Blackfoot like the face he shaves every day, Chuck likes to float from pool to pool, saving miles of floundering through unproductive water to reach his favorite spots.

Anyhow, they were twisting and jouncing through the forest when they spotted a lady deer following them. They stopped so Caroline could take pictures, and the doe posed like a lady. Then she came right up to the jeep, looking it over critically but not asking the price. Chuck stroked her nose with the casual camaraderie of a Playboy regular pinching a bunny, and drove on. The deer followed.

While they were putting the raft in the water, Miss or Mrs. Bambi – they never got the name clear – rejoined them. She sniffed about the raft and nuzzled it but didn’t try to get aboard. Caroline offered her some bread which she declined politely; just wanted to be around people.

When Chuck and Caroline shoved off, she waded into the river and swam after them. She plowed along for about half a mile, wading the rapids, paddling through the pools. Then she disappeared, but soon they heard splashing and here she came again, love shining in her doelike eyes.

She made another half a mile while Caroline made wistful calculations. Their buddy-pal was obviously willing to go whither they went, yea, even unto Los Angeles, and she’d make a sweeter pet than Ronald Reagan – but gosh, with all those freeways. . . Anyhow, Caroline had a date downstream with a three-pound rainbow trout (which she played on a gossamer leader in the most skillful performance here since opening day).

At length the doe waded ashore. Pausing on the bank, she turned one long mournful look back at the raft. Then she made her lonely way into the woods twitching her hips.

Some hours later Skipper Lofting and a companion sat on a rock below Cougar Cliff watching evening descend on the river. The water was a pale gray-green, maybe 18 inches higher than it should be at this season because there was no spring this year on the western slope of the Continental Divide. Summer followed winter with only rain in between.

Now and then a feeding trout broke the surface with a goose-pimpling “schlunk!” But there seemed to be no insect hatches of any consequence. After a while the watchers drove back to the hard road and turned up the Clearwater River to a place where the stream broadens between brushy marshy banks. Many times in the past Skipper has committed mass piscicide at this pool which he identifies elegantly as Swill hole.

Fish were only dimpling the surface, and I know plenty of girls with more dimples. The liveliest entertainment was furnished by a lady mallard and four ducklings the size of teacups swimming behind her in tight wing-to-wing formation. Silently, smoothly, they steamed downstream beside the far bank, mom glancing back now and then to snap an order.

A little farther upstream, the Clearwater flows through a big pond called Horseshoe Lake. Under bushes on the shore is a board-walled dugout which Skipper built as a duck blind in 1939. The years haven’t improved it, except for interior decoration. One wall is now ornamented with initials some hunter carved in 1956, obviously when the ducks weren’t flying.

Out in the middle of Horseshoe Lake a beaver swam alone on a long straight line. Evidently unemployment had hit his colony for he wasn’t doing anything. Just paddling around waiting for his check.

The car turned back and paused at the Swill Hole, now occupied by four teal. In a bed of lilypads just above the pool was another beaver. Unlike his loafer brother-in-law upstream, this one was busy, scrounging around among the pads with head and shoulders out of water, then his tail up, then his broad back showing.

Overcome by curiosity, the teal swam over in a body for a close look but he ignored them, working like a beaver. Upstream a muskrat made a long smooth wake across the still water, completed some errand on this side and went back.

As the watchers headed home, a pair of deer emerged from a thicket into a small clearing. In the sunset light, their coats were red as hunting jackets.

The car climbed through a forest of ponderosa pine. It was dark under those great trees, and by contrast the bleeding western sky seemed to blaze and flicker through the branches. Lungs conditioned in the city timidly sampled the unfamiliar air, pine-scented with the sharp freshness of oncoming night.

If you could package this stuff by the lungful and ship it East, it would outsell Manischewitz.

 

The above article appeared in The Philadelphia Enquirer on July 28, 1967.

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View of Sports by Red Smith [7/31/1967]

Bull Session

Greenough, Montana

Bill Potter was telling how it was when he was a kid growing on the E Bar L Ranch and the ratio of fish to fishermen was approximately a million to one as it ought to be, instead of 10,000 to 1 the way it is now. It goes without saying that the fishing was better then than now, just as it was better on the Beaverkill when Harry Darbee was a kid and better out of Gloucester when Captain Ahab was young.

“The bull trout,” Bill said, using the local term for the species known to purists as Dolly Vardon. “Most I ever caught was 72 in an hour. Another kid and I had a bet who could catch the most in an hour. We cut the barbs off our flies and I caught 72.”

The Dolly Vardon is held in low esteem here, being a somewhat less formidable fighter than Whistler’s Mother. However, like Karl Mildenberger and other noted pacifists, the bull runs to sizes seldom approached by the acrobatic rainbow, the wary brown trout, or the stupid but palatable brookie.

“Biggest I ever caught,” Bill said, “weighed 36 pounds[4] and he bit me.”

The Fish That Bit Back

Presumably it was a sneak attack, for Bill Potter is tough and quick. “No,” he said, being also fair-minded, “I started it.”

“You could see a gang of bull trout down in the bottom of the pool,” he said. “That is, you could just see the white edges of their fins. I caught me a small rainbow, put a loop around his gills, and hung a double hook on him.

“Those bulls see what they think is a wounded fish and they go for him, the cannibals. This one hit my trout. I yelled to my father to come help me with him. My father took the pole and I went after the fish. My father kept telling me to get him behind the gills. I tried for the gills and got him in the mouth; they got a mouth you could shoot baskets in. They have three rows of teeth, the biggest ones maybe three-eighths of an inch and sharp as a big rainbow’s. He really chomped me.”

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Reportorial honesty, to borrow a term from television’s Howard Cosell, compels me to the confession that the rainbow encountered thus far on this visit to the Blackfoot Valley were neither so large as Bill’s Dolly Vardon nor so carnivorous. Some of them are dead, nevertheless, for the sun has yet to set on a day that saw Skipper Lofting skunked altogether.

There was, however, one long day when Skipper, casting like a dervish, caught no more than a half dozen trout and only one of them went two pounds. Skipper regards a day like this as skunkage, even though the two-pounder put him into a mighty sweat. For a long time he couldn’t turn the fish in the fast water and when at last he had it played out he couldn’t get his landing net unstuck – he had broken the elastic thong that slings it over his shoulder and had stuffed the handle down into his bustle.

Skipper was pretty limber when that struggle ended, but not too tired to notice that a hatch of small, mottled tan moths was making up. Whenever a moth floated fluttering down a riffle, a trout took it with a slurp. So after dinner Skipper, Johnny Stone, and the Bushmaster went back to work.

The Black-Hearted

Johnny Stone is the jewel of the E Bar L’s crown, the man who does everything for the guests and other animals on the ranch. The Bushmaster earned his name by employing his back-cast to denude stream banks of vegetation. If there is a mullen stalk growing behind him, a clump of grass, a wild rose bush or even a small cedar, his back-cast catches and uproots it. He has been called a greater menace to trees than fire.

Near Cougar Cliffs the Blackfoot swings in a wide turn, making a pool nearly 200 yards long. Skipper took the middle. Soon Johnny, fishing above him, and the Bushmaster hacking away at foliage down near the tail, heard Comanche war cries.

Lofting had stooped to low cunning. He was using spinning tackle – if you’ll pardon the expression – with a plastic bubble for a weight and a big orange salmon fly on the leader. The salmon fly bears no resemblance whatever to the moths the fish had been eating. Indeed, it resembles nothing except an emaciated apricot. Yet it drove those idiot rainbows stark.

In the little time before dark, eight strapping brutes sprang at the fly, bringing eight wild whoops from Lofting. Fortunately, only one was hooked and he got away. Skipper came out of the pool with a thin white froth of excitement on his lips but his soul was pure. In spite of his black heart, he had not taken a fish with the loathsome spinning rod.

 

The above article appeared in The Glen Falls Times on July 31, 1967.

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View of Sports by Red Smith [9/10/1969]

Return Match

Johnny Stone said he had to admit that the fishing had been a mite slow. Then, talking like a guide, he said he had found clear signs that it was on the upswing. Up to a few years ago, Johnny Stone had a reputation for unswerving truthfulness. Chances are he would have it still if the division of responsibilities on the E Bar L Ranch hadn’t cast him in the role of fishing guide to guests eager to prove themselves smarter than trout.

Coming back to the E Bar L is a joy marred only by the absence of Skipper Lofting, companion and leader on all earlier visits. Skipper Lofting didn’t discover the Blackfoot Valley – Lewis and Clark got here ahead of him – but he has fished these waters so long and so skillfully that trout in both the Blackfoot River and the Clearwater instinctively get their guard up when his name is mentioned.

On this trip the companion is a lady who had never before engaged in hand-to-fin combat with any variety of fish, but was game enough to break in the hard way – wading right into the fish’s element and floating a dry fly over the Blackfoot’s sage-green depths.

She went into action without basic training except for a 10-minute rehearsal with a flyrod on the lawn. Johnny Stone, observing that she waved the rod lefthanded, said fine, we’d start at the Vatican.

Lady at the Vatican

The Vatican used to be the home of a gentleman named Pope, now fishing the Great Trout Stream in the Sky. “Wonderful little man,” Johnny Stone said. “A plumber. If you do a picture of what a plumber should look like, that would be Johnny Pope – about five-foot-three high and six feet wide. When he was fishing he sort of floated down like a cork with a big cigar going in his face.

The Vatican is a lefthander’s stretch; the fisherman wading upstream has the woods to his right. In early summer when the snow water is running off the mountains, wading here is like navigating Niagara in a barrel, but this year there has been no rain since early July. Boulders high and dry offer easy footing, for mountain goats.

Johnny and the lady watched with admiration as their companion laid out line in a long, graceful parabola. Then they waded in a little upstream and Johnny helping to smooth her timing, the lady made the first casts of her life, floating a No. 10 humpy along the edge of the run. Drooling, a rainbow seized the morsel.

Up came the rod tip. The right hand controlled the slack line firmly. After brief but spirited resistance, the fish came in all pink and silver. Johnny slid the landing net under him and the lady began breathing again. “I’m going to like this,” she said.

There was a mumble of applause from downstream, where a hundred exquisite casts had aroused no interest whatever. Johnny started fishing and soon had a rainbow which he released. “Not a trophy fish,” he said. As a fishing guide, Johnny lacks one ingredient; he does not hate fish enough to want them dead.

Probably an hour had passed. Of the three rods fishing, one had not raised a fish of any kind. It was shame-making. Then suddenly success.

The trout took the fly in midstream, where the swiftest and deepest current made swirling pockets among the rocks. He was a rainbow close to a pound, and the fast water multiplied his weight. Rather than horse him up against the current, the angler wanted to ease him into shallow water near the bank, but the angler was standing on a high boulder and didn’t dare move. He worked the trout up around a rock and down into the net, missing on the first try but getting him the second time around.

Triumph glittered in the angler’s eye, but deep inside, truth gnawed. The truth was, he had not seen the fish strike and had not struck him back. Unable to locate the fly, he had been lifting the rod tip to retrieve the cast, and he felt weight on the line. He didn’t know whether the trout had taken the fly on the surface or under water. Pure skill always wins.

After a break for lunch, the day slid by happily. A small brown trout was landed and released. There were no hatches of compliments, but at length trout began working on the far side of the river. They were within reach of a long cast but throwing the line across the current created drag that gave the fly an unnatural twist.

“Suppose we drive around over there,” Johnny suggested. “There’s time enough.”

The trip took about 20 minutes. Johnny parked at the foot of Cougar Cliff and everybody slid down a steep bank to the riverside to poison ivy painted in bright autumn colors. Johnny sat on a rock and watched while his companions rigged hurriedly and started casting. He was watching the river thoughtfully.

The above article appeared in The Sentinel of Carlisle, Pennsylvania on September 10, 1969.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/345057464/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

 

The Incompleat Angler Works the Blackfoot [7/6/1973]

By Red Smith

NY Times News Service

New York – The winter was almost snowless on Montana’s western slopes, and with hardly any spring runoff to keep them green the hills are already beige, except where mantled by the dark, dark green of ponderosa pine. In this premature summer, Skipper Lofting said, the salmon fly hatch had already come and gone. The Clearwater was finished for the year and the Blackfoot was lower than he had seen it at this season in 40 summers. Nevertheless, the Lofting Expeditionary Force had assembled two men strong and orders had been issued for a piscicidal offensive against the rainbow, brown and cutthroat trout inhabiting the lovely waters east of Missoula. With only a few days available, there could be no turning back.

Sure-footed as a burro, Skipper led the way across the Clearwater at the Schoolhouse Ford. This is a crossing that would daunt the Flying Wallendas and to attempt it on legs accustomed to nothing more strenuous than riding the elevator to the Yankee Stadium press box is asking for a bath. Somehow, though the passage was negotiated. Wheezing ascent was made to the railroad embankment and the party went stumbling over the uneven ties past the point where the Clearwater joins the Blackfoot and on down that stream to the logjam.

The logjam isn’t there any more and hasn’t been since high water took it out three or four springs ago. It remains a kind of landmark for anglers because a mother bear once treed a fisherman here and he spent hours aloft before she decided he meant no harm to her cub.

“As you remember,” Skipper said, “this bank fishes just about all the way up to the Pinnacle Rock. I’ll go down a mile or so and probably catch up to you about lunchtime.” As soon as he was out of sight his followers sat down thinking about Sugar Ray Robinson and the late Lew Burston. When Sugar Ray was middleweight champion of the world he had a howling holiday in Paris, then went to England and lost his title to Randy Turpin. Lew, who had lived in Paris for years, was not surprised. “After a vacation like that,” he said, “A fighter trains and thinks he’s in shape, but after three or four rounds he’s got Montmartre in his legs.”

No Ambrosia

At length a humpy was set afloat on the riffles. Fished dry, the humpy is just about as reliable a fly for these waters as anybody has tied since Walton. It is a bristly tuft of deer hair that looks something like a cocklebur with a red belly. To humans, that is: to a trout it looks like ambrosia.

It turned out that the Blackfoot trout weren’t having ambrosia that morning. Now and then a fish took a perfunctory slap at the lure but it was like a horse’s tail brushing away flies. Naturally, each little rise triggered instant reaction at the butt end of the rod. Yanked violently aloft, the fly would (A) land high in a tree or (B) break the hook off against a rock or (C) do loops and rolls in the breeze until line and leader were tied in knots that no sailor ever fashioned.

It set a guy wondering: Did Izaak Walton ever find a willow tree with his backcast? Did the wind never fashion a running bowline in his leader? Did he never step on a rolling stone and fill his waders? Of all the valued instruction in “The Compleat Angler,” is there one word of advice on how to remove a barbed hook from the seat of the pants? How compleat was that old crock, anyhow?

Skipper Bares Teeth

When Skipper showed up for lunch a party of strangers with spinning tackle was working the far bank, heaving worms or other comestibles into midstream. Skipper bared his teeth. He is a companionable man who likes almost everybody, provided almost everybody stays away from his river when he is fishing.

He had half a dozen trout in his creel, two or three one-pounders and the others breakfast-size. He said he had seen enough fish to make him think the river was almost ready to come to boil. He had been kept busy releasing little ones. The fact that he had fish and his companion [did not] didn’t surprise nobody. There are several reasons why Skipper is a better fisherman than some. One is that he keeps his fly on the water, where the chances of attracting trout are better than in trees.

The pair worked upstream together after lunch, walking around each other to alternate in the pool ahead. In front or in the rear, Skipper raised fish. His companion hooked and released two little ones. Then he saw a promising rise.

The way it says in the book, he floated a fly over the spot and the way the book says, the trout rose. The way it never says, the strike was missed. The fish was covered again, prayerfully. He took. He was on. He jumped six times by honest count. He wasn’t a big fish, maybe a pound and a quarter, but the fast water gave him added weight, and he was beautiful.

Legs Go First

It was enough for the first day, which was meant for physical culture, anyhow. Limping back to the car with gravel in his wading shoes, a guy remembered a comment offered years earlier by a young lady amused by his heavy breathing during a stroll on the beach.

“With old sports (writers),” she had said, “the legs go first, too, eh?”

 

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on July 6, 1973.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/349783315

Beating the Blackfoot’s rainbows [7/17/1977]

By Red Smith

Greenough, Mont.

As every pescicide knows, the secret of successful angling is to be in the right spot at the right time with the right lure, and since everybody knows this, it is no secret, except maybe the fish. The first foray in Skipper Lofting’s punitive expedition against the trout of the Blackfoot River had met with minimal success because only one adult rainbow had the presence of mind to be in the right spot at the right time and try to eat the dry fly that floated overhead.

That spot was up the river above Godfrey Falls, but there was this big hatch of salmon flies downstream and Skipper said it would be a crime against nature to pass them up. So he and his angling pupil returned to the stretch that had failed them once.

At the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clearwater is a pinnacle rock that Meriwether Lewis either did or did not mention in the Lewis & Clark Journals, depending on which local booster is reading. In Junes past, only the upper part of this shaft was out of water, but the rivers are so low this year that the rock stands on a dry island. Even so, there remains enough water in the Blackfoot to make some glorious green pools, flecked with foam on the surface with great red boulders just visible in the depths. It seemed reasonable that in addition to the permanent residents, these pools would be populated by transients from areas now grown too shallow.

Along here the streamside used to be a steep bank overgrown with alders and wild roses. Now Riverside Avenue is a goat path of boulders, snaggle-toothed rocks and cobblestones just waiting to roll out from underfoot. The expression “fisherman’s luck” was coined here. It means getting home without a broken hip.

In the mud between the rocks are innumerable tracks – the cloven print of deer, the five toed mark of the raccoon and the spidery signatures of many birds. Along with robins and other common residents, a wide variety of birdlife is present right now. Although there is no snow for snowbirds, a slate colored junco hopped across a patch of sunlight yesterday. The Rocky Mountain bluebird is in evidence and there are Wilson’s snipe on the river. A solitary osprey circling overhead recalled an earlier visit to this water when the visitor saw a demonstration of the balance of nature.

At the river’s edge on that occasion he saw a small snake squirming over the rocks with a squawfish about an inch long clamped crosswise between his jaws. At the end of that fishing day, and osprey sailed over on his way home to supper, holding a snake in his talons.

Back among the salmon flies, Skipper and his companion started slowly. Skipper had several of the halfhearted little strikes that had annoyed him on the first day. Then his pupil got a rise and, to his utter astonishment, poured steel to the riser. It is his almost invariable custom to miss the first strike clean. This was a fine rainbow, angry, resourceful and acrobatic, somewhat under the standard size for display over a mantel, but big for one man’s breakfast.

Before that corpse was warm, Skipper was into a beauty. The fish looked dark red rather than pink, when he leaped, and he fought sullenly when Skipper brought him close, his dorsal fin and the fluke of a broad tail showing above water.

“That’ll take care of breakfast easily,” Skipper said. “Probably we should release them from now on. See up there where two currents come together in a V? That’s the classic spot. The big loafers lie there at the V and just collect social security. Give it a try.”

By that time the pupil had ceased experimenting with fly patterns and was relying altogether on the deer-hair Humpy, prime choice of the local rainbow. When it floated down to the point of the V, the water opened and a trout emerged. He was the twin of Skipper’s fish. He would have gone free, except that it took so long to get the hook out of his bony jaw that he probably could not have survived. He made it an extra-large breakfast.

Those three fish brightened the morning. Sitting on a rock and munching a sandwich at the lunch break, neither angler had reason to think the afternoon would be different. The afternoon was dynamite. Hardly ever could any fish be seen working, but flies dropped on promising water brought almost instant response. The sun was still high and hot, creating conditions not usually considered ideal, but in spite of that the fish were on the feed and the game was afoot.

Evidently the little fish had tired of toying with the lures, or else they had been sent off to play while their elders took charge, for those that rose were all fine fish. They were challenging trout, too, not to be put down by a small disturbance. Standing on one boulder, Skipper took three fish from the same pool, one after another. Standing on another rock, his pupil lost three.

 

The above article appeared in The Winona Daily News on July 17, 1977.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/414220323/?terms=red%2Bsmith%2Bgreenough

 

Trout hooked by Skipper only get lecture, cracked lip [7/20/1980]

By Red Smith

Greenough, Mont

Skipper Lofting had reported by phone that the fishing was six to five and pick ‘em. One day big trout would be moving and next day would be dead. The Clearwater was in good shape, but the Big Blackfoot was still discolored and too high to wade.

“But I tried it yesterday, anyway,” he said. “I really killed ‘em between the old log jam and the pinnacle rock.”

When Skipper says he killed ‘em it is purely a figure of speech because he hardly ever kills a trout unless the trout pulls a knife on him. He means fish have come to his fly and been sent home with a lecture and a cracked lip.

“By the way,” Skipper said, “be sure to stop in Livingston for those Medicare Moccasins I told you about.”

Livingston, Mont., is a many-splendored community noted for Dan Bailey’s fly and tackle shop. The shop is across the street from the railroad station and in the days of rail travel, passengers frequently leaped from the train as it slowed to a stop, raced across the street and raced back with a fresh supply of fan-winged Royal Coachmen and Quill Gordons. Dan Bailey has the patent on Medicare Moccasins, a pair of ordinary city-type rubbers studded with metal cleats. They fit over wading shoes and they save souls in the Clearwater. This streambed may not be the slipperiest west of the Continental Divide, but anyone who wades it with ordinary hobnails or felt soles must wind up with a wet bottom, a fractured hip and a vocabulary that will doom him to perdition.

With next-to-no snow on the western Rockies last winter, there was little run-off to raise the streams, but spring brought cold, incessant rains accompanied by thunderous electrical displays. As all anglers, ichthyologists and rod-and-gun columnists know, nothing puts trout down so efficiently as a thunderstorm.

Skipper Lofting knows it as well as anyone, but he used to have a ranch on the Clearwater, he has fished the river for donkeys’ years and its inhabitants do his bidding. One day recently he fished an hour and a half with lightning blazing around his head and thunder shouting. He hooked and released a 19-inch brown and a rainbow only slightly smaller.

The skies were still scowling and grumbling when two of Skipper’s disciples checked into the E-L Ranch at Greenough, Mont. The fisherman had been there six or eight times before, the fisherperson only once in 1969, the year of the “miracle Mets.” It was September, and although the Chicago Cubs went into that month with a fat lead in the National League East, day by day Tom Seaver, Ron Swoboda, Cleon Jones & Co. chewed into the leader’s margin. One Sunday a two-column head in the sports section of the Missoulian read:

“Cubbies’ Lead Shrinks as Expos Bomb Fergie.”

“Who are the Shrinks?” the fisherperson asked. “A local team?”

On this visit the fisherperson had a new graphite flyrod to try out, but not on the first day. On the first raw day, only a fish would have entered the water willingly. By sundown, though, a patch of blue over Sheep Mountain hinted that summer might be coming in at last. When it came in the next morning, Skipper and his party were already navel-deep in the Clearwater.

As dictated by local custom, fisherman and fisherperson chose the Humpy as their original offerings. The Humpy has had feature billing on the menu of trout in these waters for years. Dan Bailey now sells what the catalogue describes as an improved version called the Goofus Bug, but it looks like the same old lure, a hump-backed concoction of deer hair with a red or yellow belly. It floats cockily, isn’t difficult to see on the water, and seems to bring out the killer instinct in Western trout.

This day, however, the Humpy only entertained the fish, who slapped at the fly with amused indifference. The fisherman missed a strike, missed another and hooked a rainbow too young and inexperienced to merit piscicide. (When starvation threatens, even the all-merciful Lofting kills enough small fish for breakfast, but not that small.)

“I’ve got something,” the fisherperson said, “but I can’t take it off the hook. What is it?”

It was a six-inch chub. A few minutes later the fisherperson deceived and hooked a rainbow trout about the same size. She released this one unaided, murmuring small, comforting sounds as she eased it back into the water. The fisherman killed one rainbow for breakfast.

Skipper was upstream covering the pool created by a wide bend in the river. From time to time he was seen wading to the bank, as though to net a fish. When he rejoined the others, there were four breakfast trout in his creel and a German brown of about 17 inches. He does not kill fish that big, but the brown was bleeding badly when he brought her to net and he feared she could not survive.

She was a lady, heavy with roe. “I’m sorry, Gretchen,” Skipper said, dressing her out.

Three birds soared in circles overhead. In the bright sunlight, one displayed the identifying color of a red-tailed hawk. Another was that great fisherman, the osprey. The third, chunky of body and short of wing, would, no doubt, have been familiar to Roger Tory Peterson. The fisherman was reminded of an earlier day on the Clearwater when he almost stepped on a tiny snake with a two-inch squawfish crosswise in its jaws. Later that day he saw an osprey heading for home, carrying a snake in its talons.

This is known as the balance of nature.

 

The above article appeared in the Southern Illinoisan on July 20, 1980.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/79475009/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Blofting

 

Red Smith died in Connecticut in January of 1982. He was 76 years old. According to his obituary in the N. Y. Times he had a 55 career as a journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976. The Times obituary stated the following about the gentleman who gave us a few snapshots of Blackfoot fishing with “Skipper” Lofting:

“In the college textbook ‘A Quatro of Modern Literature,’ between an essay by Winston Churchill and a short story by Dylan Thomas, there is an example of spot-news reporting by Red Smith. It is a column on a heavyweight fight between Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano, written on deadline. It is the only piece of journalism in the anthology, and the only sports story.”[5]

Below are several chronological links most regarding Red Smith articles about fishing the Blackfoot River:

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 6/17/1963

https://www.newspapers.com/image/562562717/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Bblackfoot

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 6/18/1963

https://www.newspapers.com/image/137530159/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 7/4/1964 – “Old Canoe Paddle”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/312093224/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Bblackfoot

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 7/5/1964 – “Glob of Feathers”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/137026580/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 7/6/1964 – “Fish Beat Anglers”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/137027960/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on rodeo 6/28/1965 (Dean Oliver – rodeo)

https://www.newspapers.com/image/347002184/?terms=red%2Bsmith

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 6/29/1965 “Dull Fishing”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/561306342/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on fishing Blackfoot 7/1/1965 “Last Day”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/347008068/?terms=red%2Bsmith

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/27/1967 “Montana Bambi Strikes Romance”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/179838883/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Blofting

https://www.newspapers.com/image/136595409/?terms=bill%2Bpotter%2Bskipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/31/1967 “Bull Session – Bill Potter’s 32 pounder”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/346938791/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 8/2/1967 – Falling down in Rivers while fishing

https://www.newspapers.com/image/30445791/?terms=red%2Bsmith%2Bgreenough

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 9/10/1969

https://www.newspapers.com/image/345057464/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on animals in the Blackfoot 9/14/1969

https://www.newspapers.com/image/435170033/?terms=red%2Bsmith%2Bgreenough

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/6/1973 “The Incompleat Angler Works the Blackfoot”

https://www.newspapers.com/image/349783315/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Blofting

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/9/1973 – “The Blackfoot Trout Strike Back”

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1973/07/09/99155496.html?pageNumber=45

Red Smith – Article mentions Norman Maclean’s book – 2/22/1976

https://www.newspapers.com/image/570957757/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Bnorman%2Bmaclean

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 6/26/1977

https://www.newspapers.com/image/350348242/?terms=red%2Bsmith%2Bgreenough

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 6/28/1977

https://www.newspapers.com/image/149380885/?terms=skipper%2Blofting%2Bblackfoot

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/17/1977

https://www.newspapers.com/image/414220323/?terms=red%2Bsmith%2Bgreenough

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/31/1977

https://www.newspapers.com/image/570988043/?terms=red%2Bsmith%2Bgreenough

Red Smith – Article on fishing the Blackfoot 7/20/1980

https://www.newspapers.com/image/79475009/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Blofting

Article about Red Smith by Phil Smith (Great Falls Tribune) – 1/18/1982

https://www.newspapers.com/image/240036546/?terms=%22red%2Bsmith%22%2Blofting

Article about Skipper Lofting by Edwin McDowell – 1967

https://www.newspapers.com/image/117469079/?terms=skipper%2Blofting

Rocene on Lofting – 1963

https://www.newspapers.com/image/349641365/?terms=skipper%2Blofting