Bass Fishing

Bass fishing is an American invention. The largemouth bass — Micropterus salmoides — is native to the rivers and lakes of the Mississippi basin and the southeastern United States, and for most of human history nobody tried to catch one on purpose. Indigenous peoples netted and speared them; European settlers ate them when they had to. The idea of pursuing the bass as a game fish — catching it for sport, for the fight, and putting it back — is younger than the railroad.

The father of American angling is Izaak Walton, whose The Compleat Angler, published in 1653, made fishing a contemplative act and a gentleman's pursuit. But Walton wrote about trout and chub, not bass; the bass country was still wilderness in his lifetime. The sport of bass fishing begins in the 1860s, after the Civil War, when the new railroads made the lakes of the Northeast and the upper South reachable from the cities. The first artificial lure specifically for bass — the Haskell minnow, a painted metal fish with a jointed tail — was patented in 1859. The first bass club, the Boca Grande Club on Lake George, was founded in 1880.

The twentieth century turned bass fishing into an industry and a culture. James Heddon carved the first commercial plug on the bank of the Dowagiac River in Michigan in 1898, after he tossed a small piece of wood in the water and watched a bass strike it; the Heddon company still sells lures today. Lauri Rapala carved his balsa minnow in Finland in 1936, and the Rapala Original Floater became the best-selling lure in history. The spinning reel, invented in France in the 1930s, reached America after the war and made casting easy. The bass boat — a flat-bottomed, outboard-powered, electric-trolling-motor-equipped platform — was invented in the 1960s and turned the angler into a mobile hunter.

The man who turned bass fishing into a professional sport was Ray Scott. In 1967 he organized the first bass tournament on Beaver Lake in Arkansas, with 106 anglers and a $10,000 prize; the next year he founded the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society — BASS — and the tournament trail that became the Bassmaster Classic. Scott invented catch-and-release as a tournament rule, and the practice spread to the point that, today, nearly every bass caught in American water is released. The largemouth bass has been introduced to every continent except Antarctica, and the American sport of bass fishing has gone with it. For the empty nester, bass fishing is the rare hobby that is both a quiet morning on the water and a lifelong study of weather, structure, forage, and the moods of a fish that does not care whether you are there.