of inches shy of six feet, not an un-oiled joint in his lean whipcord body. He always looked like he was moving fast, but he was really always moving slow, and smooth, and effortlessly. I never have met anybody who gave more the impression that he was in a terrific hurry, while he was really taking his time. He had nondescript brown hair, pale ice blue eyes, and, man, he was the inventor of Smile Disease. As I learned later, he could talk you out of your socks (or any other piece of apparel), and was a bit of a devil with the ladies. He had that “Aw, shucks, ma’m, my hand isn’t really there” cowboy way that snaps like a mousetrap on (especially Eastern) girls, but he was very quiet and polite about it. Jim had been raised in the Sandhill Country of western Nebraska, a ranch kid, and was a couple of years older than most of us. He had graduated from the University of Wyoming down in Laramie, and spent the past year teaching school over in Dubois (here pronounced Dew-boys), a settlement just over the mountains northeast from Jackson. What he wanted to do with his life was, “Well let’s just go look, and see what happens,” but, hard as he worked at it, the keen intelligence under his hat was hard to hide. He had the Western hat and the Western boots, and he drove a garbage pick-up truck for the park. Said it was a good job for the summer, because he got to meet a lot of girls in the campgrounds and parking lots.
We headed into the yard, piled into Jim’s old rattletrap Ford (made back when you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was black), and, trailing oily smoke behind the black and orange bucking horse Wyoming license plate, turned north on the main park road towards the Jackson Lake Lodge. I was a bit surprised, because nobody seemed to have any fishing gear.
After five or ten miles, when I thought I had better mention that we had forgotten something, Dick looked at Jim, Jim looked at Dick, and Jim said,” Well, Steve, here’s how we go fishing up here in the Tetons of a Sunday afternoon. First we go up to the Willow Flats below the Lodge, and Larry here will show us how to really catch trout. Then, after we cook and eat ‘em, and rest a while from our labors, it gets to be about four or five o’clock in the afternoon, and we go up to the bar in the Lodge, and sit there, and have a little drink, and go fishing for the girls who work up there. It’s early in the season yet, just beginning, but I think it’s going to be a good year. “
This was the second summer in the Park for all three of my companions, so I thought I better just follow along and work it like they said. Sounded good to me.
It took us about a half-hour to reach the Jackson Lake Junction. On the way, I got my first look at the crystal blue waters of Jackson Lake, the largest lake in the park. Across the water to the west soared the flat-topped Mount Moran, girdled by glaciers, and with a distinctive oxide-colored natural dike running down its upper east face. Mount Moran was currently best known as the peak into which an airliner had slammed during a winter storm a few years earlier; the bodies and parts of the plane were still up there. The mountain was named after the great early painter of the American West, Thomas Moran. Strangely enough, Moran never saw ‘his’ mountain from its most dramatic, Jackson Hole, eastern side, but he did get to paint it from the west.
Thomas Moran, a rather mousy and timid-appearing Philadelphia engraver, British-born, had been engaged as the back-up artist on the Hayden expedition of 1871. Led by the Director of the US Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Ferdinand V. Hayden, the expedition set out to document the wonders of the region that included what was to become Yellowstone Park. Moran formed a close partnership and friendship with the expedition’s photographer, William H. Jackson, and Moran’s watercolors and later-executed oils of the geysers, steaming pools, colored rocks, lakes, and Yellowstone Falls and Canyon, substantiated by Jackson’s photographs of the same scenes, created a sensation back East, and at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. This incontrovertible documentation of the scenic marvels of Yellowstone played a significant part in the creation of our first National Park and the subsequent treasures of our National Park System.
Moran did not accompany the Hayden expedition’s foray into Jackson Hole, south of Yellowstone in 1872. He turned further south, to paint the Grand Canyon, but Hayden named Mount Moran in his honor. Moran himself did not see the Tetons until 1879, when, with a military escort, he approached, and painted the range from the western (Idaho) side.
Between the Jackson Lake road junction and the edge of the lake were the Willow Flats, a low and somewhat marshy area where a number of small streams threaded into Jackson Lake. Jackson Lake is, actually, just an extremely wide place in the Snake River, which enters its north end, and flows out through a small dam to the south-east. It was here that I got my first taste (or, more accurately, vice versa) of the big local mosquitoes, or as some called them, the Jackson Hole Canaries. In truth, the tiny no-see-um black flies were much worse, but they weren’t about at the moment. Fortunately, there was bright sun and a pretty good breeze, and the Canaries were a relatively minor nuisance for most of this day. Their specialty, like the Royal Air Force over Berlin, was after the sun went down.
We wandered down along one of the larger streams, lay down in the sun, had a smoke (Luckies and Camels for the locals, Marlboros for the wanna-be cowboys), watched the clouds roll by overhead, and then, when we were good and ready, got down to the serious business of fishing. Dick and Jim had, between them, in their pockets, a half-dozen fish hooks and about twelve feet of line—in six pieces of unequal lengths. The three of us dapped (British fancy fishing language for “dipped”) short lines in the water, baited with worms I dug up from the soft soggy ground with my pocket knife. But this was only a diversion from the main event, and we never did catch any trout that way that day.
What really was going on was this: Larry would sneak up to the stream bank, on his belly, absolutely silently. In slow motion he would push his arm over the bank, into the water, and underneath the grassy overhang. Then he would sort of wiggle his fingers in a motion I never was able to master, and that he called “tickling the trout.” Jim later told me that what he was actually doing was stroking their bellies, and mesmerizing them. In about 15 minutes he had flipped a half-dozen small brookies onto the bank, and that was all there was to it. I have heard of people catching fish with willow wand rods, reed-woven nets, bows and arrows, and fish spears, but I have never seen anything like that Flathead friend of mine that afternoon. The only thing I could compare it to was in my Western stories, where the young braves would slip in among the pony herd, and steal them silently away, while the enemy camp slept on, unawares.
We gutted and cleaned the trout with our small knives, spitted them on willow sticks, cooked them over a small, smokeless fire right on the stream bank, sucked our greasy fingers clean, and soon were lying, contented, on our backs again, smoking and talking, resting after all that hard work.
I already knew that Jim’s job for the summer was driving the garbage truck. Larry, it seemed, was just passing through for a few days, on his way to work on assignment with a fire-fighting crew based up in Yellowstone Park to the north of the Tetons. Dick, it turned out, was a major player on the real trail crew. These were the experienced hands who did not come back to Park Headquarters and the bunkhouse each night, but lived for days and weeks at a time high in the mountains, at tent camps or winter refuge cabins, or under the sky, working the back trails in the high country. Their year-round park staff supervisor, Buddy, who was in training to get his deer that next fall by running it down with a hunting knife (and he did it, too; his explanation was that it wasn’t so hard, all you had to do was to keep moving after it until the deer became exhausted and lay down), would drop in on them every once in awhile, but they were largely on their own, and had to really know what they were doing. The other trail crews, such as the one I would be joining, were regarded by that elite as sort of rear-echelon soldiers.
As we lay there, a little groggy from the sun and the trout, Jim began what I soon was to recognize as one of his school-master-type discourses.
‘The reason they call that bay up around the east side of the lake Colter Bay, is in honor
