John Benn - Father Of Steelhead Fly Fishing
The Following is an excerpt from Flies For Atlantic Salmon & Steelhead which can be purchased from Amazon HERE
When I was a young man, I began to do archival research at Seattle’s public library. I was interested in anything that discussed steelhead fly fishing from around the turn of the century. Books that fit the bill were Roderick Haig-Brown’s many fine books, Claude Krieder’s Steelhead (1948), Clark Van Fleet’s Steelhead to a Fly (1951) and, of course, Zane Grey’s Tales of Freshwater Fishing (1928). When I’d exhausted these resources, I became frustrated with the lack of new content, but then one day a helpful librarian brought me an early copy of Forest & Stream. I was enthralled – everything, from cover-to-cover documented this largely forgotten period in our Far West fly-fishing story. This wasn’t just about fishing, but told what whiskey they drank, tobacco they used, clothes they wore, modes of transportation taken and the routes taken by city dwellers to the rivers. The magazine advertised the opium-and alcohol-based patent medicines of the period that could cure every disorder from arthritis to menstrual cramps and must have been the perfect anecdote for a day of poor fishing.
Within these pages I discovered, the name “John Benn,” a person described in a Forest & Stream fishing report as an authority on fly fishing the Eel River for steelhead near Eureka, California. This dated to the early 1900s.
While taking this fascinating tour of the country’s fishing and hunting in the 1900s, I came across an article by a person who wrote under the pen name “Steelhead” and was published during an era when the public was mad for Chinook salmon—called king salmon by many Californians—“Steelhead” knew the truth, that steelhead would “rise to the fly “and would in all ways outfight any other gamefish worth the name. For a half-century I’ve wondered who this Steelhead person was. At the time I learned that “Steelhead” lived in San Francisco. So, too, did John Benn as did his closest friend and fishing partner, John Butler. After a half-century thinking on the matter, I’m convinced that “Steelhead” was one of these individuals.
John Shewey, a masterful modern researcher, provided a more complete history of John Benn and his period in his remarkable book, Classic Steelhead Flies (2015). What began for me as a single name applied to a person and then to a “Coachman,” in Forest & Stream, was now a fascinating biography about a person who must be considered the father of American steelhead fly fishing.
With this backstory, I present Dave McNeese’s re-creations of John Benn’s flies for steelhead, top left to right: Martha, Silver Admiral. Center: Carson, Coachman, Van Zandt, Soule. Bottom: Railbird.
