Montana, 1953

My love affair with Montana started in the summer of 1953. My parents took my sister, Nancy, and me on the obligatory western road trip. For our family, it was a big deal: it was the first and only time my dad ever took a vacation of more than a week.

We packed the station wagon and drove off into the sunset, down through Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and up through California, then on through Oregon, Washington, and up to Banff National Park in Canada. Then we came down through Glacier National Park and finally into the heart of Montana.

We stopped at all the usual places, the canyons and national parks. We marveled at the wildlife and western vistas we are all so proud of. All of it was beautiful, but not something that I seemed to be a part of.

Then something happened in a most unusual place.

It was about fifty miles north of West Yellowstone — a little town we stopped in called Cameron, Montana. The population was six, and that was generous. Leonard and Janet McAtee ran the general store and gas station, which doubled as the post office. Next door was Jane’s Café. Just past that were six fishing cabins and the Blue Moon Saloon. The whole town was on one side of the road, with nothing but sage and cottonwood trees on the other side.

We met up with friends of my dad, John and his wife, Pat O’Neall, and we all drove into Ennis for dinner. Afterward, we spent the night in two of the little fishing cabins in Cameron. The next morning, we went fishing. It was July 12, 1953.

John said we would be fishing something called the Salmonfly Hatch. He told us that all the big fish in the river would be very close to the banks, feeding on the salmon flies that fell or were blown off the small western willow trees. He gave my dad and me some large flies he had tied. He called them Sofa Pillows. I couldn’t believe how large they were in comparison to the little flies we used back in the Smokies.

We drove Highway 287 South, which is upstream, toward West Yellowstone. John explained that we had almost missed the hatch, which moves upstream every day. He said, “There are still a few flies remaining at a place farther up the river called the Cow Camp.”

We arrived there about 9:30 a.m. Pat hiked far downstream to fish back up to the car. John took Dad and me down to the river to show us the technique on fishing the salmon flies.

John began his instructions with my dad, and after a few minutes, he took me upstream around the bend and asked if I would mind if he showed me how to do it, and then I would be on my own.

That sounded good to me.

He said, “First of all, don’t walk right up to the riverbank because the biggest fish in the river may be right there in shallow water next to the bank, waiting on a salmon fly, and you’ll spook him.” He said, “Stay back about six or eight feet from the river and make your first cast as close to the bank as possible.”

He demonstrated and immediately hooked a spry rainbow that took off down the river. John followed it, around the bend and out of sight.

My one lesson had ended quickly.

Let me explain that the largest trout I had ever caught in my life up to this point on a fly was about thirteen inches long. It was from Abrams Creek in the Great Smokies in East Tennessee, and I had been so proud of how large it was. I was thinking to myself how exciting it was that the big fish in this river were close to the bank, and it occurred to me that I might hook one without even wading out into the water.

It was one of those perfect bluebird, big-sky Montana days. There was no wind. The temperature was warming, and the scent of sage was in the air. The river was big. I didn’t even know that streams that big and fast held trout. I was in a state of wonderment, and the river seemed mysterious, but in a good way. I was ready to begin solving the mystery.

I tried to do what John had said. My first cast was close to the bank. My next cast was a few feet farther out.

Seven decades later, I still remember my third cast. The fly landed upstream, about six feet from the bank. It was bouncing along the ripple, riding beautifully on the moving surface. Beneath my fly, I saw reflections of wonderful rust-colored stones the size of a fist. Something else, too.

The bottom of the river seemed to move. Was I seeing things? How could that even happen?

I cast again to the same spot. The salmon fly landed and started its ride. When it got near the place where the strangeness had occurred, the bottom of the river moved again and became a huge fish, which rose up and engulfed the fly.

I was completely dumbfounded but in tune enough to know that this fish was enormous. As I pulled back to set the hook, the trout looked to me to be larger than the ones on the tackle shop walls I had seen that morning in Ennis.

I didn’t know what would happen next, but that fish was about to give me a lesson, and part of that lesson concerned my fishing equipment. Back then Dad and I were still using the old South Bend automatic fly reels and glass Shakespeare Wonderods. The biggest downside of the automatic fly reel, and there were many, was that the more line the fish pulled off the reel, the tighter the drag would get. It was designed for the small creeks back east where most of the fish weren’t large enough to pull line out.

Here on the Madison River in 1953, that was not the case. The instant this fish knew he was hooked, he went on a wild tear across the river.

It is worth mentioning here that the Madison is wide—very wide. It is also moderately shallow, clear, and for the most part, the current is very swift.

I was completely unprepared as this monster fish tore across the current, accelerating on a mad rush for the other side of the wide channel near an island. I was still standing about six feet back from the bank with no knowledge of how to fight a big fish.

He jerked the rod out of my hands. The rod went sailing through the air and landed on the grass and was being pulled rapidly toward the river. I ran and grabbed the rod just as it slid across the rocks and into the water, which probably saved me tremendous embarrassment later.

By now the fish had gained full speed, the line was sizzling off the reel and cutting across the river, and the drag was getting tighter and tighter. It was a blur: I couldn’t think fast enough to move the lever on the reel that would reduce the drag pressure.

When the fish reached the island on the other side, the drag was at full force, which meant no more line was coming off that reel regardless of how hard the fish pulled.

By now the heavy current in the middle of the river had caught the fly line, creating even more pull on the fish. Between the current, the drag, the big fish, and me, something had to give.

Then the big fish jumped near the far bank. It’s hard for a fish that large to jump. It was more of a slow lunge skyward. The sun was behind me and shining directly on the fish. He was perfectly illuminated in gold, pink, and luminescent brown. Forty yards away was a little twelve-year-old boy from Tennessee who had never been to Montana. He was trying to grow up and prove he was a man by landing this monstrous fish.

Then the line went slack. The fish crashed back down into the water. The hook had pulled out. In fact, the hook had straightened out completely. The fish was gone, and the Madison was back in equilibrium—but my life was not.

A few minutes earlier, I had been a well-rounded boy on a family vacation. In a matter of seconds, Montana and fly fishing and big trout and big skies and every other big thing out here had me in its grip. The rest of that week only reinforced it.

For the next six days, the boy from Tennessee saw broad Montana valleys framed by snow-capped peaks all around. In every one of those valleys there was a magnificent river running swift and cold. In each of those rivers there were trout — and the entire land seemed like magic just waiting to be discovered.

I had grown up with the Lone Ranger, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Cisco Kid radio programs. Here in the Madison River Valley, I saw real Montana cowboys who looked the part. They ran cattle in the valley in the winters and the high country in the summers with fall roundups just as in the old days.

There were still a few ranchers alive out here in their eighties who had been little kids when Custer was wiped out at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And there were a few older patriarchs still alive on some of those ranches whose fathers had settled the valley, fought for water rights, saw the advent of fencing, and witnessed the death of the open range. The golden age of the cowboy was long gone, but not in their minds. And not in my twelve-year-old mind, either.

There were very few fly fishing guides in the early fifties in Montana. I don’t even recall seeing or meeting one. No drift boats, either. There weren’t many anglers at all, for that matter, and those few just waded the rivers. Guides weren’t necessary. There were just miles and miles of trout streams and not many people fishing.

It was too much. I felt as if I had been hit by an earthquake, shaken by the revelation that life is much larger than I had thought. The drive from Montana to Tennessee was a long one for our family, but not for me as I sat in the back seat of the old station wagon and relived, over and over in my mind, each new and exciting moment in Montana. I could not have begun to articulate it at that age, but on some level, I was changed, and I knew that no matter where my future life took me, my soul would forever be in the state of Montana.

 

Excerpted from From Out of the Smokies: Stories of Fly Fishing and Life by Charlie Tombras (University of Tennessee Press). Copyright ©️ 2025. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.