Fishermen record oral histories about their sport - The Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Fishing books and scientific papers are generally well preserved, easy to hold onto. But what about the fishing stories people tell and never write down? Not so much, and that worries James Thull, a special collections librarian and associate professor at Montana State University.

“If we don’t capture it, it’s going to be gone,” Thull said.

That’s why Thull has been sitting down with famous fly-fishing authors, artists, government biologists and other luminaries and flipping on a video camera. It’s part of the Angling Oral History Project, which went online last week.

The project is another piece in the MSU library’s Trout and Salmonid Collection, which the library describes as an “effort to create the world’s largest and most comprehensive research center for all information related to the study of these valuable and sought after species.” The collection includes more than 12,000 titles, the papers of famous anglers and digital collections of artwork.

Funded in part by a grant from the Willow Springs Foundation, Thull said he and his team have been working on the project for about two years. They’ve done about 60 interviews, 29 of which are available online now. And Thull said more are on the way.

Interviewees include locals like Bud Lilly, authors like John Gierach and staff from Yellowstone National Park. But the focus isn’t just the American West — one of the interviews online now is with a biologist from Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Thull plans to interview people in Asia while he’s on a trip there later this month. He said their interest is “wherever trout and salmonids exist.”

Many of the interviews use similar questions, like what a person’s favorite fishing story is or what they think about climate change. The conversations range in length. Some are fewer than 20 minutes long while others exceed an hour.

Thull said part of the importance of the project is letting people talk about what fishing is like now, especially as climate change alters the environment, and making sure what people have to say about that is available for posterity.

“It’s about preserving that common experience and the importance of angling in our time,” Thull said.

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