The Johnny Appleseed of browns, brookies and rainbows had a less-than-secret obsession with black bass- largemouth and smallmouth, mostly. Born in antebellum Baltimore, he moved west to Cincinatti and then Wisconsin, where he made a home on Lake Oconomowoc, west of Milwaukee. The lake became his adopted pen name as he wrote articles for national sporting magazines, while studying the behavior and reproduction of the bass that lived there- observations which would inform their culture, allow them to be propagated in hatcheries, and replenish stocks ravaged by pollution and market fishing.
He wrote The Book of the Black Bass, he wrote an autobiography- in which he spends practically no time describing his experience in the west, establishing the Bozeman trout hatchery and building the legendary Montana trout fisheries of today.
Maybe that tells us something.
