Troubled Tributaries

Troubled Tributaries reveals how Alberta’s early fly fishers joined together in their settlements, towns and cities, to fight for conservation now and the future.

Anglers knee-deep in Alberta’s mountain streams after the First World War understood that there was something wrong. Coal mining, forestry, and irrigation were industrializing landscapes. Roads and railways brought unprecedented numbers of people to remote fishing grounds. Once home to abundant runs of cutthroat, mountain whitefish, and bull trout, the Bow, Highwood, and Oldman Rivers, and their many high mountain tributaries, were in crises.

Up and down the Eastern Slopes, anglers rallied to defend their watersheds. The ensuing fish fights were not peaceful. Deep disagreement on tributary closures, open season dates, environmental protection, regulation and enforcement raged among fishers. But despite their disputed viewpoints, Alberta’s anglers agreed to advocate fiercely for the conservation of their rivers and streams.

Troubled Tributaries reveals for the first time the work—and the controversy—of fisheries conservation in the Eastern Slopes of Alberta’s Rocky Mountains from 1900 to 1930. It is a story of passion and commitment, of the struggle to balance nature’s use and preservation, and of people coming together even when divergent viewpoints threatened to break them apart. This is the story of the first round in the great fight to save Alberta’s western trout kingdoms.

George Colpitts is a professor of History specializing in environmental history at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Game in the Garden and Pemmican Empire.

Troubled Tributares is proudly published by Bighorn Books

In conservation we are so focused on looking down the path to the future we rarely cast a glance over our shoulder to see where we came from. George Colpitts’s book Troubled Tributaries does that for us. The book is a compelling history of early trout conservation in southern Alberta, from a frontier era of abundant, but evidently shrinking aquatic resources. What Troubled Tributaries chronicles is a critical snapshot of time. This period set the stage for further exploitation, management decisions, and conservation efforts leading to today’s urgent trout recovery efforts. This book is a must read for conservationists, biologists, anglers, and especially politicians who make decisions about trout conservation today.

—Lorne Fitch, author of Streams of Consequence and Conservation Confidential

In this modern-day conservation call to arms, George Colpitts takes readers back 100 years to expertly chronicle challenges that faced early efforts to protect distressed Eastern Slopes fisheries. Troubled Tributaries tells a prescient tale disturbingly like the current state of trout conservation in Alberta. Resource exploitation, self-serving user groups and other special interests, and politics-driven management decisions continue to threaten the future of trout just as they did in the early 1900s. Colpitts’s solution: principled anglers must lead the fight just as they did last century. Hear hear.

—Bruce Masterman, author of One Last Cast: Reflections on an Outdoor Life