Neat old white river video of times gone by!

[fishinwrench]

9 minutes ago, Skeeter ZX190 said:

What year would this have been taken?

Cocaine was a shelf item at the drug store.  So what's that tell ya. 😅

[Al Agnew]

It's so bittersweet seeing these old videos and photos of the White River.  One of my greatest regrets in life is that I was born too late to see the White as it was back then.  

Some things of note:  It's interesting how big, wide, and slow some of those pools were.  Typically, the White flowed just slightly more water than the James where they came together.  The James probably flowed around 500 cfs on average in, let's say, late June, and the Kings flowed another 300 or so,  so the White where these guys were floating it would be flowing around 1300-1500 cfs over much of the float to Cotter.  That's about the same volume as Current River around Van Buren.  But the White was a slower, wider river.  I have some old topo maps showing the contours that are now under Bull Shoals, and they show the river dropped about 2 feet per mile.  That's considerably slower than the Current.  It appears the riffles were still fast, but the pools were long.

Note that none of the smallmouth were very big.  The biggest one on the stringer they held up was maybe 15 inches, and the others were no more than 12 inches.  I really don't think the fishing was any better, if as good, back then as it is now.  Of course, part of that is that the knowledge and equipment was not nearly as good.  But you have to realize that 1940 was only 15 years or so after the big logging boom ended.  Land around the river was eroding, and fish and game laws weren't very enlightened back then.  And everybody ate the fish they caught.

It showed Ray Bergman, fishing editor for Outdoor Life, as one of the celebrities that floated with them.  He wrote a book that is one of my cherished possessions, called "Freshwater Bass".  In it, he devotes one whole chapter and parts of several others to fishing for Ozark smallmouth; the White was one of his favorite places to fish.  He fished with both a fly rod and casting tackle, and talks about how sometimes when he was there the river was up and murky, and they caught lots of fish on casting tackle, but when it was low and clear, he preferred the fly rod.  My favorite chapter was the one he devoted to floating the Buffalo River.  He had arrived at the Owen Boat Line to find the White was high and muddy.  So Jim Owen started calling people (no easy task in the late 1940s-early 1950s!) all around trying to find cleare water.  And finally got a report that the Buffalo was low and clear.  So they loaded up those big boats on those trucks and headed for the Buffalo.  He doesn't say where they put in, but based upon the descriptions, it was either Woolum or Carver.  The guides had apparently never floated it before.  The river was indeed low and very clear, and they couldn't catch much on their usual casting tackle, but Bergman kept seeing lots of smallmouth.  So he broke out the fly rod, but forgot to change his leader.  Hooked what he said was at least a 4 pounder, and it immediately broke off because he was using way too light a "gut" leader.

He wrote that the river was very low, and the guides had to drag the boats a lot.  And then they came to what was certainly the losing reach below Woolum, where most and sometimes all the river sinks underground for three or four miles.  He described it as not having enough water to float an ax chip!  The guides knew they couldn't drag the boats, so they went up and found a farmer plowing with a team of mules, and he used the mules to drag those loaded boats the three miles or so as the guides and clients walked behind!  But like many others, Bergman said the Buffalo was the most beautiful river he'd ever seen...and he wasn't even in the most scenic parts!

[grizwilson]

23 hours ago, gotmuddy said:

I watched it last night, I was thinking there was a version with sound but couldn't find one.

 

[Quillback]

Ad that ran in the 1946 in Popular Science Magazine - according to On the River.