In my early days as a fly fisher, I developed an absurd craving for a bamboo rod. The fact that I couldn’t afford one made the craving even worse. Often I stopped at a tackle shop just to hold a prime specimen and wave it around. I was like the car buff who visits a dealer to sit in an Alfa Romeo he’ll never own. Why do we punish ourselves that way? I wish I knew the answer. I would imagine the huge trout I’d catch and the ease with which I’d do it. It’s only natural to covet a superior piece of technology, I suppose, and Hiram L. Leonard must’ve recognized that when he built his first split-cane rod.
Sparse Grey Hackle, aka Alfred Miller of Catskills fame, once celebrated Leonard as the “father of the fly rod” in a 1956 Sports Illustrated article I came across online. (SI used to cover “upper-crust” sports such as polo, yachting, and, yes, fly fishing at the behest of its blue-blooded founder, Henry Luce.) Sparse’s claim is a half truth, at best, but there’s no denying Leonard’s influence on rod building, even though he took it up belatedly after a lifetime of adventure. Born in Sebec, Maine, in 1831, he grew up in Pennsylvania, where his parents had moved to find a larger market for the oars and paddles they fabricated from ash. In his teens, he taught himself basic engineering and invented some machinery for mining coal, but the dust affected his breathing and gave him asthma. His doctor prescribed a freshair cure, so Leonard returned to Maine and practically lived in the woods for years.
He tried his hand as a taxidermist and gunsmith, but his true calling was as a hunter and fur trader, possibly the only vegetarian one ever. (He also played the flute and bass viol and believed the dead can communicate with us.) An early photo shows Leonard in his hunting outfit, fierce-eyed as he stares at the camera, holding a rifle with a knife strapped to his chest and an axe in his belt. He earned his money selling deer, bear, and moose meat at logging camps and astounded everyone with his strength and endurance, once toting a hind quarter of moose, roughly 135 pounds, for seven miles through the woods. Tales were told of a rescue he effected, diving into a freezing river to save a stagecoach driver and two passengers when their coach veered off a bridge.
He stood out from the crowd in other ways. Most hunters never changed their clothes and seldom bathed, gaining a reputation for being incredibly filthy and stinky, but Leonard was spotless. Henry David Thoreau took note of it when they met on a stagecoach bound for the Moosehead Lake region of the far North, where Leonard would lead a hunting party who’d stowed their canoes and supplies along their route. “A handsome man of about 30 . . . of gentlemanly address and faultless toilet,” wrote Thoreau in The Maine Woods. “He had a fair white complexion and an intellectual face, and with his quiet manners could pass as a divinity student.” Leonard was a legendary marksman, and the local Indians admired his stealth and his uncanny knack for finding game. “He could not only use guns, but make them,” Thoreau observed, “being a gunsmith himself.”
Many of the early rod builders were gunsmiths, in fact, able to work metal and wood to f ine tolerances, but they didn’t have Leonard’s engineering skills or his extraordinary devotion to craft — a form of genius, it was said. He built his first rod of ash and lancewood in 1871 at the age of 40 and sent it to Bradford and Anthony, a tackle dealer in Boston, hoping they’d give him a commission. They were impressed enough to dispatch a salesman to Bangor, who brought two bamboo rods to show Leonard. He’d never seen any before and judged them to be relatively worthless — too long and heavy, awkward to cast and badly designed. The salesman wondered if Leonard could build such rods himself. “Yes,” he replied, “and much better.”
He set himself the challenge of improving the split-cane rod. Instead of copying the standard four-strip method that Samuel Phillippe, also a gunsmith, had mastered around 1848, he relied on a six-strip construction to produce a lighter hexagonal rod. His design incorporated compound tapers computed mathematically to allow the rod to bend at the start of a cast and straighten at the finish. The bamboo of choice in Maine was known as Calcutta, but it was flimsy, with a pulpy core and a thin outer wall. While searching for an alternative, Leonard discovered Tonkin cane — thicker, sturdier, and less pulpy. He noticed that some umbrella makers used it for struts, and he began importing quantities of Tonkin from southern China.
Leonard’s love of music carried over to his craft. He swore that no one could build a great rod without being able to play at least one instrument, and he wasn’t kidding. It could be argued that there’s a certain music in casting a wellmade rod, and the theory, at any rate, worked for him. Soon he had more orders than he could possibly fill, so he invented a beveling machine. The beveler could cut the six cane strips to order with incredible precision and accuracy, never off by more than one-thousandth of an inch. No one else had anything like it, and Leonard intended to keep it that way, storing his beveler in a locked room only he and his nephew, Reub Leonard, could enter. His ingenuity and business acumen put him miles ahead of his competitors. It took them 30 years to catch up.
Leonard didn’t smoke or drink and devoted his limited spare time to conservation efforts, such as an attempt to bring back Atlantic salmon to the rivers of Maine. He married Elizabeth S. Head, a gifted woman who spoke four languages and wrote poetry. Their only child, Anna Cora Leonard, took up fly casting and became the first woman to enter tournaments, setting a record by laying out 73 feet of line in Central Park in 1898. Nephew Reub had set a record himself in 1882, using a Leonard cane rod to cast 102 feet, more than 20 feet farther than the previous record holder.
In 1877, Leonard took on a partner, a Boston man called Kidder, no surname given, who later sold his interest to William Mills and Son of New York. Mills owned the sole distribution rights to Leonard rods and insisted on moving the operation to Central Valley, a hamlet north of Manhattan. Apparently Leonard was never happy about the move or about losing control of his company, and he sold out to Mills in 1896. He died a few years later at 76 and is buried in upstate New York with his wife and daughter. Atop his tombstone sits a canoe with a broken paddle, carved from granite.
Though I never came up with the cash for an H. L. Leonard bamboo rod or any other, I did satisfy my craving once, courtesy of a well-heeled friend who loaned me a split-cane rod of recent vintage. He’d paid about $3500 for it. As you can imagine, I treated it as gingerly as a newborn baby, worried I’d subject it to car-door syndrome or worse. I took it on a trip to the North Yuba and fished the wild-trout section below Sierra City. At first, I disliked the slow action of the rod, but I soon adjusted and fell into a very smooth rhythm — the sort of music Leonard spoke of — and began picking up small trout on dries. I don’t think I’ve ever presented a fly so delicately or cast with such a light touch. If I had the money, would I splurge on a bamboo rod? That’s a fair question to ask. I get along just fine with my graphite rods, and I’m afraid I’d always be anxious about damaging such an expensive piece of equipment. I’d probably feel the same about an Alfa Romeo, parking it in the driveway instead of risking a dented fender or a body scratch. And I’m not sure that a bamboo rod would improve the fly-fishing experience to such an extent that it would justify the cost, so for the time being, I’ll stick with what I’ve got and continue to drive a Toyota.
