If you’re a steelhead enthusiast, the name Jim Pray may ring a bell. I first came across Pray’s artistry in a catalogue from Lang’s, the auction house for fishing collectibles. Have you ever hankered after a vintage Hardy Perfect trout reel? It can be yours for $700. How about a Walton Powell bamboo rod ideal for small streams? That’ll cost you a mere $1,100. For the budget minded, Lang’s has a tintype portrait of a fly fisher ($40) or a batch of Russell Chatham sketches ($50). In the bargain basement, you’ll find an invitation to the Sportsman’s Club of America’s 1947 Hall of Fame Banquet ($10). If you’re lucky, you might sit next to a club member such as Joe Brooks or Ted Williams, the Bosox great.
One item in particular caught my eye, a lot of three steelhead flies from the 1930s. The tyer was identified as Jim Pray, a tackle dealer in Eureka. The estimated price for the lot was $35 to $40, but the f lies sold for $325, and I became curious about Pray and why his flies were so valuable. I soon discovered he was well-known in steelhead circles, instrumental in promoting angling on the rivers of the North Coast, especially the Eel, his hometown stream. His reputation as a tyer was so substantial that devoted fly fishers such as President Herbert Hoover were willing to wait weeks for Pray to fill a mail order. The outdoor writer Thomas Hardin celebrated his skills in True magazine in 1952, calling him the “wizard of West Coast flies.”
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1885, Pray tied his first flies as a boy of eight. He did it without a vise and never used one his entire life. As a young man, he drifted west and hired on at a lumber mill in Scotia, but he lasted only a year before he set to wandering, finally fetching up in Eureka without a dime to his name. He roughed it in the redwoods and bartered his flies for groceries and essentials. When he developed enough of a following, he began tying on a mezzanine above a bakery, eventually scraping together the funds to open a proper tackle shop, although he never made much of a profit and struggled to cover his costs. But the shop served as a clubhouse for his angler pals, who were required to catch a steelie of twelve pounds or better before Pray would post their photos on a wall.
The Eel River was a gorgeous stream in Pray’s heyday, its runs and jade-green pools thick with salmon and steelhead. When a team of Gold Rush explorers arrived in the region around 1850, they came up with the name after trading a frying pan for some Pacific lampreys that the indigenous Wiyot had harvested. Pacific lampreys are eel-shaped, sea-going parasites, and the explorers mistook them for the real thing. The Eel f lows from south to north for almost two hundred miles, originating on a flank of Bald Mountain and emptying into the ocean near Humboldt Bay. It was designated a Wild and Scenic River in 1981, although two dams were built on it prior to that. But there are no hatcheries, so all the steelhead and salmon are wild.
The North Coast was virgin territory for fly fishers until the late nineteenth century. In October 1891, The Morning Call in San Francisco reported that a group of anglers had traveled by rail and stagecoach to the “wilds of Humboldt County” to try their luck on the Eel. They were after “steel-heads,” presumably related to the “gamy white-trout of Europe.” (Sea trout are sometimes called “white trout” in Ireland.) A year later, the Call noted that an angler on the Eel had proven that trout, salmon, and steelhead would all rise to an artificial fly, and the fishing pressure rapidly increased. At first, the flies in use were featherwings, but after World War I, durable hairwing patterns such as the Bucktail supplanted them as the go-to for steelhead.
By the time Jim Pray set up shop in the 1930s, the Eel and its tributaries were attracting anglers from all over Northern California. His first fly to create a stir was the Silver Demon, a riff on the Golden Demon pattern favored in New Zealand. Zane Grey, an avid fly fisher as well as the author of such cowboy classics as Riders of the Purple Sage, was responsible for importing it to the West Coast. (On the Rogue River in Oregon, Grey was notorious for hiring thugs to keep others away from the pools he wanted to fish.) Pray changed the fly’s body from yellow floss to silver tinsel and the wing feathers from bronze mallard to teal flank. That resulted in a brighter, more visible fly. The Silver Demon was so successful he had trouble keeping the pattern in stock, working till two or four in the morning at times. In 1936, the year he introduced the fly, he sold thirteen hundred, compared with just three hundred Golden Demons.
As an innovator, Pray had few equals. He once threw together a few scraps on his bench to create a fly pattern for friends who planned to fish the Eel on Christmas Eve. The pattern, tied in Royal Coachman colors, hadn’t yet been named. The men returned to the Eel on Christmas Day, but heavy rains had washed out the lower river, so they moved upstream to Fernbridge Pool and rented boats. One angler, Walt Thoresen, tried a size 6 version of Pray’s new fly and hooked a number of steelhead right away, including an eighteen-pounder that won first prize in an annual Field & Stream contest. Pray was delighted and called the fly the Thor in Thoresen’s honor. The Thor accounted for the contest prize the next year, too, a seventeen-and-three-quarter-pound Eel River steelie.
Pray is perhaps most famous for his Optic flies. He didn’t invent the pattern, but he tinkered with it brilliantly. He started producing Optics around 1940, clamping a brass bead to a heavy, short-shanked, Limerick bend hook. He was always finicky about hooks and later teamed up with Mustad to manufacture his own brand, Jim Pray Special Steelhead Hooks. The beads were hard to come by, but Pray located a source, cornered the market, and shut out his competitors, earning a tidy sum by selling Optics for a dime. He coated the bead with lacquer and painted on a white iris with a big black pupil to give the impression of an eye, then attached bucktail behind the bead.
The Optic was admittedly weird looking, a bug-eyed critter from a sci-fi movie, but it had the virtue of sinking quickly in the often heavy flows of the Eel. Pray wasted no time in putting it to the test. On the first morning he fished it, he netted four steelhead and two silver salmon. What better way to advertise a new product? Word traveled fast, of course, and the demand for Optics soared. Pray tied them in red, black, cock robin, and orange, but red was his favorite. “We are having a great run of steelhead in the Eel River,” he once wrote to a customer, “and they are taking almost exclusively my Red Optic.” Bill Schaadt swore by the Optic pattern when the current was strong, and he always stopped at Pray’s to stock up whenever he headed to the Klamath for summer-run fish.
Toward the end of Pray’s life, he received a steady stream of fans eager to meet him and shoot the breeze. Ted Trueblood of Field & Stream was among them and wrote about his visit. He believed Pray had originated more good steelhead patterns than anyone else. He’d hoped to fish with Pray, but the Eel turned high and muddy, and he had to be content with hanging out at the shop and swapping lies with the locals. One stormy afternoon with a fierce wind blowing, he and Pray took a drive to look at the river. As they stood in a redwood grove in a drenching spray of mist, they both marveled at the primal force of nature. It was the old man who put into words what they both were feeling.
“A wild storm like this does something to me,” Pray confided. “Among these noble trees it’s better than a symphony.” That was high praise indeed, Trueblood noted, because Pray loved good music. When he died of cancer in 1952, his cronies gathered at the shop to raise a last glass and hung a sign on the door, Gone Fishin’.
