Although the essay below comes from an East Coast fly-tying newsletter, the experiment it highlights — reverse-engineering a fly to understand and replicate how it was tied — is certainly of interest to fly fishers irrespective of where they live. And it’s worth considering, too, that Catskill dry flies, themselves a product of regional ingenuity, are the template for what we consider the modern dry fly that’s now fished around the world.
An enduring slice of Catskill fly-tying history has Walt Dette, along with Winnie Ferdon and Harry Darbee, learning the art of tying by unwinding flies purchased from Rube Cross. Accounts of this are given in Mike Valla’s Tying Catskill-Style Dry Flies and in Eric Leiser’s The Dettes: A Catskill Legend. Their Story and Their Techniques. The story goes that in the late 1920s, Walt Dette offered fifty dollars to Rube Cross for the purpose of being shown how to tie Cross’s flies. Because Cross wanted to keep his methods of tying a secret, he turned down the offer, and the cash was instead used to purchase his flies, which were then deconstructed by Dette, Ferdon, and Darbee in a rented room above a movie theater in Roscoe, New York. That effort resulted in three legendary Catskill fly tyers learning their craft.
Many people who hear about Rube Cross’s refusal to teach his methods seem to think that Cross was being foolish. Fifty dollars, after all, was a tidy sum of money in the late 1920s, and couldn’t anyone have deduced the secrets of fly tying just by unwinding existing flies? I generally felt the same way until I started wondering whether or not it is easy to learn how to tie flies by dismantling them. Perhaps Cross believed that few people had the gumption needed to put in the painstaking work of learning his secrets by unraveling their mysteries one thread wrap at a time.
I learned how to tie by reading about the subject and through face-to-face instruction. Until recently, my experiences “I think this backward method of learning was one of the most valuable contributions to my career as a flytier. Try it sometime. It challenges your mind to reconstruct in reverse the way a particular fly was tied, and you can actually tell more easily how a fly is put together than if you had watched the tier when his hands were in the way, moving at his own desired speed.” The words “more easily” could be debated, but I figured that if Harry Darbee is saying that this is a good idea to try — then I should try it.
I wanted to experience what it would be like to learn how to make a Catskillstyle fly by deconstructing one. It was very unlikely that anyone would give me an actual Rube Cross fly to destroy, so I put together an imitation using materials that might’ve been used in the 1920s, when the Cross flies were being unraveled. A Hendrickson, size 12, was tied as the fly to be taken apart. I made the fly with silk thread, wood duck flank for the split wings, fox fur for the body, and medium dun rooster for the tail and hackle. I project. I approached the experiment from the perspective that they had to learn everything from scratch and strictly from their observations.
With the Hendrickson secured in a vise, I was able to use my fingers and a bodkin to unravel the thread after a bit of picking at the head of the fly. Questions arose immediately. Would I have known the exact number of turns that were in the whip finish if I hadn’t tied it myself or how actually to perform a whip finish if I didn’t already know how to make one? It was becoming clear that understanding the intricacies of thread manipulation would require a great deal of focus and careful observation.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow description of each step in the unwinding process, but I’d like to note a couple of observations. I don’t think that it would be very difficult to figure out how to dub thread (though it could be tricky to know the origin of the specific fur used), and the attachment of the tail seemed pretty straightforward. Even the act of winding hackle seemed understandable — once the existing hackle was unwound from the fly — but the wing is a completely different story. I noticed that the wing refused to budge, even though thread passed it as I unwound the fly from the head to the tail. The conclusion that could be drawn is that the wing was put on first—because it came off last when taking apart the fly. Still, it was difficult to unwrap thread at the wing; it seemed tangled in a strange way. I actually know how the wing was tied in (since I’m the one who tied this fly), and yet I was still finding it difficult to loosen wraps that seemed overlapped in strange ways. I can only imagine how puzzling this would be to someone who has no concept of how upright wood duck wings are tied on a Catskill-style fly. Deciphering the construction of an upright wing would clearly be the hardest part of the puzzle for a person who doesn’t have previous experience in fly tying.
Seeing the individual bits of that Hendrickson lying side by side reminded me that there isn’t all that much material on a sparsely tied fly — and that’s a good lesson in fly tying that was reinforced by this process. I also measured the strand of removed silk thread and found it to be eleven inches long. I made a mental note to use fewer wraps of thread the next time that I tie a fly. It was clear that this little experiment was teaching me something about my own fly tying (Harry Darbee’s words about challenging your mind were ringing true), but I was disappointed that I wasn’t getting more of a sense of what a true beginner would experience.
I couldn’t undo the fly-tying knowledge that I’d already acquired over the years.

I enlisted the help of my cousin Sam. She’s a blank slate when it comes to previous experience with fly tying, but she’s curious about things and doesn’t quit easily when faced with a challenge. She would bring a youthful vision and few preconceived notions to the exercise, and I also liked the fact that at seventeen years old, she’s close to the ages that Walt Dette, Winnie Dette, and Harry Darbee were in the late 1920s. I handed Sam a freshly tied Hendrickson that matched the one that I’d dismantled — warned her to keep it away from her dog — and asked her to take it apart with the goal of learning how she could make the same fly. Because it was important to see what she could learn on her own by unwinding the fly, I instructed her not to go online to find information about fly tying. I was hoping that Sam’s thirteen-year-old sister would assist her in the project, but I made my request at noon, forgetting that early afternoon is still the crack of dawn to a newly minted teenager. I’m told that when she finally awoke, she took one look at Sam tinkering with the fly and asked, “What sort of buffoonery is this?” Despite my admiration for her use of the word “buffoonery,” she clearly lacked the proper attitude and was cut from the team. Sam worked diligently on the fly and reported that she used tweezers to yank at the thread loops. She said that the fly was difficult to take apart (I do like to tie a fly that can take some punishment) and that it was all wound in one direction and had some knots in it. Her other observations were that a small piece of bird feather was tied to the hook with the yellow thread and that the fuzzy stuff coming off of the thread looked to be some kind of wool. She added that the wool was annoying, because it made it more difficult to get to the thread. It was her opinion that the wing was made from a rooster feather. I was impressed with Sam’s thoughts. Her observations were quite good for someone who had never before encountered an artificial fly. It’s understandable that she perceived the fox fur to be wool, and she correctly believed the wing and hackle to be made from bird feathers. I can’t expect her to know the difference between wood duck f lank and rooster feathers. She observed the one-direction nature of the thread wraps and seemed to get a pretty good sense of the fact that materials are tied to the hook shank, as opposed to using some sort of adhesive, such as Crazy Glue, to adhere them. I sent her a link to a video that showed the construction from start to finish of a Catskill-style Hendrickson, and I’m looking forward to the day when I can put a vise in front of her and watch her tie a fly.
Our joint efforts led me to conclude that Harry Darbee was correct about being able to learn a lot by using the “backward method,” but learning it all from scratch — thread handling, proportions, identifying materials — to the point where you could actually tie your own flies from start to finish would be a great accomplishment. Walt Dette, Winnie Ferdon, and Harry Darbee not only learned how to tie that way, but they became some of the best fly tyers in the world. I was glad that I had the opportunity to take a few brief steps in their footprints, and I gained a heightened appreciation for their fortitude, grit, and powers of deduction.
One thing still bothered me. I didn’t like seeing my nice (for me at least) fly reduced to a bare hook and a pile of fluff. It just didn’t seem right to leave it that way, so I put the hook back in the vise and carefully used all of the same materials — including the same strand of silk thread — to reconstruct that Hendrickson. I thought about the rhyme “Humpty Dumpty.” Poor Humpty couldn’t be put back together again, but all he had to help him were all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men. If only a fly tyer had been available.
This essay first appeared in the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild Gazette and has also been reprinted in the Theodore Gordon Flyfishers’s Gordon’s Quill and The Fly Dresser: The Journal of the Fly Dresser’s Guild (UK).