In October 2013, as I was browsing the fly bins in the Ted Fay Fly Shop in Dunsmuir and chatting with owner Bob Grace, we began speculating about the origins of the well-known technique of short-line nymphing, that pocket-water tactic in which weighted flies or flies on tippets weighted with split shot are cast just a rod’s length or two way, to fast-water pockets or seams thought to hold hungry trout. I always had heard that the technique was developed or at least popularized by the legendary Ted Fay, the renowned founder of the shop where I was standing. The technique antedates today’s Czech nymphing approach by at least 60 years, the main difference being that local practitioners fished very stout leaders and tippets, not the 6X and 7X level leaders the Europeans use in competition.
Bob said, “Well, don’t forget Ted Towendolly . . . he figured in there somewhere.” This was a new name to me. What I’ve tried to do since then and what I will try to do here is unravel the mystery of Ted Towendolly’s role in the development of this short-line nymphing method on the streams of Northern California.
Unfortunately, Bob Grace had little information to share. All that seemed to be known was that Ted Towendolly was pure Wintu Indian, lived in Dunsmuir most of his life, and invented the heavily weighted Black Bomber fly in the 1920s, followed by a few other weighted flies, all of which he shared with Ted Fay. That was it — period.
Then, on the long drive home down Interstate 5, I had an epiphany. I was pondering the spelling of Dunsmuir’s Tauhindauli Park, which obviously honored a Wintu family name. It and Towendolly sound exactly the same — and in fact, they’re the same name. There had to be something so special about this family that the city of Dunsmuir created and named a city park after them. There had to be a good story there somewhere. And there is.
The Wintu
Roughly twelve hundred years ago, a large group of indigenous peoples who would later be known as Wintu or Wintun began migrating south from southwestern Oregon to California. Why they came is uncertain. Perhaps they were seeking better hunting and fishing prospects or responding to encroachment from neighboring tribes. Or maybe it was just a continuation of the millenia-long, gradual migration from Siberia to Alaska and then south into the warmer and more hospitable climes of the American continents.
The Wintu were relative newcomers to Northern California. Archaeological evidence now confirms that earlier peoples had inhabited certain areas of Shasta and Siskiyou Counties for over fifteen thousand years. After the early stages of the migration, the newcomers gradually coalesced to become a cohesive tribe with a common culture and customs. They were organized into smaller bands scattered up and down the upper Sacramento Valley and points west, east, and north of the valley. The Wintu band known as the Nom’ti’pom (“in-th’west-ground”) or Trinity band settled on the banks of the upper Trinity River at the confluence of a major tributary, now under Trinity Lake.
It was not just chance that they made their home on a river at the confluence of a tributary during an era when massive runs of salmon, steelhead, and trout still were the norm there. The Wintu were sedentary hunter-gatherers who lived by hunting and fishing, and they were good at it — they had to be, to survive. In addition, compared with the tribes that surrounded them, they had superior hunting and fishing tools. For fishing, there were hooks from the jaw of a deer and the riffle pike. Fishing line was made from a threadlike fiber stripped from opposite edges of the grasslike leaf of the “poo-tere” plant, a member of the wild iris family. And when fishing conditions dictated, they used the long deep-water dip net. But their cleverest tool for catching large fish in riffles and shallower holding water was a spear pole with two sharpened prongs from the serviceberry shrub about eight inches long and splayed out three or four inches. At the two pointed tips, held in place with a snug slip fit, were two very sharp-tipped “thimbles” of deer bone. They were secured loosely to the main shaft by two dangling strips of rawhide. After harpooning the fish, quickly jerking the spear back would cause the thimble tips to slip off the pointed prongs, leaving the fish dangling helpless, but totally secured. Using such technological advantages, the Wintu put away huge stores of high-protein foodstuffs, largely salmon flour from pulverizing cooked salmon meat, for the seasons when the hunting and fishing was poor and there was little to gather. Their superior technology eventually allowed them to out-compete their neighbors, and over time and usually nonviolently, they expanded their territories.
Wi’ Ca’we’ha Tau’hin’dauli
The Wintu thrived and prospered for well over a thousand years, unfettered by outsiders. Then catastrophe struck with the arrival, first, of malaria, or maybe influenza, carried by white trappers in the early 1820s, when entire villages were wiped out. This was followed by the massive transformations of Northern California brought on by the Gold Rush.
In July 1841, Major Pearson Reading discovered gold on a gravel bar of the Trinity River at the mouth of a creek that now bears his name. Then, in March 1851, there was a major gold discovery at what would later be known as Yreka. Life as the Nom’ti’pom Wintu had known it on the upper Trinity River came to a relatively abrupt and brutal end.
In April 1852, what may have been a pivotal event for all the local Wintu bands occurred at Hay Fork, about 25 miles southwest of the current Douglas City on Highway 299: the Bridge Gulch Massacre. A local rancher, Colonel John Anderson, was murdered, and his herd of cattle was stolen. The Trinity County sheriff immediately mustered a posse of 70 citizens, and at dawn the next day, they attacked the first Indian camp they encountered, killing all 150 residents except for two toddlers who managed to hide or escape during the melee. The posse had wiped out the Hay Fork band of Wintu, and in fact, they had attacked an innocent group of Indians. Word of the slaughter quickly spread far and wide and certainly terrified the Wintu and other area tribes for many miles.
At the time of the discovery of gold on the Trinity River, the leader of the Trinity Wintu Nom’ti’pom band was Wi’ (“chief ”) Ca’we’ha (“wise man who intensifies”) Tau’hin’dauli (“tying with the left hand”). In fact, all the men of the tribe and some women were left-handed. It’s thought that perhaps a few years later, the “Wi” was interpreted by his new Euro-American friends as “William,” so Tauhindauli later became known as William or “Bill.”
The massacre at Hay Fork, following upon the increasing encroachment of miners on the river, was likely the tipping point that caused Wi’ Ca’we’ha Tau’hin’dauli and his clan to flee their ancestral lands on the upper Trinity. Now estimated to be but a small family group of not more than 8 to 12, they escaped upriver through the mountains, where they took a northeasterly path along the ridges and slopes to avoid the miners on the rivers and streams below.
Wi’ Ca’we’ha Tau’hin’dauli’s route upriver and over the mountains would lead them to a spot on the Sacramento River they called Mem’okis’takki, or “strong water place.” The local American settlers called it Soda Springs and later Upper Soda Springs. Today, we fly fishers call it Tauhindauli Park in central Dunsmuir, one of our favorite fishing spots in town.
Given the bloodshed and mayhem being visited upon the Indians up and down the entire state of California, they could not have found a more ideal destination. They would quickly learn that Soda Springs was a homestead run by twin brothers, Harry and Samuel Lockhart, who had legal claim to the land and who operated a simple inn consisting of a log cabin and a corral. Their business catered to mule trains that made the long trek from the lower Sacramento Valley up the canyon to the mining towns of Shasta and Yreka. In fact, the famous Siskiyou Trail (also known as the California-Oregon trail) passed right by the Lockhart property. Today, we call the exact same route Interstate 5.
The Lockharts allowed the Tauhindauli clan to settle on their land permanently and provided them comfort and protection from predation. Perhaps it was totally altruistic on the part of the Lockhart brothers, or maybe they just wanted cheap labor. It’s thought that perhaps the current site of the Dunsmuir City Park or maybe the ball field is the location of the Tauhindauli’ initial family encampment. At any rate, the Tauhindauli family would find both security and employment for 70 years there. “Bill” himself worked as a guide and handyman.
In 1855, Ross and Mary McCloud, seeking a suitable investment and a place to settle, purchased the site from the Lockharts. The McClouds continued to provide comfort and shelter to the Tauhindauli clan and soon began major improvements to expand the business.
As the McClouds’ business grew in the 1860s and beyond, it became known as the Upper Soda Springs Resort. With the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, things really took off, with the resort catering to hikers, hunters, anglers, and well-to-do Victorian-era travelers from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond who sought to “take the waters” of the soda springs and to enjoy a wilderness experience in what was a beautiful, unspoiled locale.
Ted Towendolly
In 1881, William Tauhindauli and his Achumawi wife, Jennie, would have a son named Garfield (The Achumawi are the Pit River Indians). At some point during the 1880s, a name change occurred from Tauhindauli to Towendolly. A careless census taker had difficulty with the native spelling, so anglicized it to a phonetic equivalent, and Towendolly became the family name. Then, in 1901, Garfield and his wife, Rose, by now located on Butterfly Avenue in Dunsmuir, would have a son. His name was Theodore Laverne “Ted” Towendolly.
Little is known of Ted Towendolly’s early years, but there’s a lot we can safely surmise. According to Ted’s great-granddaughter, he was proficient in all fishing methods from an early age, including using the ancient Wintu spear pole. But that would also have included fly fishing.
Diaries of Dr. Livingston Stone, the noted nineteenth-century fish culturist who established the Baird U.S. Fish Hatchery on the McCloud River, the first salmon-breeding station in the United States, report members of his staff seeing Wintu fishing the upper Sacramento for trout with fly gear in 1873–1874. There’s also photographic record of Wintu fly fishing the McCloud or upper Sacramento in the 1880s, indicating that the Wintu were quick to embrace this “modern” method of fishing. Their fly rods were made from bamboo or yew, the material of choice for the period.
It should not be a shock that they would be early adopters of fly fishing, given what we know of their ancestral affinity for and proficiency at fishing in general, along with their love of life on the river going back well over one thousand years. It’s reasonable to consider that Ted likely began experimenting with fly fishing at least in his teens, since it’s known that he created his Black Bomber in the 1920s, when Ted himself was only in his 20s. One typically does not start tying flies without some level of expertise at fly fishing. Further, Ted had an uncle, John Towendolly, who lived in Dunsmuir his entire life and was an avid fisherman. It’s not a big stretch to assume that his uncle had an influence on a young Ted.
Ted Towendolly’s first creation was the Black Bomber, with its 10 turns of .025-inch lead wire to get it down quickly to the stream bottom. Ted would go on to develop his Black Spent Wing, Brown Spent Wing, Burlap, and Peacock. His Burlap may have inspired or been inspired by his brother-in-law Arnold’s steelhead Burlap f ly, conceived in 1945 for the Klamath River.
The Brown Bomber, often attributed to Towendolly, was actually created by Arnold Arana, Ted Towendolly’s brother-in-law, I’m told by longtime upper Sac angler Joe Patterson. The prizefighter Joe Lewis was undefeated during the 1940s, and the story goes that in searching for a name for his fly, Arnold was inspired by Joe Lewis’s nickname, given him by the sportswriters: the Brown Bomber.
Ted Towendolly would become the first known fly-fishing guide on the upper Sac, guiding there as early as the 1920s. His daughter, Betty Jane, is reported to have been an accomplished fly tyer in her own right, helping Ted produce his Bomber and other flies, which he sold from buckets and coffee cans for 10 cents each off the back of his pickup truck around town and beyond.
There’s a story that Bill Kiene, founder of the iconic Sacramento fly shop, tells of the time in the late 1960s when he was working at the Tower of Sports sporting-goods store in Sacramento. Bill was behind the counter, and an older fellow walked in dressed in denim bib overalls. He was looking for grizzly hackle capes and introduced himself as Ted Towendolly. They chatted for a bit, and Bill sold him some grizzly hackles, then Ted mentioned his Black Bomber. Next thing, Ted headed back out to his truck and returned with a three-pound coffee can three-quarters full of his Bombers. Ted asked Bill if he would like to buy some, but Bill declined, thinking he’d be unable to sell that particular style of weighted fly down in Sacramento.
It’s been said that Ted Towendolly was a Wintu shaman, or spiritual healer, as the Wintu prefer to say, but being born in 1901, and with the tribe largely dispersed, and with the availability of conventional Western medicine, any role Ted played in this capacity may have been largely ceremonial or symbolic.
Ted worked for the railroad in Dunsmuir, and being good with his hands, he also found work in small-motor repair and as a carpenter and handyman. Later in life, Ted would move to Sacramento to work for the Sacramento Department of Public Works. In 1975, Ted Towendolly succumbed to pneumonia in Sacramento at the age of 74.
Ted Towendolly and Short-Line Nymphing
Ted’s great-granddaughter told me that Ted did indeed develop what we call short-line nymphing. Joe Patterson confirmed that for me. Joe described watching Ted’s brother-in-law, Arnold Arana, fish on the upper Sac one day in 1948 when the two, who never had met, happened to cross paths above Mossbrae Falls. They arrived simultaneously at a split in the river just below an island. Joe had been fishing the river since the age of 12 with bait and hardware on family vacations, but was now a 22-year-old rank newcomer to fly fishing. Arnold Arana, on the other hand, was a 38-year-old local who had fly fished the river regularly since his early teens and was very good at it.
Arnold graciously allowed Joe first choice for his target water, they then each proceeded to fish their chosen method on opposite sides of the island: dries for Joe, and for Arnold, a method that Joe found quite strange. As Joe would occasionally glance over at his new acquaintance, he saw that he was being outfished 10 to 1. Joe finally went over to where Arnold was flogging the pocket water to inquire about what the heck he was doing. And thus began a friendship that would see the two fishing together five or six times over the coming years, with Joe becoming thoroughly schooled in this new technique. Sadly, it would be a short friendship, with Arnold Arana’s life ending tragically at the age of 49, just 11 years later.
What Arnold Arana demonstrated and taught young Joe Patterson on that day in 1948 was exactly what we today call short-line nymphing. Sitting across the table recently from an 88-year-old Patterson over lunch, I asked him to describe the casting stroke, and what he told me depicted short-line nymphing to the letter. Just to be crystal clear, I made the casting motion in the air above the table with my arm, and his response was, “That’s it — it was not pretty. He smacked the water hard.”
I then asked Joe the pivotal question: “Did you ask Arnold where he learned this technique?” Joe did ask, and Arnold replied, “From my sister’s husband.” It turns out that Arnold had married Ted Towendolly’s sister Grace, and not to be outdone, Ted in turn married Arnold’s sister Julia. That pretty much cemented the relationship. In fact, according to Ted’s great-granddaughter, who was raised in both households in Dunsmuir as a young child, their relationship went back to at least 1935, when the first wedding bells rang. It is evident that the two had been friends and fishing partners for a good while before Joe’s chance encounter with Arnold at the island above Mossbrae Falls.
The Rest of the Story
In the early 1940s, when Oakland grocery distributor Ted Fay first began driving up Highway 99 to Dunsmuir on weekends and vacations to fish the upper Sacramento, he encountered Ted Towendolly, either in town or on the river. It was at some point during this period, as Ted Towendolly’s daughter, Betty Jane, told her granddaughter years later, that her father taught Fay how to tie his flies and how to fish them.
The meeting of the two Teds was the start of a lifelong amicable relationship that would prove to be of mutual benefit. Towendolly had the effective flies that he and brother-in-law Arnold had been fishing on the upper Sac since the 1920s and 1930s, and Fay had developed a passion for the river, was determined to master it, and needed his new friend’s flies to be successful, along with a little coaching to master the short-line nymphing technique. In 1948, Ted Fay retired from the grocery business and moved to Dunsmuir permanently. He purchased the Lookout Point Motel and soon developed a reputation among his guests as the go-to expert on the river. On checking in at the front desk, guests would make the typical inquiries we all make today on visiting a destination fly shop: “How’s the fishing?” “Where are the fish, and what flies do I need?” Ted, being very eager to promote the river, the town of Dunsmuir, and of course his motel, would often say, “Hang on a minute. I’ll grab my rod and show you.” If you’re a fly fisher and you get this kind of service at a motel check-in, there’s little doubt which motel you’ll return to on your next trip.
From this evolved Ted Fay’s free guide service for his motel customers, during which he’d heavily promote what would later become known as the “Ted Fay flies,” along with the short-line nymphing technique he had picked up from Ted Towendolly in the early 1940s during his weekends on the river.
Ted began acquiring ever greater amounts of fly-fishing supplies to satisfy requests of his motel customers, so he dedicated one of his motel rooms to this purpose, and the Ted Fay Fly Shop was born. The Lookout Motel was ultimately torn down to make room for I-5, forcing Ted to move the shop to his garage for awhile, then later to another motel.
Today, located on Dunsmuir Avenue and under the ownership of Bob Grace, the shop provides customers the same straightforward, no-BS advice that has been offered there since the early 1950s. It is now said to be the second-oldest continuously operating fly shop in California and one of the oldest in the country. And should you ever have an inclination to turn the clock back 70 or 80 years and fish the upper Sac “old school” style, the Ted Fay Fly Shop still stocks all of the old weighted flies, tied by Bob Grace himself according to the original recipes. On a recent visit to the river, I netted a 12-inch rainbow in the city park on Towendolly’s Brown Spent Wing.
In the beginning, Ted Fay purchased his flies directly from Towendolly to satisfy demand in his shop, but at some point, Ted Fay began tying his own flies, following Ted Towendolly’s recipes. Ted Fay would go on to develop derivations and variations of Towendolly’s weighted flies, along with his own designs, and would promote them to shop customers along with the short-line technique, which would become known in some quarters as the “Ted Fay method.”
In 1973, McCloud-born Joe Kimsey retired from a 20-year career with the U.S. Air Force and returned to Dunsmuir, where he grew up as a teenager. He found work in Ted’s shop, and having fished the local streams since early childhood, he quickly picked up the short-line nymphing technique and began helping Ted out with guiding motel customers and others. Joe would go on to develop a series of his own weighted flies in the Towendolly tradition. While chatting over his tying bench in the shop, Joe was often heard to say, “Weighted flies were originally created in the 1920s by an Indian fellow named Ted Towendolly.”
We can perhaps best discern what the Towendolly/Fay nymphing style looked like from a 1978 Dunsmuir promotional video, now on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYkUi5rIxwY, that shows Joe Kimsey fishing the upper Sac. He would do a wide-open loop back cast, then a lob to the target with the rod held up at a 45-degree angle following impact, and maintain the line in a vertical position once the flies came under the rod tip. He’d then finesse the flies along with the current to achieve a natural drift. It seems likely that this is the way Towendolly and Fay fished the technique, since Joe learned it from them.
We can gain additional insight into Fay’s fishing style, and by extension Towendolly’s, by following a description from a Ted Fay fishing partner, the late San Jose fly-fishing luminary Marty Seldon, from his March 27, 2008, posting on the Kiene Fly Shop Web site message board:
Ted was quite short but moved very quickly, fishing aggressively. I remember the last time I fished with him on the McCloud. . . . Ted continually caught and released trout at a faster pace than I could keep up with him just wading As I recall Ted used a heavy, about 4 ft. long, leader with a heavily weighted fly like a Black Bomber at the point with a 3X tippet and another nymph (or sometimes a dry) on a dropper just over a foot up from the tip fly. The key to Ted’s method was very aggressive wading and very fast fishing. I needed cleats just to follow him. He would cast a short line upstream with only about two feet of fly line out of the guides and then holding the rod high and keeping it all tight, he guided it around the rocks and through the pockets at the same speed as the water. It was one or perhaps two casts, then move on, and he was very successful at his craft.
In May 1983, Ted Fay passed on at the age of 79, and Joe Kimsey took over the shop. In 1997, due to poor health, Joe would step aside and sell the Ted Fay Fly Shop to Bob Grace. Joe would stay on for another 12 years, tying flies, chatting it up with customers with his colorful style of humor, and dispensing sage advice on where and how to fish the river. My tattered StreamTime map, barely held together with multiple layers of tape, has Joe’s blue pen markings on it showing me where to fish on my first visit to the shop in October 2005.
On March 23, 2011, Joe Kimsey passed on at the age of 81, bringing to a close the golden era of colorful and talented characters on the upper Sac, but leaving the door open for a new generation to carry the torch forward.
In 1975, upper Sac guide Ron Rabun would learn the nymphing technique from his Davis neighbor and good friend Don Childress, who had in turn been trained a few years earlier during several guiding trips with Ted Fay. Ron, with a strong analytical streak, felt that the method could be refined a bit, so he introduced a few changes that are now practiced by many of us today.
In 1978, Ron introduced a fluorescent red/green Amnesia indicator between the fly line and leader. He would start with a downstream roll cast to load the rod and avoid a dangerous overhead cast with multiple flies and shot. Ron found through trial and error with his guiding clients that immediately raising the rod to the horizontal following the lob, then adjusting the angle of attack of the leader into the water to 45 degrees during the drift would increase the grab rate. At the end of the drift, Ron added a trial hook set with a horizontal twitch toward the bank in the hope that a fish just might have its mouth around the fly.
In the early 1990s, Ron would introduce longtime friend and fellow upper Sac guide Bill Carnazzo to the shortline method, along with his various refinements. Bill was quickly sold on the Rabun-modified Towendolly method and began teaching it to his guiding clients and fellow club members.
Bill, a California Fly Fisher contributor and columnist and a cofounder of the Granite Bay Flycasters, would go on to conduct annual short-line clinics for the club, with the help of Ron in the early years. Bill would continue the clinics until his passing in early 2013. Today, Ron Rabun continues the tradition of the annual October upper Sac short-line nymphing clinic for the fly club.
In “As the Cro Flies,” in the November/December 1996 issue of California Fly Fisher, Chip O’Brien wrote:
Precious little is known of Ted Towendolly. Records indicate that Grant Towendolly, the last Wintu shaman, lived with his family along the river at Soda Creek. Ted may have been his son, but records are sketchy. No one seems to know where Ted Towendolly came from or where he went. One thing is clear: At some point he met Ted Fay and introduced him to his Sacramento flies. It was serendipitous: Fay was to become a popular guide and fly fishing legend along the river for the next thirty years.
Now you know the rest of the story.
