Old Hat wrote: ↑Thu Apr 04, 2019 9:17 am
I doubt the Pritt and Skues of tradition just walked into a fly shop and purchased whatever they wanted at the time or ordered over the internet from countries afar.
Hat, You couldn't be more correct in your statement. One of the things I find so compelling about Spiders and one of the points I make in my presentations is that the tradition of dressing them, and in reality all angling flies before the advent of the commercial availability of materials, is that, with the exception of silk and hooks, one had to procure one's own materials . And when you go way back, one made one's own hooks as well. In
The Book of St. Albans there are instructions for making hooks as at that time, 1486, an angler had to make every part of his tackle.
Fly dressers looked to the fields and folds, woods and hedges, barnyards and pastures for their materials and gathered what they needed. People lived much closer to nature then and had much more knowledge and recognition of individual species. Almost every bird even remotely edible might end up as table fare and their feathers were used if the colors and textures were suitable. Poultry and game markets were an extremely important source of feathers from both domestic and wild birds right into the 20th century. In Henry Walbran Cooper's obituary there is a description of him taking the train to the game-dealers' shops in Harrogate and then plucking the feathers from the birds on his way home in the rail car.
This tradition is as true in early American fly dressing as it was in Pritt's time. In fact, one of the things I find so compelling about the Catskill tradition is that a fly tyer could find most everything to dress these very sophisticated dry flies right outside his back door. I just made a page in the Materials Book of traditional Catskill materials and here is the text from that page:
"The fly dressing tradition begun by Theodore Gordon soon evolved into what came to be known as the “Catskill School of Fly Tying” and was exemplified by fly tiers such as Herman Christian, Roy Steenrod, Rube Cross, Harry and Elsie Darbee, and Walt and Winnie Dette. In order to be effective on the pool and riffle Mountain Rivers, sparsely dressed Catskill Style dry flies relied on high quality components, especially hackle, and most of the palate of materials used in their construction was sourced locally. Farmyards supplied poultry hackles, and the region’s forests and fields contributed Wood Duck and Mallard feathers, along with Fox, Muskrat, and Rabbit fur. Aside from having to purchase light wire dry fly hooks, often from Allcock & Co. or Ray Bergman, tying silk, and perhaps some Peacock feathers from the local Dry Goods store, with a little effort a Catskill fly tier could provide himself with all the materials needed to produce these delicate and deadly dry flies."
Finding substitutes is as old as fly dressing. Take the near legendary Dotterel feather for instance. Fly dressers were substituting the inside wing feathers of the starling in the 19th century and it is said that Dotterel even then was so rare that Skues, perhaps the most "connected" angler of his day, only ever owned a single pair of wings. The search for a good substitute is still going on and the topic has cropped on the pages of the Flymph Forum from time to time.
Perhaps in some ways we are in a new era of finding and gathering materials ourselves. As the traditional materials dry up we are forced to find other alternatives in our own "backyards" whether in actuality or on the "backyard" of the internet. Aren't materials a fascinating subject?