Michigan may not have the best trout fishing in the country, but it certainly has the most varied and most beautiful trout fishing in the country. To test the first part of the hypothesis, you’ve got to visit the Jordan, Sturgeon, Pigeon, Black, Manistee, Boyne and Boardman to see how different these ecosystems really are, from river depth, flow, bottom structure and bank ecosystems. To test the second part of the hypothesis, you’ve only got to go to the Deward Tract on the Upper Manistee River.
The Deward Tract is a 4,720 acre management area which is part of the Au Sable State Forest. It’s shared among four counties – Antrim, Crawford, Kalkaska and Otsego. Its name came from lumber baron David E. Ward or as you will see in land records D. Ward (get it?). According to author John Counts who interviewed the director of the Lovell’s Historical Museum in a 2016 article for MLive, Ward was a timber cruiser from the Bay City – Saginaw area around 1850. Timber cruisers were the guys who scouted out land in advance of lumber crews coming in to cut it.
And while we’re on the topic of logging-era job names, the guys who actually cut down the trees were called “shanty boys.” Teamsters drove the horse-drawn sleds loaded with logs. “Road monkeys” were children who cleared brush from the roads at night and helped pour water on the sled runner tracks to ice them while also throwing sawdust in between the tracks so the horses could get traction. “Cookees” were children who helped the camp cook and delivered lunches to the sawyers in the field. “River hogs” risked their lives as they rode logs downriver during the spring river drives. “Boomers” sorted out logs at the end of river drive based on the different logging company’s stamps pounded into their cut ends with custom made sledgehammers, not unlike a cattle brand. Lumber barons were the owners of the company.
Ward’s insider knowledge as a timber cruiser helped him to find a good thing before others, and so he purchased the Deward tract, but he died in May of 1900. His will stated that all his assets be liquidated within 12 years of his death, so that meant the shanty boys who felled the trees in the Deward tract had 12 years to do so. In 1901, the company town of Deward was built, eventually growing to include 12 sawmills, a railroad running to East Jordan, a community center, boardinghouses, and a Swedish Lutheran Church. Ward banned liquor on the property, but if a shanty boy was hard up, he could drive the 5 ½ miles to Frederic to buy a bottle. According to Counts, the census peaked at 800 people (and with a name like Counts, you’ve got to believe that figure).
The giant virgin white pine trees were all gone by 1912, and the people not long after. Farming in this sandy soil would have been a disaster. Technically, Deward is called a ghost town, but to me, a ghost town has buildings. There are none to be found. What you will find is remnants of concrete and steel dams at narrow points in the river where water was allowed to back up in order to boost the spring-thaw flow and flush these massive logs downriver. One can only imagine the devastation such a practice would have on the habitat for trout and the trout themselves after such a torrent of water and logs was released downriver.
Which leads us back to the fishing, although going down the historical rabbit hole only adds to the enjoyment of a place. Deward is unique in that there are no campgrounds, yet camping is permitted as long as you stay within 50 feet of a road open to motorized vehicles (ORVs are not permitted in the Deward tract and according to Gerth Hendrickson’s awesome guidebook “Twelve Classic Trout Streams in Michigan,” neither are snowmobiles.) That means you won’t be camping on the riverbank, but you will be camping on dry, sandy soil shaded by red pines and diffused with the smell of sweet fern. It’s a veritable camping paradise compared to the bug-infested muck swamps of the Jordan River.
The river has been carefully tended by members of Trout Unlimited and the DNR. The water is shallow and crystal clear but man-made log perimeter islands create shaded holding water 2- to 4 feet deep. Fish will sit beneath these islands as well as under overhanging tag alder branches and in the deeper runs with undercut banks on the hairpin curves of the river. There they are protected from avian predators. Really fine tippets of 5x or 6x will be needed to fool the eyesight of wary trout in shallow water. An overcast day helps tremendously as does low light conditions at daylight and dusk. Your cast must be delicate and precise as trout won’t move far in clear, shallow water to grab a fly. Plan on losing flies to the brush or busting holes to retrieve them. Charlie Weaver, one of my favorite Manistee river guides from the late ‘80s used to tell his clients, “Put your fly close enough to the log that you can’t slide a credit card between it.”
He was right. Drift a fly 6 inches away from a piece of cover and it’ll never attract a strike. Put it 1- to 2 inches from the same piece of cover, and you’ll catch a fish. Casting skill and river conditions in a place like Deward can make a huge difference. Some anglers will fish three hours without ever getting a strike from even 4-inch trout. They’ll leave the river believing it’s devoid of fish. They’ll be wrong. Wade that same stretch of water in low light conditions, while making good casts when the fish are turned on and you’ll find it not only has a healthy population of trout in the 6- to 10-inch range but it can also hold bruisers pushing 18- to 20 inches.
Skinny, clear water like Deward must be fished differently than the bigger water of the Manistee or the Jordan. You’ve got to be willing to cover ground and pick the low hanging fruit. Deward has lots of marginal, shallow, open sandy water. There aren’t trout in it, so don’t waste your time casting to these spots. Instead, move quickly upriver or downriver from bend to bend or from island to island. Once you get to a solid piece of holding water that has structure below and cover above, slow down, concentrate, make your cast and mend your line to get the most natural drift you can get. If you make a bad cast, let the fly slide a good 6 feet (if possible) below the structure before lifting the rod and trying again. These trout don’t suffer fools gladly. One bad cast, they’re spooked, and the hole is blown. This is technical water and should be treated as such. Fooling even a 6-inch trout in such water is an accomplishment and deserves celebration.
As I write this, hex season is upon us. It’s the fish equivalent of the peak of the whitetail rut. Everybody (and their brother and their brother’s five best friends) is on the river because big, wary, photo-op fish have become vulnerable. It reminds me of steelhead fishing on the Pere Marquette. Deward is the antidote to that. As Ecclesiastes 3 states, there’s a time and place for everything. The time for peaceful, reflective, solitary fishing is late August and September, and there’s no better place to do it than the pristine waters of the Deward tract.