Hey, Slab Happy. I think we know each other, virtually. I publisher the Skagit River Journal, which you referred to. And thank you very much. On this lovely rainy afternoon, I do my weekly check on stats for visitors. We passed five million page views a while ago and we get 2500 readers or so a day for our entire site, but our entry home page is usually in the 70-110 range. So lo and behold, one day last week we had 1248 unique visitors to the home page. Needless to say I checked to see if it was a fluke, but no. Anyway, one of the main culprits, it turns out, is this very Piscatorial site, which I did not know about, and this very thread.

You referred people to Frank Wilkeson. He indeed is a piscatorial historian. Columnist for the New York Times, lived at various times in Fairhaven, Sedro, Hamilton and Stehekin, mainly in the 1890s. Wrote a famous civil war novel, Turned Inside Out. While here, he claimed to have fished every major stream and tributary of the Skagit, and there are a lot. I was thrilled to find in his 1890 column that he and his boy rode across my childhood farm, east of Sedro-Woolley, to fish. I've co-authored a book about Frank and the fishing columns we found in the morgues of the Times and the New York Sun. The Old Soldier Goes Fishing is the planned title; we hope to have it in print by 2013-14. If any of you are interested I will post the info as we get nearer to publication. By the way, yes, the town of Wilkeson is named for the family, but I did not find any evidence in my research that any of them actually lived there.