It’s possible we’ve taken our passion for native trout a bit too far. Not that North America’s native fish should be held in disdain. Far from it.

In putting the notion of Manifest Destiny into practice — first by identifying it as the inevitable future for European Americans in the mid-1800s and then by actively pursuing it as an ideal — our predecessors doomed more than just the Indigenous people of our continent.

With all due respect to North America’s indigenous people, many of whose progeny remain confined to “reservations” (yes, we still use that shameful term) and still suffer the apartheid conditions that resulted from westward expansion by European Americans, the continent’s wildlife, too, has suffered.

The last grizzly bear in Colorado was shot and killed by a bowhunter in 1979 in the wild country of the San Juan National Forest. Utah’s last griz was trapped and shot in Logan Canyon by a southern Idaho trapper in 1929. Today, the Optimus Prime of North American predators, not unlike the continent’s indigenous people, is confined to carefully managed “reservations” where, even now, should it venture across tenuous political boundaries, it stands just as good a chance of being shot and killed as its ancestors did a century ago.

That these reservations are now called national parks, national wildlife refuges, national monuments or national forests is immaterial. Tolerance for top-tier predators is minimal, particularly by those who displaced Indigenous Americans and set about using the wild country of the West to raise livestock, funnel water from rivers to grow crops or pull minerals from the ground to fuel expansion.

And the grizzly isn’t alone. The American bison is perhaps the poster child when it comes to acceptable trade-offs. Crop yields, domesticated livestock and simple development are still more important to land managers than intact wildlife habitat. The same is true for the West Coast’s salmon, which were deemed less important than cheap timber, cheap hydropower and the desire to turn arid landscapes into lush and productive farmland or pastures for a completely different kind of protein. Therefore, they were allowed to dwindle and, in many cases, wink out altogether.

Development is an absolutist’s game. There’s no middle ground.

The trout story is different

But the country’s native trout? For some reason, that’s a different story, one not necessarily tied to the physical forces of Manifest Destiny. Rather, the plight of North America’s native trout is simply one of misguided preference — a product of the arrogance of westward expansion. This trout over that trout, for whatever reason.

We can blame ignorance. Given the infancy of fisheries science a century and a half ago, and the emphasis put on propagation rather than conservation, it made sense, at the time, to radically change the state of the trout fishery in the West. For an example, look no further than our country’s largest grizzly bear reservation — Yellowstone National Park.

U.S. Army Capt. Frazier Boutelle, who was given the charge of managing Yellowstone in 1888 in the absence of a formal management agency (which would later become the National Park Service under the Department of Interior), would take one look at the state of the park’s fishery and immediately set about to change it.

“I hope to see all of these waters so stocked that the pleasure-seeker in the Park can enjoy fine fishing within a few rods of any hotel or camp,” he’s quoted as saying.

We can blame the “pleasure-seeker” for the demise of westslope cutthroat trout and Arctic grayling in the lower Firehole and Gibbon rivers, which come together to form the storied Madison. When Boutelle gave voice to his fateful desires, both native fish thrived from the base of Firehole Falls and Gibbon Falls all the way down the Madison to where it met with the Jefferson and the Gallatin, and beyond.

Not anymore.

Replaced in the blink of an eye

Part of the blame lies with the grayling, at least according to W.C. Kendall who, as an assistant with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries had this to say about Yellowstone’s willing native fish in a 1914 report:

“It takes the artificial fly eagerly, and if missed at the first cast will rise again and again from the depths of the pool, whereas the trout will seldom rise a second time without a rest.”

Manifest Destiny wins again. Within 12 years of Boutelle’s decree, grayling were gone from the Gallatin. By 1935, the native fish were completely gone from the park. Today, the once-fishless upper reaches of the Firehole and the Gibbon are now home to brown trout of Scottish and German lineage, brookies from Appalachia and rainbows that likely originated in the McCloud River in California.

In the far upper reaches of the Gibbon, above Virginia Cascade, the Park Service continues to try and bring back the native cutthroats and grayling. But remember, these fish aren’t native, either. The meanders of the upper Gibbon, when Boutelle took charge of the park and its trout, were fishless. The effort to “reintroduce” the native fish to this small pocket of good habitat is a Hail Mary, and the results are far from certain.

In southern Montana, fisheries managers with the state and the U.S. Forest Service are working to rid Buffalo Creek of introduced rainbows that are threatening the genetic integrity of Yellowstone cutthroat trout in the fabled Slough Creek drainage. The plan? Poison the non-native rainbows and replace them non-native Yellowstone cutthroat. Much like the upper Gibbon, upper Buffalo Creek, before the arrival of European Americans, was fishless. But Buffalo Creek offers excellent habitat and sits at an elevation where it will remain dependably cold. It’s also had trout in it for a century.

The practice of displacing or replacing native trout repeated itself all over the West, and it hasn’t really stopped. To this day, fisheries managers in Idaho introduce hatchery rainbows into the upper reaches of the Big Lost River, where, before the product of Manifest Destiny arrived in the Gem State, only the lowly mountain whitefish was native. To this day, the theory that “this fish is better than that fish” prevails. Or, in more politically correct terms, the river is managed with anglers in mind.

We all but lost our indigenous Gila and Apache trout of the southwest, and some western cutthroat trout subspecies are officially extinct. Thanks to the introduction of brookies, browns and rainbows, native fish are mostly gone from the southern Rockies of New Mexico to the desert peaks of northwest Nevada. Brook trout from Appalachia have polluted remote drainages throughout the West, where they literally eat themselves out of habitat. Once revered, they’re now abhorred by trout anglers for their lack of size and the fact that they show up just about anywhere a small-stream angler might like to go to find sizable fish.

And for what? The preference of anglers more than a century ago? The desire to catch the brown trout their ancestors left behind to start a new life on a new continent, or the deep-seeded desire to make the trout water of the West look a lot like the trout water of the East?

It doesn’t really matter now. The damage has been done. It’s where we go from here that matters.

Is it too late? Probably.

It’s time to embrace wild trout. Wherever they swim. Whatever their pedigree. Theirs is not a tale of total loss, like it is with the bison or the grizzly bear. But, like the bison and the griz, trout, too, will one day be confined to reservations and restricted by climatic forces that are already taking hold.

Are there places where certain wild trout (or char, as is the case with brook trout and lake trout) just don’t belong? Certainly. Exotic lake trout in Yellowstone Lake have already devastated the lake’s native Yellowstone cutthroat trout once. If, for some reason, the National Park Service were to lose the funding needed to continually net lakers from the depths of this high-elevation freshwater sea, the non-native char will likely take over again.

Brook trout? Brookies have done more damage to native trout and char in the West than we can likely quantify. They outcompete cutthroats, hybridize with bull trout and generally turn once-cherished native trout waters into streams full of dinks.

It’s what they do. And we enabled them. In all but a few drainages where native trout hang on, and where we have the opportunity to try and recreate a native population out of heritage strains of cutthroats, Gilas, Apaches, goldens or redbands, brookies will persist.

On the whole, it’s likely too late to aggressively and meaningfully try and displace non-native, yet naturalized fish that swim in most western waters. The best we can do, in an effort to protect or propagate native trout, is to craft pockets of acceptable habitat and do our best to remove the non-native fish from these — and only these — little oases. And, save for large-scale efforts, like those ongoing on Yellowstone Lake, these smaller projects will have to do.

We’ve already reached a tipping point

Why? Because all trout habitat is in peril, and in certain reaches of once perfectly healthy native trout water, the future is grim.

A 13-year-old study has proven to be prophetic. Crafted in 2011 by fisheries biologists Seth Wenger and Kurt Fausch, the study predicted that wild trout in the West would decline by 50 percent within 70 years thanks largely to a changing climate and our often-stubborn refusal to help our watersheds adapt.

Since the study was published, we’ve seen marked declines in wild trout populations in places like southwest Montana’s Big Hole river basin, where low stream flows thanks to heavily allocated water for agriculture are coupling with record summer heat and making the river uninhabitable to trout.

We’ve seen parasites that wild trout might normally shrug off kill fish in rivers like the Yellowstone; blue-green algae outbreaks degrading trophy waters like Henry’s Lake and the Henry’s Fork; and we’ve seen record floods, exacerbated droughts and ballooning air and water temperatures.

Since the study came out, all five of the planet's hottest years on record have occurred. It’s begun. The troubling slog toward a less trouty future is under way.

And attentive anglers know it.

In the fall of 2022, legendary angler and Orvis lifer Tom Rosenbauer spoke at the annual School of Trout event conducted on the Henry’s Fork in eastern Idaho. Around a bonfire one night, with the event’s students gathered around and listening, Rosenbauer shared some sobering thoughts.

“If you’ve been coming to Montana and Idaho for 20 years, 30 years or 40 years, you know the climate is different. Rivers are getting warmer,” he said. “We’re going to lose some trout streams. If things keep up, we’re going to be limited to fishing below tailwaters where water comes out of a dam, and we’re going to be limited to high-mountain streams. The freestone, non-tailwater streams that go through the valleys? We’re going to lose some of those.”

What does the future hold?

In the Yellowstone River as it flows out of Yellowstone National Park and north toward Livingston, smallmouth bass are now present. No, they may not be plentiful — not yet. In July of last year, the first recorded catch of a smallie happened on Montana’s Bitterroot River. That same river has seen catches of largemouth bass in years past, and the Bitterroot has hosted non-native northern pike for decades.

Predictably, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks put in place an emergency order demanding anglers keep all smallmouth bass caught in the lower Bitterroot and turn them over to the state for analysis. Truth be told, short of nuking the lower Bitterroot, there’s not much fisheries managers can do to stave off the coming invasion of bass.

Both largemouth and smallmouth bass are considered warm-water fish, although smallies are certainly more tolerant of colder water. Pike are legit cool-water predators, and as the Bitterroot continues to get warmer with every record-breaking summer, the numbers of exotic fish will rise and the native westslope cutthroats and bull trout will lose habitat.

On the Yellowstone, the discovery of smallmouth bass on the fringes of the border with Yellowstone National park is an ominous event. Smallies have been in the Yellowstone for years — they’re very common in the lower reaches, well below Livingston, where the river braids out through a cottonwood forest and winds its way east toward Billings. And, you guessed it, they’re there because we put them there. Because fishing in rivers like the Tongue, Bighorn and the lower Yellowstone just wasn’t good enough in the 1960s.

But in the trout water? Right on the cusp of America’s first national park? Realists in the fisheries game might not give voice to what this means, but there are some who will readily acknowledge that this is likely the beginning of the end for wild trout in the Yellowstone north of the park boundary. The river is already becoming less hospitable to wild and native trout, and the replacement fish — the adaptable smallmouth bass — is waiting in the wings.

Can they be stopped? Probably not. And any efforts to try will be expensive. The Wenger/Fausch study suggests that any conservation work on the Yellowstone or other iconic Western rivers suffering from the effects of climate change will only delay the inevitable.

Truth be told, we couldn’t have fouled up Western trout fisheries more effectively had we actually sought to do it. Our ignorance and our arrogance 140 years ago, coupled with our disdain for the natural function of rivers led us to this point. Now, with a climate that’s becoming less and less friendly to coldwater fish, the outcome is all but certain.

“This research also builds on 15 years of work with graduate students at [Colorado State University] to find ways to prevent our native cutthroat trout from going extinct in the face of declining habitat and nonnative trout invasions,” Fausch wrote in his study in 2011.

“It’s exciting to see these ideas being used, but the impending loss of trout habitat is both startling and depressing,” he wrote. “The West is iconic for trout fishing, but much of this is projected to go away.”

This fish, that fish … no fish?

It is time to stop palpitating over which trout belong where and start ensuring functional rivers have the resiliency needed to withstand a climate that’s not going to get any friendlier to coldwater fish.

Terms like “minimum stream flows” and “connectivity” should replace worries over which flavor of trout swims in Rattlesnake Creek and why it ought to be removed and replaced. The days of fighting those little battles should be over. The effort now should focus on the plumbing of the West and how we can make sure enough water flows down the Big Hole to keep any of its trout alive, let alone its rare natives (it’s the last Missouri River Basin tributary that still has a population of native grayling, by the way).

In other drainages, emphasis should be on ensuring fish — any fish — can move throughout the system in order to migrate during spawning season or to allow them to seek out thermal relief when valley-floor temperatures hit 100 degrees and rivers that used to be dependably cold just aren’t anymore. This means that unsexy conservation projects like ensuring adequate streamflow, culvert replacements and dam removals need to become a primary focus of fisheries managers.

Chris Hunt is an award-winning journalist and the author of “Catching Yellowstone’s Wild Trout and co-author of the “Little Black Book of Fly Fishing.” He splits his time between eastern Idaho and northern Florida.