About Pat

My name is Pat. I am a fish-a-holic.

I think I have always had a fishing problem. Looking back, fishing has affected my schooling, jobs, family and stuff. I just didn’t know how much until the day I couldn’t fish. Fishing is a disease. The more you fish the more you have to fish until the only way you can fish as much as you have to, is to be a millionaire or a fishing guide.
I am a fishing guide for steelhead and salmon on the rain forest rivers of the Olympic Peninsula. I help people with fishing problems. Ever used your food stamps to buy prawns for steelhead bait? Ever used the feathers of a northern spotted owl to tie flies? Half of the people who try to catch a fish don’t. They are skunked. This can lead to depression or…golf.
In 1998 I began writing a newspaper column about my fishing problem to help others who might be in the same boat. Described by one editor as, “Misanthropic venom in a crude attempt at humor”, WildLife is a journey to the mountains, down a river, up a creek.

Got a fishing problem? It’s not something you have to be ashamed of anymore.

Call me. I can help.

360.683.9867

A Neal Family History

or

A Short History of Plunder.

We may have started in Ireland, first populated about 8,000 years ago. Ireland was a paradise of big trees, elk and salmon. It was good, too good to last. The Irish Elk, a giant of the deer family with antlers eight feet wide, was hunted into extinction with dogs and fire. By the Middle Stone Age, farmers had cut the trees and overgrazed the land until in some areas it was eroded down to bare limestone.
Ireland may have been ruined before the British invasion in the 16th century. That’s when the real trouble started. The salmon were no longer a food source for the common people. The fish were owned by feudal lords. The natives were pushed off their lands. The survivors shipped overseas as slave labor on plantations or penal colonies in the New World or herded into sharecropper plots. The introduction of the potato to Ireland in 1600 set off a population boom and bust cycle of famine and disease best described by the British economist Thomas Malthus. He observed that the population increased geometrically, while their subsistence increased arithmetically. Jonathan Swift, an Anglo-Irish satirist came up with his own solution to the Malthus Theory. Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” advised Irish parents to sell their children as food for the rich. Swift thought it only made sense since the rich had already consumed most of the rest of Ireland.
The first written reference to a Neal was a Daniel Neal who wrote “The History of New England” in 1720.  That does not mean he went there. Then, as now it was common for writers to crank out promotional copy in hopes of luring people into buying exotic real estate.
At the time you could get passage across the Atlantic Ocean by working 6 years as an indentured servant which is how Robert O’Neal, my earliest documented relation and an estimated 80% of the population of the American Colonies got here.
Neal dropped the “O” and settled in Virginia in the mid-1700’s. He was a strict Quaker who disowned several of his seven sons for fighting in the Revolutionary War.  One of Roberts’ sons, Cornelius served under Francis Marion AKA, The Swamp Fox. Marions’ guerilla force of black and white volunteers sometimes dwindled to 20 men. There were times during the Revolutionary War that this tiny force was the only resistance to the British Army in the state of South Carolina.
After the war Cornelius Neal was granted a large tract of land in Tennessee for his service. The land of course belonged to the Chickasaw, Shawnee, Cherokee and other Tribes but they were removed from their lands in a series of wars that culminated with the Trail of Tears.
Tennessee is called “The Blue Grass State”. Back then it was known for its large timber. One sycamore measured nine feet in diameter. Mineral licks attracted huge herds of buffalo, elk and deer. The Neal’s chopped down the trees and planted corn amid the stumps. When the soil gave out we moved west to Missouri. Before long it was time to go west again.
In April 15 of 1844 the Neal’s set out with between five hundred and a thousand souls, no one knows for sure, in the middle of the worst flood in recorded history. It rained up to 80 hours at a time. It took two days to cross the Missouri River. Most of the rest of this journey has been described in excruciating detail by a number of sources.
Literacy was rare on the frontier. Family legend has it that one of the Neal’s learned to read by tracing his fingers along the label of a whiskey bottle. Some of the Neal women could read. They kept a journal that has survived to the present.
The Neal’s hired James Clyman as a guide. He was a literate mountain man who had found The South Pass through the Rocky Mountains and paddled around Great Salt Lake looking for an outlet to the Pacific Ocean. Clyman had advised the Donner Party not to take that trail to California. They did not listen to him. The Neal’s did not listen much better.
Clyman also kept a journal. He mentioned how the Neal Party covered about 30 miles the first week, and then split up as the wagons travelled at different speeds. Clyman told us to stick together as a defense against attacks by Indians. We ran into some Shawnee in Kansas that we had chased out of Tennessee. Clyman describes them raising corn, beans and potatoes in a land stripped of game. He described how our train was full of “discontent and grumbling” about serving night guard duty. After a night of the horses and mules running loose to graze, 15 or 20 could be missing in the morning. As the journey progressed, discipline became strict. One man was left staked out on the prairie in the rain for a day as punishment.
Moving out onto the Great Plains the Neal’s ran into vast herds of buffalo. Clyman described how we abandoned our guard duty, leaving no defense for the wagons, to go buffalo hunting. Hunting was good. We left 40,000 pounds of meat to rot on the prairie. There were so many buffalo they ate all the grass. There was nothing left for our stock to graze. Clyman noted herds of Bighorn Sheep, elk and deer. He guarded the ladies on expeditions picking berries, plums and cherries. The women described this stretch of the trail in their own journals as, “The sweetest living we have ever known.”
It took 78 days for us to reach Ft. Laramie. It was a journey that normally took 40. Our arrival was noted by the historian Francis Parkman. He described us in his classic book “The Oregon Trail” as, “tall awkward men, in brown homespun, women with cadaverous faces… being devoid of delicacy or propriety… They seemed like men totally out of their element; bewildered and amazed like a troop of schoolboys in the woods. I was at a loss to account for this perturbed state of mind. It was not cowardice: these men were of the same stock with the volunteers of Monterey and Buena Vista. Yet for the most part they are the rudest and most ignorant of the frontier population; they know nothing of the country and its inhabitants; they had already experienced much misfortune, and apprehended more; being strangers, we were looked upon as enemies.”
And why not, we tried to buy supplies with our scarce money or trade with our extra possessions but the prices at Ft. Laramie were outrageously inflated. Cayman’s shopping list reveals flour was $40.00 a barrel. Sugar $1.50 a pint. A tanned deerskin was $2.50 and they were all out of dried buffalo meat.  This was at a time when wages were $1.50 a day and land went for $5 an acre.
Parkman blamed us for making the Indians hostile because we acted “timorous” towards them. That is, when the Dakota came into camp and demanded coffee and sugar we gave it to them. We didn’t know how to react when they smashed the cups. Parkman was only visiting Ft. Laramie on the chance he could observe a real Indian war. He followed the Sioux around for weeks and all they did was hunt buffalo and cut teepee poles. Sadly disappointed, bored and suffering from the symptoms of dysentery, Parkman went back east and stayed there.
The Neal’s continued west. We shot out the game, polluted the water holes and outraged the Indians along the way. We made it to Oregon anyway, settling in the Willamette Valley until the railroads had time to catch up.
With the invention of the chainsaw, we followed the railroads north and west to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. It had been discovered and claimed by a succession of European Explorers in the 1790’s, then wrestled from the British in the 1840’s. With the coming of the railroad in the early 1900’s, the lowlands were logged off with hand tools and steam power. The largest sawmill in the world was built in Port Angeles to cut the logs and export the finished lumber. In those days the slash that was left from logging the woods inevitably caught on fire and burned in the hills until extinguished by the fall rain. The Neal’s moved to the Olympic Peninsula the 1950’s. It was a paradise of big trees, elk and salmon. It was good, too good to last. We settled Sappho, the biggest logging camp on the Peninsula, where we salvage logged the Forks Burn. The fire burned several hundred thousand acres between Lake Crescent and Forks. The fire would have incinerated Forks but the wind shifted at the last minute. By then loggers were using diesel powered equipment, gasoline power saws and log trucks.
After the Forks Burn the Olympic Peninsula was hit with the Columbus Day Storm of 1962. This was a hurricane that knocked down huge swaths of timber that was also salvaged. By then the Japanese post war economy had developed to the point where they bought American timber. During the 1970’s up to 300 truckloads of logs came into the Port Angeles every day to be shipped overseas.  Meanwhile, American mills were being force out of business from a lack of wood.
By the 1980’s we had logged and burned the last remaining watersheds of the Olympic Peninsula from the salt water to the National Park boundary.  By the 1990’s most logging was done with machines that cut and processed wood at a rate of five acres a day. Fewer loggers were needed and those that survived became machine operators. They  harvested a genetically engineered crop of second growth Douglas fir that had replaced the native rainforest of cedar, hemlock, alder and spruce. By the year 2000, the big trees, like the vast elk herds and the immense runs of salmon on the Olympic Peninsula were rare, endangered or just plain gone.
Now I am fishing for what is left. Proving the old saying, the worse fishing gets, the more you need a guide.