Glory of the Silver King: The Golden Age of Tarpon Fishing (review)

Glory of the Silver King: The Golden Age of Tarpon Fishing by Hart Stilwell is an idiosyncratic anecdotal history about the Texas and Mexico coastal waters wrapped around the pursuit of a wily and exciting fish. Even for someone like me, not an outdoor enthusiast (I prefer hotel camping), this is a fun read. The previously unpublished manuscript by a prolific and iconic Texas outdoor writer with a strong, if quirky, conservationist bent documents Stilwell's adventures while fishing for tarpon in Texas and Mexico from the 1930s through the 1960s and remained unfinished at the time of Stilwell's death in 1975.

In his introduction, the editor, Brandon D. Shuler, recalls his own happy adventure that began when the manuscript was given to him in photocopy form in 2002 (xvi). Shuler, an avid sportsman, outdoor writer, and conservationist himself, was instantly hooked by the subject and the writing (xvi). The manuscript, which he describes as "a collection of yellowed, coffee-stained scribbles, cross-outs, and type-overs that still smelled faintly of smoke and nicotine," called to him for years and finally demanded that he put it "into publishable form" (xx). It was a daunting task for a first-time editor, but Shuler succeeded in doing so, and doing it well.

Stilwell's book is a valuable addition to a sometimes overlooked area of western literature about Texas: literary outdoor writing. Stilwell wrote three semi-autobiographical novels, but his best-known works and, as Shuler notes, "his legacy" are Hunting and Fishing in Texas (1946) and Fishing in Mexico (1948), and now, perhaps, this book (xxvii). Stilwell's prologue to the book situates the reader on the Rio Grande in 1934, in the middle of what he refers to as the Big Depression. As Stilwell writes, "the year was lousy," but the fishing was good and "the Rio Grande flowed into the Gulf of Mexico then" (xxvii). In this different world in prewar Texas, he has his first experience with tarpon and begins a lifelong pursuit of the fish all around the Gulf Coast. Along the way, he meditates on the changes in the fisheries over the years, including the decline of tarpon and the relative abundance or lack of other types of fish. He points out that "you can kill a bay by polluting the water or taking out the shrimp or taking the gamefish out with seines" and that if you "pollute the water, or kill the plankton by running the water through an industrial plant, or stop the flow of water entirely (as in the Rio Grande)," a "link in the life cycle is busted to hell" (65, 74, 74). He makes good suggestions for conservation, like managing seine fishing and using hatcheries (something that is still being considered and studied). He also recommends some odd policies, such as trying to move large game fish to inland lakes like Falcon and Amistad or even warming the Great Lakes (112, xxxi). He is prophetic about what estuarine life would face as commercial fishing and industry take over the coast, and he writes with great respect for that life, doing so with a literary style that makes the book well worth reading. Recording a time before the collapse of tarpon populations in Texas (they have never fully recovered), Stilwell's book is a great example of the literary outdoors.