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Marabou Muddler

Marabou Muddler

Fountains of Youth – Classic trout flies that have withstood the test of time … flies that remain “forever young”

by Rusty Dunn

The Pyramids of Giza.  The Colosseum of Rome.  The Taj Mahal of India.  All are among the world’s great cultural monuments.  They are landmarks of human achieve­­ment.  If you’d like to visit a land­mark of fly fishing achievement, just walk in the door at 209 West Park Street, Livingston, Montana and look around.  You’ll be in Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop, where the “Wall of Fame” is an awe-inspiring monu­ment to the culture of west­ern trout fishing.  The wall chron­cles prosperous times in the mid-20th century when it was OK – even encouraged – to whack a four pound trout solely for the purpose of public admi­ration.  Dan Bai­ley’s Wall of Fame is a shrine to west­ern fly fish­ing, a required stop on pil­grimages to trout country, and a vivid reminder of “the good old days”. 

Dan Bailey (1904-1982) lived and worked in New York City before becoming a fly fishing luminary.  He was an avid fly tyer and angler who explored famous trout rivers of the East in the 1930s.  He and his wife Helen honeymooned in the Yellowstone area in 1936 and were astonished by Montana’s angling riches.  Two years later, the Bailey’s quit their New York jobs and moved to Livingston, where they opened a small shop in the Albemarle Hotel selling flies tied by Dan and tackle to go with them.  The first mail-order cata­log ap­peared in 1941.  The shop sur­vived the lean years of WWII but expanded during the post-war boom in out­door recrea­tion.  Prominent national mag­azines popularized Montana fly fishing, and Bailey’s fly busi­ness increased rapidly.  The fly shop moved in the 1950s to its cur­rent loca­tion, where dozens of local fly tyers cranked out the needed inventory.  By the mid-1970s, Bai­ley’s shop produced over 750,000 flies per year.  He was the largest fly manu­facturer in the country and com­mented, “I didn’t intend for the busi­ness to get this big.  I just wanted to go fishing.

Bailey renewed in his Livingston fly shop a tradition that had begun in New York, where he and friends traced the outlines of notably large trout on the wall­pa­per of a family fishing cabin.  The tracings be­came a histori­cal record of good times, great fish, and cher­ished friends.  Bailey transplanted the tradi­tion to Montana and set four pounds as the minimal size for a sufficiently braggable trout.  The first Montana wall fish was a 4 lb. 8 oz. brown caught by Gil Meloche on August 5th, 1938 on Arm­strong Spring Creek.  Wall fish accumulated steadily over time and, for each, Bailey recorded the angler’s name, an ink outline on paper of the actual fish, its measured weight, the river, the date, and the fly used.  That information was then painted on individual, life-sized, wood plaques that now adorn the fly shop walls.  The plaques read like a Who’s Who of Ameri­can fly fishing.  The practice was discontinued in the 1980s when catch-and-re­lease became popu­lar, top­ping out at 364 plaques collected over 40+ years.

The greatest number of wall fish (42%) were caught on streamers, and one of the most successful stream­ers on the wall is a Marabou Mud­dler, which was de­signed by Bailey to imitate river minnows.  He described his own contributions to fly tying as mainly being the modification of existing fly patterns for big western rivers.  The Marabou Muddler is a perfect example.  Don Gapen tied the original Muddler Min­now in the 1950s for large brook trout in Canada.  Bailey changed the body material, replaced the wing of turkey feather with soft marabou, and trimmed the spun deer hair to form a prominent head.  The result was a Muddler variation that found world­wide success with both cold and warm water species of fish.

Many a western trout punched its ticket to immortality on Dan Bailey’s Wall of Fame with a Marabou Mud­dler.  Try one on your next pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  You won’t find immortality, but you may feel a sense of cultural achievement just like the ancients.

Copyright 2021, Rusty Dunn


Marabou Muddler

Marabou Muddler

The wing of a Marabou Muddler can be tied in any color, but Dan Bailey preferred white.

Hook: 3XL or 4XL streamer, #4 – #10
Thread: White or gray flat nylon, size A
Tail: Bright red bucktail or hackle fibers
Body: Gold or silver tinsel chenille
Wing: White marabou, tied full; length ~1.5 times the hook
Overwing Peacock herl, ~6 strands
Collar: The tips of natural deer body hair, spun, flared, and surrounding the body
Head: Deer hair spun tightly and trimmed to shape