Honoring our Outdoor Heritage

By Lee Tschetter, Reference Assistant

June 15, 2011

Do you spend the summer practicing elk calls? Do you calculate the range and angle of every animal you see? Are you “not a morning person” during the week but up before the crack of dawn on weekends to hunt or fish?

If so, you might just be one of Wyoming’s many outdoor enthusiasts. And you might like to know that your public library shares your outdoor interests!

The Natrona County Public Library has a collection of hunting, fishing and related outdoor literature including how-to books, trail guides, game cookbooks, maps, “fish stories” and more, available for all county residents to check out and enjoy.

Would you like to hear the stories of people who have spent their lives outside in pursuit of fish and game? Read Thomas McIntyre’s anthology “Wild & Fair: Tales of Hunting Big Game in North America.”

Many stories are worthy of an armchair expedition before or after the “real thing.” One great example is the classic “Horn of the Hunter” by Robert Ruark.

Enjoy the camaraderie of fellow-anglers in James Babb’s “Fly Fishin’ Fool” as he and his companions tie flies, fish, and travel. Wade the streams and contemplate life with John Geirach (whose life has been described as “one extended fishing trip”) in books like “Standing in a River Waving a Stick.”

In addition to the many hunting and fishing books already available to check out, this year, we started something new.

Your librarians are collecting rare and noteworthy literature on two topics: hunting in the Rockies and fly-fishing. It is our hope that these will become legacy collections showcasing Wyoming’s outdoor heritage and providing long-term access to well-known and hard-to-find books on hunting and fishing.

Thanks to contacts with outdoor publishers, writers and local outdoor enthusiasts with their own extensive libraries, we have begun a list of “must have” titles and authors we hope to acquire in the coming months and years.

Initially our focus will be on collecting rare and hard-to-find books about hunting and fishing in the Rocky Mountains and West. In later years, it may expand to include hunting and fishing tales from around the globe.

As we began this project it was interesting to learn that only one other public library in the country has a legacy collection on hunting, and that library is on the East Coast. The others we found belong to universities and museums, and only three are west of the Mississippi River.

This gives us all the more reason to capture the breadth of Wyoming’s outdoor heritage, right here in Natrona County.

If you are well-versed in hunting or fishing literature, we would welcome your suggestions. Looking for a home for your own hunting or fishing books? NCPL would be honored to consider your donation to help us build these new collections. Please stop by the library or contact us at 577-READ.

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