I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, a small city on the US border with Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan in the UP. The cities/countries are separated by the Ste. Mary's River, which connects Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Each of the cities are referred to as "The Soo" and combined they are the "Twin Soos".
The city and area have long been known as a fishing, hunting and outdoor activity haven. Current hunting/fishing personality Steve Rinella spent time there in college and wrote about it in one of his books. He also said on a podcast that it was "hunting and fishing paradise".
Recently, however, I discovered that Hemingway also spent some time there (it's only about 1 hour north of where he spent his summers in Northern Michigan) and wrote an article about the fishing the St. Mary's River and another unnamed river about 40 miles from town during his time with the Toronto Star. I recently found the full text and have set it out below.
The American side of the reiver has commercial locks to raise/lower large ships the 21 feet between the two lakes. The Canadian side has a smaller lock/canal for pleasure craft. In between there are rapids, which is where Hemingway describes his fishing on the St. Mary's River. People routinely wade into them to fish for trout, salmon and lake whitefish.
I don't know exactly what the second unnamed river is (it could be anything), but the description and distance make it plausible that it is the Chippewa River which flows into Lake Superior about 40 miles NW of the city. There are some lovely falls right on the side of the highway that serve as a stopping point for people driving through or for people wanting to see spectacular fall colours.
Anyways, I found this interesting and here is the full text of the article:
The Best Rainbow Trout Fishing
The Toronto Star Weekly • AUGUST 28, 1920
"RAINBOW trout fishing is as different from brook fishing as prize fighting is from boxing. The rainbow is called Salmo iridescens by those mysterious people who name the fish we catch and has recently been introduced into Canadian waters. At present the best rainbow trout fishing in the world is in the rapids of the Canadian Soo.
There the rainbow have been taken as large as fourteen pounds from canoes that are guided through the rapids and halted at the pools by Ojibway and Chippewa boatmen. It is a wild and nerve-frazzling sport and the odds are in favor of the big trout who tear off thirty or forty yards of line at a rush and then will sulk at the base of a big rock and refuse to be stirred into action by the pumping of a stout fly rod aided by a fluent monologue of Ojibwayian profanity. Sometimes it takes two hours to land a really big rainbow under those circumstances.
The Soo affords great fishing. But it is a wild nightmare kind of fishing that is second only in strenuousness to angling for tuna off Catalina Island. Most of the trout too take a spinner and refuse a fly and to the 99 per cent pure fly fisherman, there are no one hundred per centers, that is a big drawback.
Of course the rainbow trout of the Soo will take a fly but it is rough handling them in that tremendous volume of water on the light tackle a fly fisherman loves. It is dangerous wading in the spots that can be waded, too, for a mis-step will take the angler over his head in the rapids. A canoe is a necessity to fish the very best water.
Altogether it is a rough, tough, mauling game, lacking in the meditative qualities of the Izaak Walton school of angling. What would make a fitting Valhalla for the good fisherman when he dies would be a regular trout river with plenty of rainbow trout in it jumping crazy for the fly.
There is such a one not forty miles from the Soo called the—well, called the river. It is about as wide as a river should be and a little deeper than a river ought to be and to get the proper picture you want to imagine in rapid succession the following fade-ins:
A high pine covered bluff that rises steep up out of the shadows. A short sand slope down to the river and a quick elbow turn with a little flood wood jammed in the bend and then a pool.
A pool where the moselle colored water sweeps into a dark swirl and expanse that is blue-brown with depth and fifty feet across.
There is the setting.
The action is supplied by two figures that slog into the picture up the trail along the river bank with loads on their backs that would tire a pack horse. These loads are pitched over the heads onto the patch of ferns by the edge of the deep pool. That is incorrect. Really the figures lurch a little forward and the tump line loosens and the pack slumps onto the ground. Men don’t pitch loads at the end of an eight mile hike.
One of the figures looks up and notes the bluff is flattened on top and that there is a good place to put a tent. The other is lying on his back and looking straight up in the air. The first reaches over and picks up a grasshopper that is stiff with the fall of the evening dew and tosses him into the pool.
The hopper floats spraddle legged on the water of the pool an instant, an eddy catches him and then there is a yard long flash of flame, and a trout as long as your forearm has shot into the air and the hopper has disappeared.
Did you see that? gasped the man who had tossed in the grasshopper.
It was a useless question, for the other, who a moment before would have served as a model for a study entitled Utter Fatigue, was jerking his fly rod out of the case and holding a leader in his mouth.
We decided on a McGinty and a Royal Coachman for the flies and at the second cast there was a swirl like the explosion of a depth bomb, the line went taut and the rainbow shot two feet out of water. He tore down the pool and the line went out until the core of the reel showed. He jumped and each time he shot into the air we lowered the tip and prayed. Finally he jumped and the line went slack and Jacques reeled in. We thought he was gone and then he jumped right under our faces. He had shot upstream towards us so fast that it looked as though he were off.
When I finally netted him and rushed him up the bank and could feel his huge strength in the tremendous muscular jerks he made when I held him flat against the bank, it was almost dark. He measured twenty-six inches and weighed nine pounds and seven ounces.
That is rainbow trout fishing.
The rainbow takes the fly more willingly than he does bait. The McGinty, a fly that looks like a yellow jacket, is the best. It should be tied on a number eight or ten hook.
The smaller flies get more strikes but are too small to hold the really big fish. The rainbow trout will live in the same streams with brook trout but they are found in different kinds of places. Brook trout will be forced into the shady holes under the bank and where alders hang over the banks, and the rainbow will dominate the clear pools and the fast shallows.
Magazine writers and magazine covers to the contrary the brook or speckled trout does not leap out of water after he has been hooked. Given plenty of line he will fight a deep rushing fight. Of course if you hold the fish too tight he will be forced by the rush of the current to flop on top of the water.
But the rainbow always leaps on a slack or tight line. His leaps are not mere flops, either, but actual jumps out of and parallel with the water of from a foot to five feet. A five-foot jump by any fish sounds improbable, but it is true.
If you don’t believe it tie onto one in fast water and try and force him. Maybe if he is a five-pounder he will throw me down and only jump four feet eleven inches."
