Historic Fishing Guide’s Wannigan
On the outside, this early 20th century pine camp box (now sold) looks like an ordinary wannigan.
A what-again you might ask?
A traditional wannigan is a wooden box used to store cooking equipment and food while on a canoe, camping, or sledding trip, or at a logging base camp. The name derives from the Abenaki word waniigan, meaning a container for sundries.
(photo: mensjournal.com)
While convenient to have on a campsite, wannigans are a beast to carry over portages, which most trippers do by putting the wannigan across their back supported by a tumpline across their forehead to distribute weight from their back to their neck.
Does this look like fun? (photo: jackmtn.com)
When Jeff spent a few summers guiding at a boy’s canoe tripping camp in northern Maine, he declined to use their traditional wannigans on trips. Having come from summers of tripping in Ontario where there were many long portages between lakes, he learned to fit everything into a pack that he could carry along with a canoe in order to make only one trip across each portage, thank you very much.
But that doesn’t dampen our enthusiasm for this particular wannigan!
This Wannigan’s Significance
And now for the big reveal. Lifting the top of the wannigan exposes what makes it so special.
The underside of the lid was decorated and inscribed in 1940 by two renowned Maine fishing guides, one of whom was also an accomplished artist: Herb Welch and “Chief Needahbeh” (Penobscot tribesman Roland Nelson).
Herbert “Herb” Welch (photo:pattibender.com)
Roland “Chief Needahbeh” Nelson (photo: speypages.com)
There is a pencil portrait of a brook trout hooked on a fly across the full width of the lid’s underside, with the fishing line extending from the trout’s mouth beneath and around its body to form an oval cartouche around the portrait.
The other end of the line terminates with the inscription
Drawn by “Herb” Welch
On the body of the trout is the inscription:
Caught by Harry Buricage (note: Welch’s handwriting leaves the exact name open to deciphering)
Big Pleasant Lake
August 3rd 1940
Big Pleasant Lake is in a remote area of Maine about 37 miles east of Moosehead Lake where Needahbeh owned a tackle shop. It has been described for decades as a lake with “a large area of shallow but relatively cool water at the shoreline that is ideal habitat for trout.” (maine.gov)
Aerial photo of Big Pleasant Lake showing variations in depth (photo: lakesofmaine.org)
One inscription also documents the particular fly that was used to catch the trout:
Jack’s Grass Hopper Fly
In the upper right corner of the lid is the inscription:
Best Quarkazoo I ever ate was on this trip. Sept. 5, 1940
Needahbeh.
“Quarkazoo” must have been an invented name for some kind of trip food they cooked, most likely an inside joke derived from enjoying improvised camp meals together.
The story this artwork and inscriptions tell is that Welch and Needahbeh gave the wannigan to one of the fishermen they guided on a Maine fishing trip together.
Their trip group would have looked similar to the one depicted in the photo below showing Herb Welch (seated on the ground) along with two other guides and their “sport” - a wealthy Boston lawyer - in the early 1900s.
(photo: pattibender.com)
It doesn’t take much imagination to picture that “sport” sitting on his guides’ wannigan while awaiting dinner at a campsite.
The wannigan is 26.5” wide, 15.5” deep, 13” high.
The Guides
Master fly-caster Herb Welch (photo: dailybulldog.com)
Herbert (aka “Herb” or “Herbie”) Welch (1879-1960) was an impressively multi-talented man. In addition to being a champion fly-caster and sought-after fishing guide (President Herbert Hoover was once a client), he was an accomplished artist and sculptor who had studied art in Paris and New York, as well as a world-class taxidermist.
Welch’s taxidermy and artwork are highly valued, and we’ve been lucky to buy and sell a few pieces over the years.
A classic Herb Welch brook trout mount behind bubble glass with an artistically painted lake landscape background (sold at Lang’s Auction - photo: lofty.com)
In 1903 Welch arrived in Haines Landing, Maine, a small village in the Rangeley Lakes region, an area that had been attracting sportsmen’s attention since the 1870s as a fishing mecca.
He was there during the early 2oth century decades of the rusticator heyday, when hotels and sporting camps were built to serve affluent tourists, many of whom summered there with their families year after year. There was plenty of work for a guide and taxidermist of Welch’s stature.
Herb Welch’s Black Ghost streamer fly (photo: flytyingarchive.com)
In addition to his artwork and taxidermy, another of Welch’s legacies is the Black Ghost streamer fly pattern that he created in 1927 and which remains popular today. (For more background about Welch’s life see the 2018 book Herbert L. Welch: Black Ghosts and Art in a Maine Guide’s Wilderness by Graydon Hilyard and Leslie Hilyard.)
Chief Needahbeh in his performance regalia (photo: pinterest.com)
The other guide on the August 1940 trip documented on the wannigan was Roland Nelson (1892-1954), a well-known Penobscot performer whose stage name was “Chief Needahbeh.” He traveled extensively to sportsmen’s shows in the 1930s and 40s, where he was master of ceremonies and demonstrated fly casting and canoeing techniques.
He also owned a tackle shop on Moosehead Lake in Greenville, Maine called “Needahbeh’s Shack.”
Roland Nelson created the Chief Needahbeh fly also known simply as “The Chief” which the Fly Fishers Pattern Book calls “an excellent pattern for spring trout and fall salmon fishing that also be used for largemouth and smallmouth bass.” (photo: pinterrest.com)
His tackle shop and guiding services were popular due in part to the respect and publicity Needahbeh received from notable sportswriters of his day, as well as to his own flair for self-promotion on the sportsmen’s show circuit.
Chief Needahbeh teaching fly-casting as master of ceremonies at a sportsmen’s show circa 1940, on stage with baseball legend and avid angler Ted Williams, who was also a friend and client of Herb Welch. (photo: speypages.com)
Needahbeh was a natural entertainer with a fun-loving persona, which along with his competency as an outdoorsman, must have made him a desirable companion or guide on fishing trips such as the August 1940 trip to Big Pleasant Lake. He was famous for opening and closing sportsmen’s shows with hauntingly accurate loon calls, perfected no doubt through hearing loons all summer on the lakes where he, like the loons, lived and fished.
Wannigan Art
This unique wannigan has rightfully been retired from service on canoe trips given its historic and artistic significance. Using just a pine plank and a lead pencil, Herb Welch was able to accurately portray a brook trout, and also encapsulate a type of outdoor adventure that will never cease to attract anglers and canoeists to remote waterways.
In a new home, the wannigan will enhance a collection of sporting art and can serve as an open display case for antique fishing gear.
Or it can be used as a an element of rustic décor whose interior secrets are selectively revealed to other appreciators of Welch’s artistic prowess, the beauty of brook trout, the sport of fly fishing, and the simple pleasures of wilderness camping camaraderie.
