In May I blasted down to Texas. I had my friend Eric with me; we’d hired the world-famous gator-gar-guide Captain Kirk, and I was dead-set on landing a six-foot monsterfish as thick around as a trashcan with a head the size of a horse’s skull and a snout full of razor-sharp crocodile fangs. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been fascinated by this fierce and primitive fish, which hasn’t evolved since the Miocene. For five years in Louisiana I tried to catch one, but struck out every time. And for the last few years in Missouri, I’d been writing and researching what I call “garticles”—so it was high time I caught me a Texas alligator gar.

Garfish once covered an area from Canada down to South America, and only a century ago they were indigenous to half of North America. But since gar are valued less than the common lab rat, they’ve been extirpated across the continent—especially alligator gar (the largest of the species), which pretty much only exist below the Bible Belt now.

Within the last three decades, though, biologists and conservationists, along with government agencies, have been making efforts to study and protect this fish, whose populations have diminished due to overfishing, according to some authorities. Sportfishing has also been cited as a factor.

But the most compelling argument is that of mass extermination, which was encouraged by anti-garfish propaganda in the early twentieth century. Echoing the popular nationwide attitude toward the species, government publications like Fishes and Fishing in Louisiana (Bulletin 23, 1933) helped establish the gar’s reputation as a destroyer of game fish (i.e., bass, trout, walleye, crappie, catfish, sunfish, etc.) by publishing comments such as: “Numbered among our most objectionable fishes, they are a pest to the commercial fisherman and to the angler alike, for their voracity is responsible for the destruction of great numbers of useful and valuable fishes.”

To read the rest of this article, please visit our online store to purchase a copy of the issue or order a subscription.