The D.C. Booth National Fish Hatchery

The spring-fed creek running through Spearfish Canyon is cold enough, and clear enough, that federal fisheries scientists chose this spot in eighteen ninety-six to build what became one of the oldest fish hatcheries in the American West.

Congress had appropriated five thousand dollars to establish a trout culture station in the Black Hills. Investigators surveyed multiple sites before settling on Spearfish, because the gravity-fed spring water stayed near forty degrees year-round, and the Burlington Railroad could ship fingerlings in ice-packed containers within hours of leaving the tanks. The facility was operational by the summer of eighteen ninety-nine, its original hatching room holding forty-eight troughs and two million trout eggs.

DeWitt Clinton Booth arrived as the first superintendent and stayed thirty-four years, long enough for the hatchery to eventually carry his name. In nineteen-oh-one, Booth's operation established a field station at the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake to collect cutthroat trout eggs, ship them by rail to Spearfish, hatch them in the canyon, and then distribute the fingerlings to rivers across the northern plains and the Rocky Mountain West. For millions of anglers fishing the High Plains through the early twentieth century, the trout on the end of their line almost certainly had its origins here.

The hatchery never stopped running. Today it still raises trout for eight Native American reservations in South Dakota and eastern Montana, and for military bases in the region, operating under cooperative agreements that date back to its first decade. The historic grounds include the original Victorian-era superintendent's house, stone rearing ponds, and a museum tracing a century of federal fish management.

What looks like a quiet park on the edge of a small South Dakota town is actually a continuous biological enterprise that has been stocking the streams of the interior West for more than one hundred twenty years. The cutthroat and rainbow trout of the Black Hills owe their presence here, in no small part, to a spring and a scientist who set up shop along Spearfish Creek.