page_title: Northern Michigan
section_title: Sport fishing
hierarchical_section_title: Northern Michigan / History of Northern Michigan / 1860s to 1890s: Homestead Act settlements and industrial developments / Sport fishing
caption_attribution_description: Map of the Au Sable River watershed.
context_page_description: Northern Michigan, also known as Northern Lower Michigan or Upper Michigan, is a region of the U.S. state of Michigan. A popular tourist destination, it is home to several small- to medium-sized cities, extensive state and national forests, lakes and rivers, and a large portion of Great Lakes shoreline. The region has a significant seasonal population much like other regions that depend on tourism as their main industry. Northern Lower Michigan is distinct from the more northerly Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale, which, obviously, are also located in "northern" Michigan. In the northern-most 21 counties in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, the total population of the region is 506,658 people.
context_section_description: Sport fishing along the Au Sable River became a tourist attraction for wealthy sportsmen from Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Toledo, Indianapolis, and Chicago. After the Jackson, Lansing and Saginaw Railroad reached Grayling in the late 1870s, it began to advertise hunting and fishing trips in Crawford County, home of the arctic grayling. In the same way, the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railway published a "Guide to the Health, Pleasure, Game and Fishing Resorts of Northern Michigan reached by the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad" in 1882. In 1880, Ansel Judd Northrup, a lawyer from New York, published a detailed account of his train trip to fish Northern Michigan, and he assessed the Au Sable, Manistee River, Cheboygan River, Pigeon River, and Jordan River for trout and grayling fishing. The state of Michigan, having created a Board of Fish Commissioners in 1873, stocked rivers with whitefish, black bass, and non-native species such as California salmon, California trout, German carp, and brook trout.  The Board of Fish Commissioners created its first fish hatchery at Crystal Springs Creek in Pokagon, Cass County, Michigan and shipped rail cars full of small fish to streams across Michigan. As the grayling vanished from the Au Sable, Manistee and other rivers, the state propped up the Northern Michigan fishing industry with non-native brook trout, brown trout, and rainbow trout(steelhead.  Ultimately, the Arctic grayling that had inhabited much of Northern Michigan  was eventually wiped out. The logging practice of using river beds to move logs in the springtime destroyed the breeding grounds for these fish. Before they could recover, non-native sport fish such as brook trout  took over the grayling's habitat and made them disappear from northern Michigan.
caption: After being used for floating logs in previous decades,[149] the Au Sable River in the 1880s became famous for fishing – first for grayling, and later for brook trout and brown trout.
exif: {}