Given that I’ve recently written two posts celebrating two of the three greatest American fly-anglers of the 20th Century, namely Joe Brooks (1901 – 1972) and Lefty Kreh (1925 – 2018), it seemed proper to fete the remaining member of the trinity, Lee Wulff (1905 – 1991). Interestingly, he and his wife Joan actually lived many years on the Batten Kill in Shushan, New York, only a few miles away from my humble fishing camp. In fact, I’m friends with a couple who currently own the Wulff’s former guest fishing camp, which they’ve filled with all sorts of Lee Wulff memorabilia. Consequently, I set-out to craft a little essay about Lee the fly-fisherman from the local perspective based on the recollections of the few surviving Shushanites that knew the man first-hand.
And therein lies the rub. For Shushanites who knew Lee Wulff are as rare as hen’s teeth these days. Yet, I managed to find one who was willing to give an interview.
Lee Wulff: The Cosmopolitan Sportsman You Admired, but Didn’t Like
In early March, I convened with Doug Lincoln who lives just up the hill from my camp, and the two of us sat-down for a good hour talking about his recollection of Lee Wulff. Yet, what Doug remembered most about Lee was not the man as a fly-angler, but the man as a deer hunter and as a trapper, which initially created a dilemma. For I intended to write a piece thematically well-timed with Spring fly-fishing, but nothing came of interview permitting it.
I really shouldn’t have been surprised, though. In the 20th Century, fly-anglers were arguably the most cosmopolitan of sportsmen. What I mean is that if you chanced upon a man who fly-fished, as rule, he also was active in a range of fieldsports disciplines – a pattern less commonly found among say the waterfowlers you might have encountered back in the day. It is no surprise then that Lee Wulff was just as much a passionate deer hunter and upland wingshooter as he was a fly-angler. He even wrote volumes on both of the former two subjects. Joe Brooks and Lefty Kreh were no different. All of which reinforces the point that, back then, being well-rounded in fieldsports was implicit to being a fly-angler.
Today, however, the situation is reversed. Sadly, fly-anglers tend to be quite provincial now. It’s paradoxical, too, given their dependence on items such as bucktail, game bird feathers, and furbearer pelts for fly-tying, which being active in deer hunting, waterfowling, and trapping address. But this isn’t just my opinion. Rather, it’s an observation that many of my former colleagues at Orvis share based on our collective experience interacting with both fly-anglers and wingshooters. The reality is that most upland bird hunters also fly-fish, which is not the case the other way around. Moreover, those ‘Salt-of-the-Earth’ bass tournament guys I alluded to in Mr. Standfast Goes Fool-On for Fly-Fishing (03/18/2025 post), quite unlike rank-and-file fly-anglers today, also hunt deer and/or turkey and/or ducks, etc. almost to the man, making them far more cosmopolitan than their formerly tweedy counterparts, though it pains me to admit as much.
Well, that’s enough sour grapes for one post. Doug Lincoln, after all, had something to say about Lee Wulff, the deer hunter and trapper. And in the main, it is this: While Lee was just as capable a deerslayer as he was a fly-angler hunting Atlantic salmon, he was unneighborly and abrasive with respect to others who pursued whitetails each Autumn.
Born on March 7th, 1932 in Sandgate, Vermont, Doug came to know Lee Wulff via a land purchase between the latter and his father, who owned a dairy farm surrounding a stream called Terry Brook. He then sporadically encountered him thereafter. Now, the town of Sandgate borders Shushan, New York where Lee and Joan Wulff lived, the two municipalities occupying opposite ends of Camden Valley, which transects the state line. But Lee needed a long, level piece of land for an airstrip, because he was also a fixed wing pilot, and he found it in the form of a roughly 100-acre pasture that was, at that time, part of the family farm.
One of Doug’s vivid memories is how Lee, after taking ownership of the pasture and converting it into a half-mile long airstrip, would come and, in his words, “fly right in over our farm, low.” But he also remembers how Lee was very unfriendly and posted-up all of his property. Perhaps that behavior doesn’t strike you as being misanthropic because the practice today is commonplace. Yet, people simply didn’t do that back then. In fact, against the backdrop of history, what our practice of posting-up property reveals is the extreme deterioration in social cohesion in western societies that has occurred since the mid-20th Century. We’re substantially less trusting and more selfish than our predecessors. The behavior, though, begs to be differentiated into reactive and proactive cases.
It can be argued that a sportsman is justified in adopting a low-trust, high self-interest posture when he posts-up his land if all of his neighbors are doing it and society is generally falling apart. He can hardly afford to unilaterally disarm and, since the measure is strictly reactive, it imparts to him little if any moral culpability. But what about the individual who posts-up his land proactively and without provocation? Well, this is what Lee Wulff did. For according to Doug, he actually was buying a lot of property in Camden Valley and posting all of it so that, in Doug’s words, “he could shut the valley off for himself.”
That sounds extremely self-centered to me. In fact, Doug also had this to say: Beforehand, “we had privilege to go anywhere, anytime, and no one cared. We were in the woods everywhere, and our neighbors were all friendly. They didn’t care where we went because we were all neighbors.” Lee Wulff, though, up-ended the custom, which is why area sportsmen, while they admired him as a hunter, disliked him as a man.
Again, I set-out to write an account of Lee Wulff the local Batten Kill fly-angler, but what I’ve ended with is a fieldsports morality piece. Although I believe it functions as a cautionary tale even if it’s all too late. We now live in a post-collapse society and one aspect of which is that, today, sportsmen post land – itself a manifestation of the dearth of social cohesion, and a guy can hardly unilaterally disarm. Moreover, how can anything be resuscitated, much less made great again, after suffering a collapse? Of course, it’s natural and easy to point the finger at the enemy without. Even so, I believe it’s the enemy within that is most to blame. And human selfishness is just that: the Enemy Within. It’s corrosive and breeds more of the same.
So while Lee Wulff was firstly an accomplished cosmopolitan sportsman, contributing innovation after innovation especially to fly-angling, he unfortunately hurt fieldsports by posting-up his land when he didn’t have to. And since that is now the norm, we know unequivocally the harm it does. For it unnecessarily raises barrier-to-entry thus making it harder to recruit young sportsmen to replace those who are aging out, the effect of which is to imperil the ability of fieldsports to exist in perpetuity as a living cultural tradition. I regret the fact that such a behavior detracts from Lee Wulff’s legacy.