# The Carson King

Source page: https://carsonriverresorts.com/fish/carson-king

House pattern · Markleeville

There is a trout fly that carries the name of the water it is fished in, and it was tied and sold half a mile from this gate. It was printed once, in 1978, in a book nobody had thought to open — six lines in an appendix, and a twin nobody had mentioned in seventy years.

Ask anyone along this stretch of the East Fork about the Carson King and
you will get a story: that the family who owned this resort in the 1940s
kept exotic chickens for hackle, tied flies in a cabin above the water, and
invented a pattern that took the river's name. For years that was only a
story. It now has a witness: Jim Brune, who grew up next door, names the
man in his 2018 memoir — Tony Whitney.

What follows is what the record supports. The fly is real, its recipe is
printed, the shop that sold it is named, and one man who was there
remembers who made it.

## What the fly is

The Carson King is a dry fly. It is wingless, it wears a collar of brown
hackle, it has a tail of golden pheasant tippet, and its body is peacock
herl. It has a twin — the **Carson Queen** — identical in every respect
except that its body is yellow floss and its thread is yellow.

Both are tied on a Mustad 94840, which is the standard dry-fly hook. This
matters more than it sounds: it means the fly floats.

Nothing in either fly is dyed. Golden pheasant tippet is orange because
the bird is orange, and the black bar across it is how the feather grows.
Peacock herl is iridescent by structure, not pigment. Brown hackle is
brown because the rooster was. Whoever specified these materials was
using a bird, not a paint pot.

Neither picture above is a photograph of a real fly. No photograph of
either pattern is known to exist. What you are looking at was built from
the printed dressing and checked back against it line by line — hook,
thread, tail, body, no wing, hackle. Everything visible is in the
dressing; nothing in the dressing is missing. They are shown as they came
off the copy stand, on the plain backdrop they were shot against, because
in a page about an exact recipe a cleaned-up picture is a picture you
cannot check.

## The dressings, as printed

| | The Carson King | The Carson Queen |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Hook** | 94840, size 10–14 | 94840, size 10–14 |
| **Thread** | Black 3/0 mono-cord | Yellow 3/0 mono-cord |
| **Tail** | Golden pheasant tippet | Golden pheasant tippet |
| **Body** | Peacock herl | Yellow floss |
| **Wing** | None | None |
| **Hackle** | Brown neck hackle | Brown neck hackle |

Appendix entries 101 and 102 of *Tying and Fishing the West's Best Dry
Flies*, Bob Wilson and Rick Parks, Frank Amato Publications, Portland,
Oregon, 1978 — foreword by Dan Bailey, ISBN 0936608226. It is not a rare
book. It is simply one nobody had thought to look inside for this.

## Reading the dressings

**The tail is the loud part, and it is the same on both.** Golden pheasant
tippet — orange, barred black, undyed. It is the first thing a trout sees
and the first thing a tyer chooses.

**The King's body is the part everybody gets wrong.** Peacock feathers are
pigmented dark, nearly black. The green is not in the material at all; it
is an interference effect thrown off microscopic layers in the barbules,
the same trick as a soap bubble, and the black is what makes it visible by
swallowing the stray light. So a peacock herl body reads *dark*, and
flashes green and copper only where the light catches it. Dark first.
Color second.

**And there is no wing on either.** That is the line that places them. A
wing would make this a caddis imitation — something pretending to be a
particular insect. Wingless, hackle-collared, with a bright tail, it
imitates nothing and works anyway. That is an attractor. That is a shop
fly. It is what you sell to somebody who is going to fish all day.

## What it is a variation of

Four columns to the right, on the facing page of the same book, sit **Gray
Hackle Peacock** and **Gray Hackle Yellow** — a national standard pair,
distinguished from each other by exactly the thing that distinguishes the
Carsons from each other: peacock herl for one body, yellow floss for the
other.

| | Gray Hackle Peacock | The Carson King |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Hook** | 94840, 12–16 | 94840, 10–14 |
| **Tail** | Red hackle fibers | Golden pheasant tippet |
| **Body** | Peacock herl | Peacock herl |
| **Hackle** | Grizzly neck | Brown neck |

Same hook family. Same wingless, hackle-collared construction. Same body
pair. What changes is **the hackle, grizzly to brown**, and **the tail, red
hackle fibers to golden pheasant tippet**.

That is what a local pattern usually is. Somebody took a fly everyone
already tied, changed the two materials he had opinions about, and the
river's name attached itself to the result. And if the Carson King came
out of a household that kept chickens for feathers, a brown rooster neck
is exactly the substitution that household would make.

**The limit.** The book does not say the Carson pair derives from the Gray
Hackle pair. That is our reading of two dressings printed on facing pages:
an evident family resemblance, not a documented lineage. Strong, and still
an inference.

## The shop that sold it

Page 105 of the same book is a shop directory, and the Markleeville entry
reads: **Alpine Bottle & Tackle · Doug Ford · P.O. Box 216 · Markleeville
96120**, with his five favored patterns — Royal Coachman Bucktail, Carson
King, Carson Queen, Renegade, Adams.

Three of those are national standards; every shop on that page names flies
like them. The Carson King and the Carson Queen are the only patterns on
the page named for the water they are fished in, and the only two unique
to this shop. The recipes and the shop that sold them are printed back to
back on one opened spread — the appendix of dressings runs out at the foot
of 104, and the directory starts immediately opposite. One book answers
both questions.

The shop stood at Main and Montgomery, and it is attested in local print
*before* the book: a bank's staff profile of Markleeville from about 1970
lists "the Alpine Bottle and Tackle Shop" among the town's businesses —
years earlier, from a document that had never heard of the publisher.

## The two families

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **1946** | The Whitney family buy the resort — Anthony A. Whitney, his wife Jeannette, the children Mark and Karla Sue, and Jeannette's widowed mother Adelaide Mundel. A household of five. |
| **4 April 1950** | The federal census finds them here. Anthony's industry is recorded as "Own Cabins" — the cabin business, in a federal record, in the enumerator's hand. |
| **1950–53** | The gap. Three years in which the two families cannot have met, and after which the town had no fly shop of its own for some time. |
| **1953** | The Ford family arrive from Los Angeles. Lillian Agnes Ford, born at Tyne in England in 1897, would run the Alpine Motel; her son would run the tackle shop. |
| **1978** | The book prints the fly — twenty-five years after Ford arrived in a town he had no prior connection to. |
| **June 1984** | William Douglas Ford dies in Markleeville, five years before his mother. |

Until that census sheet was read, the only evidence the Whitneys ran
cabins on this river was the memory of the people who were children here
with them. The census now agrees with them, in a federal record written
down in April 1950 by a man walking the highway with a clipboard.

Then a witness. Jim Brune grew up in a cabin up the road and played with
the Whitney children, and in his 2018 memoir, *Simple Balance* (ch. 4, p. 35),
he names the maker: Tony Whitney "invented a special fly for the Carson
River which he called the 'Carson King.'" Tony studied the insects on the
river, Brune writes, and split light through a glass prism to decide which
colors and feathers would fool the trout; the flies that passed his
inspection sold in his store. It is the only account anywhere that names
the maker, from someone who was there, and it fits everything the
documents say — the chickens, the fly-tying cabin, the household the
census found.

So the fly has its maker back. And the record kept the rest: a pattern
still being sold twenty-five years after the Whitneys left the river — a
fly that had outlasted the family that made it.

> The fly carries this river's name, and it outlived the people who fished
> here before us.

## Why it is called a King

"King" is not a flourish on the end of a name. It is a recognized class of
American dry fly, and the convention runs back to the nineteenth-century
**King of the Waters** and its partner **Queen of the Waters** — the same
royal pairing, distinguished by the color of the body. A Carson King with
a Carson Queen beside it is a form being used correctly, by somebody who
knew the form.

The same 1978 book carries other Kings — the Rio Grande King is in the
same appendix, and the Colorado King is photographed twice, once in
color, with its creator named and quoted. The Carson King got six lines
in an appendix and a mention in a shop's top five. The difference is not
quality. It is that somebody wrote to the man who made the Colorado King
and got an answer, and nobody did that for Tony Whitney, who had left the
river by 1951.

## How we know it

Everything here was read at the original page image rather than from
machine-transcribed text. These are old documents, scanned, set in narrow
columns. Software that converts them to text reads the characters
correctly but not the *page*, and stitches neighboring columns into
sentences that are fluent, plausible and wrong. The result never looks
like an error. It looks like a fact.

Twice it looked like a fact here. The Carson King was first reported as
belonging to a tackle shop in **Visalia**, four hundred miles away, and
the contradiction with Markleeville was written up as a genuine puzzle. It
was not: the Markleeville entry gives a P.O. box, and two columns to its
right another shop gives a street address. The transcription had fused the
columns and moved the fly four hundred miles. Separately, Lillian Ford was
recorded here as running the "Alpine *Hotel*" — a word copied from a
summary rather than checked. The page reads *Motel*, and an Alpine Motel
is independently attested in the same archive.

So the working rule, on this page and everywhere else on this site: a
transcript, a summary or a careful note is a **lead**. The page image is
the **source**. Where we cannot read the image, we say so rather than
filling the gap.

## If you want to tie one

A 94840 hook, black or yellow thread, golden pheasant tippet, peacock herl
or yellow floss, and a brown neck hackle. Five things any fly shop still
stocks. The dressings constrain the materials and say nothing about
proportion, how heavily the hackle was wound, or how long the tail ran —
those are ordinary tying practice, which is to say a guess made by
somebody who was not there.

If you tie one and fish it here, bring it by the store. The object that
would settle the most is a tied one, and we would like to photograph a
Carson King that somebody actually made.

---

Carson River Resort · 12399 Highway 89, Markleeville, CA 96120 · (530) 694-2229 · store open 8am to 6pm, every day.
Machine-readable facts, units and policies: https://carsonriverresorts.com/api/agent/index.json