A Brief History of Mexican Trout

The first known written account of trout in Mexico is contained in a "carta anua" [annual letter] from Jesuit missionary Hernando de Santaren.  The exact date of the letter has been lost, but scholars suspect it is from the late 1590's.   Santaren mentions "truchas" as occupying streams in the mountains of what is now northwest Durango.  He was missionary to the Acaxee Indian tribe in and around the Rio San Lorenzo, Piaxtla and the upper Rio Colorado -- a tributary to the Culiacan, and all three watersheds are known to have native trout.  The Acaxees had retreated to the high mountains in an effort to escape persecution by  Spanish soldiers.  

There are at least several other references from Spanish explorers of trout in the mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the next written account of trout in old Mexico comes from John Woodhouse Audubon, son of the famous artist and naturalist John James Audubon.  In l849, Audubon was leading a group of men to the gold fields of California.  The group had gone via boat from New York to the Mexican coast, and were traveling overland through northern Mexico when Audubon mentioned seeing "little trout about 5 inches long" inhabiting one of the tributaries to the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua.  We cannot be certain that Audubon was not referring to Gila chubs, a common minnow in Mexico and the southwest United States.   It was sometimes referred to as "trout."

In the American Naturalist of August, 1886, the famous paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope published a one paragraph note about several trout that had been sent to him from southern Chihuahua by his friend, a "Professor Lupton,"  evidently the first specimens of trout collected from Mexico for science.  Unfortunately, the specimens have since been lost, and the identity of Lupton's trout remains in question. 

Interest in Mexican silver and gold mines in the latter part of the 19th century prompted an influx of Americans into northern Mexico.   Professor Lupton was one of these, but Judge John R. Flippin of Memphis, Tennessee, was perhaps the first to notice the trout in Chihuahua's Sierra Madre, noting from the mining town of Guadalupe y Calvo in the early 1880's that "mountain trout" lived in the cold headwater streams.

The U.S. National Museum has a pair of trout from Mexico that were preserved in alcohol and exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition (World's Fair) in l893.  The only collection information with the specimens says that they were collected from Durango, Mexico by Fernando Ferrari-Perez.  Ferrari-Perez was head of the Mexican Geographical and Exploratory Commission, a group that was to inventory the native biota (mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, and plants) of Mexico.  Ferrari-Perez was commissioned in the early 1880's. In 1884, he sent an exhibit to New Orleans and New York via steamship of specimens representative of Mexico's biotic diversity.  An accident in New York harbor ensued, and the entire collection was lost to a fire. Ferrari-Perez vowed to replace the goods lost in the fire and worked hard to do so, sending collectors far and wide into the wilds of Mexico.  Whether or not the trout specimens represent wild fish is not known.  In 1888, the U.S. Fish Commissioner sent some 25,000 McCloud River rainbow trout eggs to Esteban Chazári (La Secretaría de Fomento=,  in Mexico City.  We know from a rare 1892 publication (Germenes de Trucha Arco-iris) of the Secretary's Office that the McCloud trout were being raised in 2 hatcheries near Mexico City at that time, and they were expected to be ready for release to other Mexican hatcheries the next year.  At that time, however, none had been stocked or sent to other states in Mexico.   Next