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Aside from a few pioneers who imitated Indian bob-fishing strategies, American fly fishermen relied on Old-World trout and salmon flies and techniques to catch bass well into the 20th century. For example, all of the so-called “bass flies” described and pictured in Mary Orvis Marbury’s encyclopedic Favorite Flies and Their Histories, published in 1892, are simply larger and gaudier versions of the hackle-and-feather wet flies that Charles Cotton had written about two centuries earlier — or, for that matter, Dame Juliana before him. There is no evidence that non-native American anglers designed a single fly — topwater or subsurface — specifically for bass before 1910 or so.

Still, the effectiveness of surface-fishing for bass with a fly was well known. Those hackle-and-feather “bass flies” were typically fished on or near the surface. Dr. Henshall, in an 1880 magazine article, described the standard way to catch bass on flies: “The angler should endeavor to cast his flies as lightly as possible, causing them to settle as quietly as possible, and without a splash. After casting, the flies should be skipped along the surface in slightly curving lines, or by zigzag movements, occasionally allowing them to become submerged for several inches near likely-looking spots. If the current is swift, allow the flies to float naturally with it, at times, when they can be skittered back again, or withdrawn for a new cast.”

Things changed dramatically shortly after the turn of the century when, as Paul Schullery wrote, “. . . the bass bug experienced a startling growth in popularity, and most of the enduring forms were created. There have been hundreds, perhaps even thousands, but they follow a few main types.”

This sudden popularity resulted from two related factors. First, the effectiveness of high-floating cork bodies, in combination with feathers and other decorations, was discovered. Second, unlike feathers and hair, cork was a durable, easy-to-work-with material that lent itself to mass production.

In 1900 not a single commercially-made bass bug could be purchased. But by 1930, Schullery reports, “There was a bewildering assortment of bass bugs available, possibly even more than there are today.” It wasn’t so much that bass fishermen created a demand for commercially-manufactured fly-rod bugs. Rather, the production, distribution, and marketing of bass bugs created the sport of bass bugging. Designers such as Ernest Peckinpaugh and Cal McCarthy, manufacturers such as B. F. Wilder, and sporting writers such as Will H. Dilg worked together — and competed against each other — to popularize what had been a virtually unknown sport, and to create a burgeoning market for their products. By the early 1920s, what Jack Ellis calls the “Golden Age” of fly-fishing for bass had begun. And in those days, fly fishing for bass meant bass bugging.

Prototypes of the commercial cork-bodied bass bug had been used by the back-country “swampers” of Arkansas and Missouri, who lashed beer-bottle corks and turkey feathers to a hook and caught bass on them before the turn of the century. It’s uncertain who deserves credit for the first true cork-bodied bass bug. Schullery gives the nod to William Jamison of Chicago, whose Coaxer (wide, flat cork body, red felt wings, and feather tail lying flat over the top of the hook) was created around 1910. A. J. McClane nominates Tennessean Ernest Peckinpaugh, whose Night Bug (feathers, bucktail, and a double hook, all lashed to a cork stopper) was manufactured by the John J. Hilderbrandt Company and popularized in sporting magazines by Will H. Dilg.

Jack Ellis contends that the first fly-rod popper was invented by none other than Theodore Gordon, but that fly-rod bassing was held in such low esteem among effete dry-fly anglers that to protect Gordon’s shameful secret (he fished for bass!), he and his contemporaries deflected credit for inventing the lowly bass bug to Peckinpaugh.
We do know that by 1930, with considerable help from Dilg and the Hilderbrandt Company, Peckinpaugh had become the name most intimately associated with bass bugs. Dozens of variations of “Peck’s Bugs” were made available in a highly competitive market.

Toward the end of his life, Peckinpaugh reflected on his first creation, the Night Bug: “I discovered that late in the afternoon,” he wrote, “and at dusk, if I could keep a bucktail fly on top of the water, I would catch more fish."

"This gave me the idea of putting a cork on a hook, and tying the bucktail hair to the lure, and in that way making it stay on the surface. A little experimenting quickly showed me that a single hook could not be securely fastened to the cork, but I did find that by using a double hook, I could make a very solid bug. Therefore, all the first bass bugs I made were on double hooks. These bugs were designed for taking bream. I found that just before dark the bream would strike on the surface and I could catch them by using one of these little cork body bugs.

“There was practically no further development in these bugs until 1910 or 1911. I am uncertain about which year. Anyway, at this particular time, my work as a contractor kept me pretty busy and the jobs were always so far away from home that they interfered considerably with my usual periods of fishing. By the time I arrived at one of the lakes or ponds where I usually fished, it would be just about dark, so I was compelled to fish at night. I then discovered that bass would strike the same bugs which I had been using for bream. But the hook was small and I lost most of the fish. This inspired me to make a larger edition of the double hook bugs, and inasmuch as they were developed for night fishing, I called them ‘Night Bugs.’ I made these bass bugs in many colors of feathers and bucktail hair.”

When the Great War broke out in Europe in 1914, Peckinpaugh lost his British source of double hooks and was forced to adapt his Night Bug to the single hook. He tied for friends and sold them locally in Chattanooga. Bass-fishing tourists bought them, and thus Peckinpaugh’s bugs migrated to other parts of the country and eventually to the businessmen who would make them for the market.

Other popular cork-bodied bugs of the 1920s and ‘30’s were the Cal-Mac moth, a flat-winged affair devised by Cal McCarthy, and the Wilder-Dilg, the prototype for the still-popular “feathered minnow” or Sneaky Pete, which featured a pointed nose, bullet-shaped body, wound hackle at the butt, and a long tail of hackle feathers.

Around this time, Tom Loving of Baltimore invented his Gerbubble Bug, which Joe Brooks called “the best largemouth bug I’ve ever used.” Loving’s creation featured hackle feathers inserted into slits cut along both sides of the cork body so that the fibers stuck out perpendicular to the hook shank, creating the effect of dozens of legs kicking at the water’s surface.

Meanwhile, fly tiers were creating their own deerhair counterparts of the commercial cork-bodied bugs. Orley Tuttle’s popular Devil Bug and the spun-and-clipped deerhair Henshall Bug sparked the creativity of a generation of clever fly tiers such as Joe Messenger, who elevated the tying of deerhair bugs to an art form in the 1930s. Messinger crafted his realistic and utterly elegant frogs by stacking rather than spinning the deerhair body. This technique involved holding a bundle of hair in place to prevent it from twirling 360 degrees around the shank of the hook as he drew the thread tight over it to make it flare. In this way, Messenger created two-toned clipped deerhair frogs with pale bellies and green backs. To make protruding, kicking legs, he inserted a piece of wire into a bunch of two-tone bucktail, wound over the knees with thread, bent the wire into shape, and fixed the joints with glue.

By 1940 or so, bass bugs had become as integral to fly fishing as dry flies. Fly-fishing or fly-tying books were considered incomplete if they failed to include a section on bugs. Even a book as general and concise as H. G. Tapply’s Tackle Tinkering (1945), which covered baitcasting and live-bait methods as well as fly fishing, included detailed instructions on making both cork-bodied and spun-deerhair bugs. William Bayard Sturgis (Fly-Tying, 1940) and William F. Blades (Fishing Flies And Fly Tying, 1951), probably the most innovative and influential tiers of their era, continued to expand the art of bass-bug making. Both Sturgis and Blades gave the same attention to hair- and cork-bodied bugs as they did to trout and salmon flies. Their hair mice, frogs, crawfish, moths, and cork poppers were logical extensions of the art of bug-making.

In 1947, Joe Brooks published Bass Bug Fishing, the first book devoted exclusively to that subject. Finally, it seemed, fly fishermen had fully embraced bass as quarry that deserved as much respect as trout and salmon, and fishermen in general accepted the fly rod as a deadly weapon for catching bass.

Then everything changed.

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