This fall at the annual banquet of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, two Maine outdoorswomen, Alexandra Conover Bennett and Tenley Skolfield, were presented with the Fly Rod Crosby Lifetime Outdoor Achievement Award by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
This is a new award that not only serves to recognize deserving recipients, but also to pay homage to a legendary Maine outdoorswoman who cut a wide swath early on and became recognized as a foremost advocate for Maine outdoor tourism and an accomplished angler and hunter.
Fly Rod, whose real name was Cornelia Thurza Crosby, was a native of Phillips. The 6-foot-tall woman was born in 1854 and died in 1946 at the age of 92. A delicate child with health issues, not unlike Teddy Roosevelt, time in the outdoors was a prescription for improving her health.
She eventually left her job as a bank clerk and distinguished herself as an outdoor writer and public personality who attended national sportsman shows and promoted Maine as a destination spot for anglers, hunters and anyone who wanted to “get away” to the outdoors.
Although Fly Rod was best known for her angling articles and accomplishments in the fishing realm, she was an able and enthusiastic hunter as well. A friend of Annie Oakley, Crosby could shoot, and she hunted deer, moose and caribou.
Not unlike other legendary figures, her life and accomplishments were not without some embellishments, if not downright myths. It was said over the years that Crosby was the only woman to shoot a caribou, and that the bull caribou that she shot at Square Lake in 1897 with her trusty 38-55 Winchester was the last caribou ever harvested in Maine.
Not so, according to Northwoods Sporting Journal columnist Mark McCollough. McCollough discovered that in Bill Krohn’s authoritative historical account in his book “Early Maine Wildlife,”
A Mrs. Dwyer bagged a caribou in 1893, four years before Crosby’s bull was taken at Square Lake.
Additionally, Krohn reports that Crosby did not kill the last caribou in 1897. That happened in 1908.
As you might guess, Crosby, who apparently had some hubris like the rest of us, let the caribou myths ride and never disavowed them publicly, according to McCollough.
On balance, though, Fly Rod Crosby was a marketing powerhouse for the state of Maine, like no other. She was also steadfastly anti-suffrage and a model for outdoorswomen, even for today.
These words from her famous notebook capture the essence of her legacy: “I have found that if a woman loves the woods she is sure to make a good camper, to find pleasure in the little discomforts, to smile over the unexpected difficulties, and quickly adapt herself to circumstances, and keenly and with much enthusiasm enter into the sport of life out-of-doors which seems to me, brings out one’s true nature better than anything else.”
V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide and host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network.
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