When toying with this thread I was thinking of Tim Hoschlag's "Small Mouth Fishing" book where he includes the 100 top smallmouth fishing rivers in the US. Seems like he has them in every state, and that isn't even scratching the surface. When I lived in Dubuque in the late 1960s I fly fished the Driftless rivers for smallies without even giving trout a thought. I don't even know if there trout in the rivers back then. Surely there must have been. Some of the most fun I've had here in the prairie was on the Minnesota, of all places, and our little creek here, Hawk Creek, both of which are on no one's maps whatsoever. Hoschlag told me one day that the substrate of the Minnesota in this area, which is just full of granite outcroppings, was before industrialized farming, prime smallie fishing. A flotilla of us who started out paddling the canoes for walleye ended up having a spectacular afternoon of smallie fishing on the Minnesota. It was fun and doesn't happen enough. JGW