King of the Kaw

Named Lawrence Magazine 2013 Best Story of the Year by the magazine’s writers and a panel of judges

Story by Julie Tollefson

Shortly after Thomas Burns hung up his fishing nets for good in 1991, he began working on a book about his life of fishing and hunting in Lawrence. He cobbled together these stories on notepads and scraps of paper, eventually releasing them as the self-published memoir 60 Years on the Kaw River.

Burns was known by many, particularly in North Lawrence, as a formidable fisherman before he released that book. Those who fished with him say he had an affinity for the river, a sixth sense, a connection to the flathead catfish he called “muddies.” But the six decades of accumulated fishing wisdom contained in his book revealed exactly how deep that connection ran. Burns was a self-taught naturalist who could accurately predict within one day when flathead catfish would migrate up the Kansas River. He was a predator who possessed uncanny abilities, able to spear fish through the ice with a 20-foot barbed pole. And Burns’ stories—the culmination of years studying the river and its inhabitants, every day, in all kinds of weather—are still emerging more than a decade after his death in notes found by his family and in conversations recalled.

“When I started fishing, I had no one to show me anything,” Burns wrote in his memoir. “So to get an idea what was going on, I just looked for any movement in the water. I believed in the powers of observation.”

Those observations compelled the young Burns into rushing waters, onto thin ice, and across fields guarded by shotgun-bearing farmers whose interpretation of property rights differed from the view young Burns had inherited from hunting legends such as Charles Saunders and other men who made their living trapping and hunting along the Kaw in the late 1800s.

“Catfishing was a way of life for a lot of people, especially before we had reservoirs,” notes Ned Kehde, who was instrumental in helping Burns finalize his memoir.

As Burns grew, his keen eye—or his magic touch—made him one of the most successful commercial fishermen on the Kaw in the early 20^th century. He landed fish in astonishing numbers. Records he kept from 1944 to 1993 show he pulled in thousands of pounds of fish each year—14,000 pounds in 1946; 11,500 pounds in 1950; 12,000 pounds in 1969.

“My dad wasn’t a big man, and he handled all those fish by himself,” says Patty Burns Breithaupt of Lawrence, who has collected stories, videos, and photos of her dad. “Dad could just throw out the hook, grab the net and bring it in, all these fish dumping in the bottom of the boat.”

Burns fished in the early morning hours then headed to work at Lawrence Paper Company before ending the day farming for his parents on what was then East 11^th Street. He cleaned fish during his lunch breaks and then sold them to a roster of regular clients.

“Tommy’s way was a tough way,” says Ned Kehde, who became close friends with Burns in the last 10 or 15 years of his life. “Nothing fancy. Hard. Muddy. Dirty. Dangerous.”

And, for much of his commercial fishing career, illegal.

Burns used hoop nets three or four feet in diameter baited with cheese to capture catfish. Fish swam in the big open end of the net but couldn’t swim back out. In his earliest days on the river, that was fine. But then Kansas laws changed, banning the use of nets and making outlaws out of most of the commercial fishermen—including Burns—who operated on the Kansas River.

“That was typical,” Kenny Breithaupt says of his father-in-law’s illicit fishing operation. “Every fisherman in North Lawrence was doing exactly the same thing.”

Eluding the officials tasked with enforcing fishing regulations became a game for Burns.

“He had five or six boats on the river, so they didn’t know for sure which boat he was going to be at,” Patty says. Sometimes, when he knew officers were watching one of his boats, he’d wait for them to take a break and then move it a few yards, just to keep them guessing. “You could say he was just a little on the ornery side.”

It’s all fun and games until someone gets caught, right?

“They did catch him one time,” Patty says with a sheepish laugh. “And my mom was so mad at him, so embarrassed.”

Later, his legendary prowess as a fisherman and his intimate knowledge of the Kaw brought an unexpected offer from the same wildlife officials who had tried to put a stop to his illegal fishing: They would give him a one-time permit to set nets in the Kaw again if he would let them watch him work.

Burns spent a day showing them how he set his nets—probing the bottom of the river for rocks and other obstructions and maneuvering the hoops into place just outside the main current. A few days later, with the officials watching, Burns retrieved the nets and the fish inside.

“Dad was so disappointed,” Patty says. His catch was only about 645 pounds.

Burns died in 2003 at age 83, leaving behind a legacy that was more than total tons caught. “The grace of the river was always with Tommy,” says Ned Kehde, himself an avid fisherman and longtime columnist for the Lawrence Journal-World and In-Fisherman magazine. “He was an unschooled guy, but he really was a genius. He did show biologists and all of us the ways of the river that none of us really knew.”

The stories in Burns’ collection recall everything from how he interpreted moon signs to how he escaped harm when two men shot at him from a bridge while he rowed below.

“When Mom was in the nursing home, I’d sit on her bed and read the book,” says Patty. “She said, ‘You know, if I knew he was doing those things, I’d have been scared to death.”

Tommy and Ozella Burns were married almost 64 years, and he always said she was his best catch, Patty says. Ozella died in 2009. Their four children—Tommy, Susie Taul, Jeanette Hadley, and Patty—all still live in the Lawrence area, plus nine grandchildren and many great- and great-great-grandchildren.

After her father’s death, Patty continues to find unpublished notes that Burns left behind, including one that perfectly captures his feelings about fishing, hunting, and his life on the Kansas River:

Now when the shadows grow long with the setting sun, take a moment and think of the joy that all of those nights held for me during all those wonderful hours on the Kaw and tangling with its beasts.

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First published in Lawrence Magazine, Summer 2013