Fall 2023
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dimensions were given by the editor as follows: “Its maxillary bone measures four and three-fourths inches; the head is seven and one-half inches from the tip of the upper jaw to the end of the opercle, and the lower jaw projects one inch. The greatest girth of the head is sixteen and one-half inches.
In other words, it was a very big fish—perhaps the biggest ever caught on rod and reel in a sporting manner— but it’s not the world record, and it never will be. There are too many unanswered questions. For example, who was H.W. Ross?
For more than a century we had no answer, but I’ve done a lot of digging, and I can at least start to answer that question. H.W. Ross was Horace Warren Ross, born in 1852 in New York State. That would have made him 31 or 32 years old when he caught the giant bass.
According to an 1891 Jacksonville address directory, Ross worked as a “traveling agent,” which probably means he was a salesman. He died in the late 1890s. We know that because in the 1900 census, his wife is listed as the head of household, and in later censuses,
she’s listed as a widow. I don’t know exactly
when, where, or how he
“I HAD NO IDEA”
One of the earliest tales of giant largemouth bass appeared in 14 newspapers in nine different states in 1884. Since the stories were picked up from a wire service, they were all exactly the same. The first two sentences get your attention:
“I had no idea black bass ever grew so large,” said H.W. Ross of Jacksonville, Fla., a few days ago, “until I succeeded in landing one that cost me forty minutes of hard work. It measured 37 1/2 inches from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail, was 29 1/2 inches in girth, and weighed 23 pounds and eight ounces.
Ross caught the bass on a minnow that he and his fishing buddies had caught earlier in the day. His story was repeated—with some additional detail—in Dr. James A. Henshall’s follow-up to Book of the Black Bass (1881). In More About the Black Bass (1889), Henshall wrote:
The head of this fish was sent to the office of Forest and Stream, in New York, and its
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