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Endangered fish as bait Other residents reported that the endangered fish themselves made excel- lent fishing bait. Clarence Smith (Palisade, Colo.) said he would sometimes use razorback suckers for bait, when he didn't throw them on the bank or release them. Colorado River fisherman Lyndon Granat (Palisade, Colo.) found that bony tail chubs and humpback chubs made excellent catfish bait. "In the early '30s, somewhere in there, they introduced channel cats in the river, and the bony tails and the squawfish began to disappear," Granat said. "I shouldn't say disappear, begin to get less numerous. And then we discovered, we'd catch those big channel cats, we'd use a bony tail or a humpback chub for bait and they had a spear hook, like two hooks on it, and you had a spear on the end hook and an eye. And run that hook through the bony tail 's body and out its mouth and then hook that hook that was attached to the line to that eye. And that allowed that fish to wiggle like this even though it was dead. And you would throw your setIine or trotline, whatever you want to call it into a ... an upper end of a pool and let it come down a ripple and those bony tails would shake like this and those catfish would come up and ... and they grabbed a fish by the tail and they turned them in their mouth and swallow them headfIrst, you see. And that's the way they caught the big channel cats with that and with chicken liver. They didn't really catch any really big catfish until the latter part of the '30s and early , 40s and then you began to get catfish out there that weighed between 6 and 8 pounds. " Spearing Colorado squawfish Some Colorado squawfish were even "gigged" with spears and pitchforks, according to some interviewees. Most spear-wielding residents were gathering the fish for food. However, Tom Hastings (Green River, Utah) recalled spearing a Colorado squawfish for fun beneath his family's water wheel and getting more fun than he bargained for. "My brother and I, we waded in there, the water hit me about here (chest high), we waded in there behind that wheel with a couple of spears," Hastings said. "One of them (Colorado squawfish) damn near drowned me. I hooked in to him, he took me down out of there ... I was underneath and on top (of the water). I was small and wasn't about to turn him loose. I was about 7 or 8. My brother, he was older; he got down there and got me, and I still had my fish." Catch of a lifetime To some upper basin anglers, hooking a large Colorado squawfish repre- sents an unforgettable "catch of a lifetime." For Max Stewart (Vernal, Utah) landing a 25-pound Colorado squawfish remains the height of his angling career. While on a fishing outing with his father, 8-year-old Stewart was given the sole responsibility to patrol some 18 lines set in the Green River, near Jensen, Utah, after his father became ill. After catching several catfish on the makeshift tamarack rods, Stewart was patrolling the row of rods when he noticed the end one being pulled into the water. "As I was walking down to the last pole on the up-river side, why there was the biggest commotion in the water," Stewart said. "The water was really boiling Sporting qualities of the endan- gered fish 13