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Arthur Daugherty (Clifton, Colo.) remembered catching "a few razorback suckers," which his father firmly disliked. "Oh yeah, there was humpback suckers, camel back suckers that they're protecting now. We didn't especially like them," he said. "My guess is they're too hard to skin. Dad always like to skin things. Sometimes we'd just throw them back because we figured to get the skin off of them over the hump was a real problem." Arel Hunt (Green River, Utah) talked about eating razorback suckers for subsistence. "We used to catch humpback suckers. Right behind their eyes they had a hump on 'em," he said. "We were too damn poor; we had to eat them. They're good flavored if you could get rid of the bones. There was eight of us at home. We kept everything." Bony tails, humpbacks and razorbacks as table fare Despite complaints about the bones, some residents preferred eating bony- tail chubs, humpback chubs and razorback suckers. Essie White (Moab, Utah) recalled townspeople canning fish caught out of the Colorado River: "Yeah, they used to can it. They used to put those bonetails and everything like that in the cans and pressure them and usually couldn't even tell there was bones at all; you'd eat all of them. They were just soft. They didn't bother you. A lot of people canned fish." Ray Case (Debeque, Colo.) believed the razorback or humpback sucker was some of the finest eating fish available, Case caught his razorback suckers just above Palisade, Colo. "Back then, we'd talk about people, the old timers we knew around, of course all the old timers that were here that fished that river are all dead now. And everybody called them the humpback suckers. They might have had a humpback, but that hump was pretty good eating. We were so cotton-picking poor that we didn't know good from bad. "Somebody told us something about liking suckers. They have a good flavor, a flavor of their own. Just split them, kind of slice them up, they're really bony but you split them and deep fry them and fry them pretty crisp and those bones didn't seem to bother you. "I still say they're the best fish there is to eat; that's the truth. I'd rather have them. We had to be awful careful with the kids because of the bones." Tom Hastings (Green River, Utah) recalled a trapper who had a penchant for razorback suckers. "There was an old trapper here, well he was here after I come back from World War II," Hastings said. "He'd catch those suckers and eat them. I don't know how they fixed them, but they thought they Photo courtesy of Tom Hastings Green River, Utah trapper Mac McDowell thought razorback suckers were 'better than catfish.' Uses of endangered fish 13