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Historical accounts of upper basin endangered fish 14 were better than catfish. He had a set of gang hooks on the end of a pole, and he'd just set there on a plank across that wheel, when he seen one he wanted, why he'd just reach down and get 'em. He set there and wait 'til he found the one he wanted to. He wouldn't just pick any of them. He was quite a guy." Pressure cooking Before the time of refrigerators and freezers, upper basin residents would preserve large catches of fish, including endangered fish, by canning them. Besides preserving their catch, the canning process would dissolve many of the fishes' bones and make them more palatable. In the 1920s and 1930s, Lyndon Granat's (Palisade, Colo.) family would put all the Colorado River fish, including endangered fish, into a pressure cook- er: "Gut them and chunk them and put them in quart jars, pressure cook them. Damn, they made salmon taste bad. The bones and everything else. "That's what we lived on back in them days. I tell you, in the Depression years you ate what you could get, you know. And that (Colorado River fish) was quite a supplement to your food supply." Don Hatch (Vernal, Utah), who netted razorback suckers in the .Green River, said: "I know some people would keep the suckers and pressure cook them. They tasted OK, pretty bony. They would use pressure cookers so the bones would soften when they cooked them." Tom Hastings (Green River, Utah) talked about pressure cooking razorback suckers, "They'd pressure cook them, the Brocks would. Get rid of them fine bones so they could digest them." Gordon Hodgin and Raymond Meyer (Delta, Colo.) remembered Delta res- idents canning suckers. Hodgin worked in a Delta hardware store and recalled selling pressure cookers. "They'd come in the store and buy them, and I'd ask what they were buy- ing this for and they'd say to can suckers. It was for suckers more than trout. Once they pressured a sucker they could pull it loose from all those bones," Hodgin said. "I remember going out to Bertrands, and we had this pressured ... they said it was canned salmon. They told me we were having canned salmon, and boy it tasted good, and I said what kind of fish is this? Before we got done they finally told me it was sucker, but it was delicious. It was very flavorful." Netting endangered fish Testimony that endangered upper basin fish played a very important role in residents' diets is evidenced by recollections of gill and seine nets being used to collect fish to be used for subsistence purposes. Bill Allen (Vernal, Utah) recalls a neighbor in the 1930s using a gill net in the Green River, in Browns Park: "They used to have these gill nets they would set in there for them too. Well, I know Taylors used to do that. They had a gill net. I used to help them set it ... It was about 30 feet long, you would fasten it there and to the bank and then take a boat and take it out in the river. They would swim through it and get caught in it. Every morning we would go and pull it in." Downstream on the Green River, Wanda Staley's (Vernal, Utah) family on the Ruple Ranch was doing the same thing,