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<br />Historical <br />accounts of <br />upper basin <br />endangered <br />fish <br /> <br />18 <br /> <br />to 1936, remembered people catching fish for human and animal consumption <br />by trapping them with chicken wire. <br />"These draws run into the river, a lot of people would go in there and take <br />chicken wire and when the river was way up they take this chicken wire and <br />sink it close to the river so when the river went down the fish couldn't go back <br />and they'd get in there and catch all the fish they wanted and can 'em all," <br />Bailey said. <br />"There wasn't no trout down there but there was whitefish and catfish and <br />all that ... they canned the suckers and all. A lot of them took what they didn't <br />can and haul them up and feed 'em to the pigs." <br />Katharine Rinker (Lily Park, Colo.) also remembered Colorado squawfish <br />being trapped with chicken wire in Lily Park in the 1930s. <br />"Gh, one spring the boys caught one (Colorado squawfish) that was 18 <br />and-a-half pounds and one that was 19 and-three-quarters," she said. "They <br />caught them by hand in the backwaters when the river was real high. And they <br />put a chicken wire or something at the mouth of this little channel that filled up <br />when the river was real deep, trapped them and then waded in and caught them." <br />Essie White (Moab, Utah) used a net, as well as setlines in the Colorado <br />River to catch fish around 1920. <br />"We used to take in the evenings up the river there, by the first ranch up the <br />river here, about 15 miles up, White Ranch, and set the net at night," she said. <br />"We had lots of grasshoppers on the ranch and would set it with grasshoppers <br />and go early, just before daylight in the morning, and pull them out. We just cut <br />, em up and ate' em. There were suckers there too. <br />"And also I don't think you can do that anymore, they used to have those <br />fish lines that you put a whole bunch of hooks on. Used to fish with them, My <br />ex-husband, he was quite a fisherman. He used to get up and do the fishing, get <br />up in the morning, sometime he'd take the boys over." <br />Walt Siminoe (Whitewater, Colo.) used a seine at the confluence of Kannah <br />Creek and the Gunnison River between 1908 and 1912 to catch suckers in the <br />springtime. Afterward Siminoe and friends would hold a fish fry or divide the <br /> <br /> <br />Photo courtesy of Katharine Rinker <br />The Rinker girls support a Colorado squawfish caught in Lily <br />Park, Colo. <br />