8205

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 8205
• Author: Quartarone, F.
• Title: Historical Accounts of Upper Colorado River Basin Endangered Fish.
• USFW Year: 1995.
• USFW - Doc Type: \
• Copyright Material: NO

Historical
accounts of
upper basin
endangered
fish

20

taste.
"They were no good when the Green River was low. We never bothered
with them. It was only in the spring when the high river was down. We'd have
one or two and then we would get tired of it."
Alma Scovill (Green River, Utah) once used a pitchfork in the 1940s to
harvest a large Colorado squaw fish that found its way into an irrigation ditch
behind his house.
"They turned the water out of the ditch here one time in this canal right
here, and I went up there to plug my pipe so the mud wouldn't run in," Scovill
said. "And there's always fish in there, and those puddles, when the water goes
down all those puddles were full of fish. This one had his back sticking out of
the water ... I had a cow out there in that corral then, a milk cow, you see. So I
had some hay there so I just grabbed that pitch fork and went up there and
jabbed it in him and brought him out.
"They called it a white salmon, I didn't know what it was. Some of these
guys around here told me it was a white salmon. It was 25 pounds ... we
weighed it.
Scovill made the most of his windfall and put the fish on the table.
"(We) put him in the oven in a big dripper and baked him whole.
Sometimes if they're too big, you have to cut them in two. That's the best way
to bake them."
Tom Swain (Paradox, Colo.) said the fish his family caught from the
Dolores River represented a small part of their diet, particularly in the spring~
time.
"Well a very small part I would say, but a part of it, yeah. Mostly in the
spring of the year when they were making their run up the river, that was the
most we fished it," he said. "Oh most common way (to catch fish) was to set a
throwline, leave it all night, go back the next morning and you probably had
anywhere from six to 10 fish on it."
Swain reported catching suckers (no razorbacks), bony tails and whitefish
from the Dolores River.
Wendell and Kenneth Johnson (Delta, Colo.) caught Colorado squawfish
and razorback suckers on their farm along the Gunnison River.
The brothers used a metal fish trap, built by their father, to catch the fish in
the 1950s as they swam from the river into a slough located on the family's
property.
"We use to have a fish trap out there," Wendell said. "And we used to have
round ... oh made out of rabbit wire with a funnel deal that the fish would swim
up in there, and when they got in there they couldn't get out. And shit, we'd go
down there and there's times you couldn't even pick the damn thing up there'd
be so many squawfish in it. We had 18-pounders, a lot of them average, I'd say
about 9 pounds.
"We used to can them things all the time. Heck there was a lot of those
around at the time. My mom canned. She put 'em in a pressure cooker, they're
just like eating salmon. Just like you do with trout. If you can anything, you just
put it in ajar and put whatever you're going to do and can 'em."

Urban resident fishing
While rural anglers caught the fish as part of their daily chores or routines,