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<br />Historical <br />accounts of <br />upper basin <br />endangered <br />fish <br /> <br />28 <br /> <br />Lyndon Granat (Palisade, Colo.) remembered catching his biggest razor- <br />back sucker out of the Colorado River. <br />"Oh let's see it'd probably be in the late '20s," he said. "Yeah, it had a quite <br />a sharp behind its head instead of coming up around like a sucker back, it kinda <br />come around like that. As it got back toward the dorsal fin it had quite a sharp <br />ridge and then behind the dorsal fin, there was nothing; I mean no ridge there. <br />I'd say probably 2, 2 and-a-half pounds. It was about 20 inches long. That was <br />the biggest one I ever saw. The others that I caught were 12, 14 inches and <br />smaller. They didn't have very pronounced humps. We called them humpbacks." <br />Although the species is unidentified, Gordon Hodgin (Delta, Colo.) remem- <br />bered an enormous sucker being caught and displayed at a Delta, Colo., black- <br />smith's shop. <br />"About the first year I came over here, I came once over in 1929 they had a <br />fire there in the store, and Roy Bone had caught a huge sucker," Hodgin said. <br />"Oh my gosh he had a sucker that looked like, I don't remember now, I'm talk- <br />ing about an 18-, 20-pound sucker. Sucker, they said, they didn't live this long <br />but this was huge. They had a blacksmith shop and they had that displayed in a <br />great big iron, or tin tank of ice. People were going by and taking pictures." <br /> <br />Distribution <br /> <br />Besides the insight to the four fishes' geographic distribution already con- <br />veyed by this report, the following discussions offer a few notable recollections <br />about the fishes' distribution. <br /> <br />Razorback suckers/ Green River <br />Several Green River, Wyo., residents reported large congregations of suck- <br />ers, including razorbacks, occurring below a dam on the Black Forks River, a <br />tributary of the upper Green River. <br />Ted Cook (Green River, Wyo.) talked about people catching suckers at the <br />site, including razorbacks, between 1932 and 1934. . <br />"You know they spawned in the spring of the year," Cook said. "Used to be <br />a creek up here, well you know, Blacks Fork branches off over here just here, <br />well, on Flaming Gorge just this end. Well my mother-in-law had a homestead <br />up there like where that potash plant sits now and they had a cement dam across <br />there and those suckers used to go up and spawn right at the bottom of that dam. <br />They used to try to go up over it ... people could really go up and catch 'em in <br />the gunny sacks full. I never did bother." <br />Carl Morrison (Green River, Wyo.) remembered almost exactly the same <br />story: "My grandmother had a ranch out on Blacks Fork and they had a dam <br />there. And they used to catch them suckers there at the dam in rip-rap, you know <br />how they have all them big rocks on the sides of dams. They used to reach in <br />there and get them suckers; they used to bring suckers home by the sackful. Not <br />me, I was too small. That was Blacks Fork." <br />Bill Allen (Vernal, Utah) remembered catching razorback suckers in a gill <br />net placed in the Green River in Browns Park in the 1930s. <br />"It was about 30 feet long, you would fasten it there and to the bank and <br />then take a boat and take it out in the river," Allen said. "They would swim <br />through it and get caught in it. Every morning we would go and pull it in. We <br />