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

30

wing," he remembered. "By god we'd catch a bushel basket full of them suck-
ers. Some of them I could hardly get up over that wall. The water was kind of
backing up into that wall there, and it seemed like they had a kind of a box
there; it's still there. One time I think they had a headgate in there. And that's
where we'd fish.
"By god those two kids of ours would jump up and down and squeal and
catch them big old suckers. And they were all suckers. I never caught a catfish,
never caught a trout, very few people did," Case said. "They were sort of... they
were the humpback, some of them. I'd say some of them down there were
around 3 or 4 pounds. You'd see people down there doing a food harvest. Man
they'd get a lot of fish right there."
Arthur Daugherty (Clifton, Colo.) remembered catching razorback suckers
through the 1940s in the Colorado River.
"No, they didn't disappear that fast, you know," he said. "From the time we
fished to say in the ' 40s when I begun the railroad here, when the war was going
on, they was still around even in the ' 40s. I was really surprised they said they
was getting extinct and needing protection."
According to Lyndon Granat (Palisade, Colo.), who grew up on an orchard
adjacent to the Colorado River, the razorback sucker wasn't very common in the
river between 1920 and 1935.
"Well I tell you they (razorback suckers) weren't common, I would just
guess that in the 10, 15 years that I was fishing in the river there, that I maybe
caught three or four total," he said.
Robert Stow (Moab, Utah) remembers catching razorback suckers in the
Colorado River, upstream from Moab in the early 1960s.
"I caught one with ... that had the hump on its nose, it come back and it got
the forked tail. There was probably two different kinds. The one, I noticed, had
that hump on its head there," he said. "Every time I went I probably caught three
or four of the suckers and two or three of the squawfish. I'd say about half of
them, two of them would be the humpback with the nose like that, and the other
ones would be the regular old sucker with the white belly."
Lawrence Day (Moab, Utah) said that razorback suckers were not prevalent
in the Colorado River, but he did remember one caught in a beaver dam around
1968 and seeing another one swimming. "I've never caught a humpback sucker,
never," Day said. "I've seen two of them. One of them was in a beaver dam,
going into sloughs, he must have weighed about 7 pounds, he was caught in the
brush and stuff in the beaver dam. The other time I seen one it was swimming in
the shallows."

Razorback sucker/Dolores River
Otho Ayers (Paradox, Colo.) remembered catching what sounds like razor-
back suckers in the Dolores River. Ayers, born in the Dolores River canyon in
1913, reported "fishing all his life" on the Dolores and catching suckers that had
a big hump "once in while."
Although Tom Swain (Paradox, Colo.) didn't identify the fish as razorback
suckers, he recalled suckers moving into the Dolores River in what seemed a
spawning run.
"Of course the suckers made this run up the river as it was flooding and
usually were there a month while the river was wide, you'd catch a lot of them,"