Subsistence Hunting and Fishing

LL at Virtual Mirage talks about fishing among other things. Started me pondering on how my parents fed the family.

 http://symbolic-mirage.blogspot.com/2018/06/tuesdays-message.html

After being discharged after WWII with a wife and son to provide for, my father scrambled to make a living. At various times he was a roofer, logger, operated a gold dredge, and was a ranch hand. Then he caught on with the Denver &Rio Grande railroad.

The one constant was poaching, mainly deer. As a wee lad I called deer “bang, bang cows”. An early memory is waking up, at night, in the back seat of an old Ford as a deer carcass landed between the seats and my father and Uncle Ed hustling down a dirt road, lights out.

We moved often while my father worked for the D&RG. The line kept laying off people and my father was usually at the bottom of the senority list.  He was the Section Foreman in Steamboat Springs, CO when he finally had enough.

 My parents were able to buy a 35 acre “ranch”.  The place couldn’t provide enough income to be self sustaining so my parents always had “town jobs” and guided hunters. As I matured a lot of the ranching part became my responsibility which leads to the fishing part.

In the screenshot below the area in red was the old place. 

There was a house and two barns. Nearly three miles of the Yampa River formed the West boundary and our side of the river was seldom fished. My parents didn’t mind, but it took work to access, and most people just fished off the road on the West side.

In less than an hour I could catch enough trout for supper. The fishing I enjoyed but the object was supper. We ate a lot of trout. We didn’t bother with weight but most fish were 12-14”. The biggest one I caught went about 18”. 

The river held grayling but we didn’t care for them. Plus, grayling were much more work. Their preferred food is a type of hellgrammite larvae.

 You needed to wade in the river  and start turning over rocks to find the larve. I used a simple spinner, what we called a Colorado spinner, with a worm. 

About a foot above the lure I would put a couple of lead weights. Cast upstream and let the weights bounce off the bottom would usually result in a fish. I only kept “eating size”.

We would trim the heads and tails off the fish so they would fit into a baking pan.

 Filled with water, we would freeze them then wrap the ice block with butcher paper. A Christmas morning ritual was trout for breakfast.

The place had been a sawmill location and had a log holding pond that washed out. None of the subsequent owners, including us, ever fixed the dam. The area was dense with willows, a favorite deer staple, and we didn’t have far to go for fresh deer meat.

The ski boom and trust funders hit Steamboat and my parents starting selling real estate. Damn soon were upper middle class. I was happy for them but it happened long after I left, three days after graduating high school.

Would we have survived as a family without subsistence hunting and fishing? Probably, but we would have eaten a hell of a lot less protein. Lots of folks I knew then lived on beans, cornmeal, and flour.

I don’t fish much anymore. Too lazy I guess and fish are not my first food choice.