In the summer of 1856, after grasshoppers and drought had stripped the fields of Utah Territory, wards of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City organized fishing companies and sent them south to Utah Lake. Joseph W. Bates, fishing for Salt Lake's First Ward, spent six weeks near the lake and reported catching some 8 tons of fish. At least six such companies worked the lake that summer. Fish came in as tithing too. Provo's incomplete records show at least 6,975 pounds of tithing fish, and for decades the church's tithing yards paid public workers partly in suckers and trout.
Selling fish became a business almost at once. Robert Wimmer built a trap on the Jordan River that could take 500 pounds in a day, and he sold the catch at 6 cents a pound until settlers upstream, whose own fish runs had dwindled, protested so loudly that legislators ordered the trap removed and banned fish traps on the river. Peter Madsen began fishing the lake commercially in the mid 1850s, and his family would dominate the trade well into the 1940s. A territorial law of 1853 against needless destruction of fish did little to slow anyone. That same year officials settled who governed the catch: Provo City would control fishing in the Provo River, and Utah County the lake.
A new fish and a hard sell
The fish that would carry the industry into the twentieth century arrived in tin cans. In February 1882, four cans of carp reached Utah from the federal fish commission, and three of the recipients lived in Utah County: Jacob Houtz, who ran a flour mill in Springville, and two American Fork men, the miller Jefferson Eastmond and James Allred. Tradition holds that a spring flood washed Houtz's carp out of his millpond, down Spring Creek and into Provo Bay. A. Milton Musser, the territory's acting fish commissioner, eventually imported at least 80,000 carp and stocked streams and ponds across Utah.
Fishermen took to the newcomer faster than diners did. By 1889 men were seining carp from Utah Lake daily. In late 1892 Peter Madsen dragged a 200 foot seine for 600 yards and brought up 300 carp weighing 2 to 9 pounds apiece, plus 200 suckers and chub. By 1895 single hauls ran to 2,000 pounds, and wholesalers shipped tons a week to Salt Lake City, the mining camps and the villages of southern Utah. The verdict at the table was mixed. Wilford Woodruff ate carp from Madsen's pond in 1888 and judged it "quite a fair fish," but newspapers complained of grease and mud, and an 1899 Deseret News article called carp an inferior fish.
Promoters kept trying to turn the surplus into a product. Musser proposed curing carp the German way in 1896. A Provo man of German descent skinned and smoked them in 1897. John Beck, a former Eureka mining magnate, proposed canning carp in 1909, and in 1912 Theodore Farley of the Provo Canning Factory found a way to soften the bones and talked of selling Utah Lake Salmon. A Springville group formed the Mountain Lake Fish Canning Company in 1916, but the plant it planned at the mouth of the Provo River was never built.
The cannery at Geneva
The boldest attempt rose on Vineyard's own shore. In November 1917, the Ogden canner J. W. "Jake" Parker announced that his Utah Lake Fish Canning Company would build a $25,000 cannery near the Geneva Resort, close to the lake and the Denver and Rio Grande tracks, on ground near where Geneva Steel would later stand. The plant was ready for production in the spring of 1918. Its backers said they held a government contract to supply canned carp to the Allied armies, and by November a boxcar of it was loaded and waiting. Then the armistice was signed. The government refused the order, and the company dumped the whole load into the Great Salt Lake.
The cannery sat empty for several years. In 1923 Parker converted it to can fruit and vegetables instead, and it ran until it burned in the 1930s. It was never rebuilt.
Carp was called Utah Tuna and it went to California.Bud Good, quoted in Utah Lake: Legacy
Carp for the poor and for Los Angeles
When canning failed, carp still fed people. During the depression of the 1890s, Musser arranged free carp for needy families in Salt Lake City; the railroad hauled the fish without charge and ministers handed them out. In 1914 Fish and Game officials planned to give away 10 tons, and lines formed at 6:30 in the morning for an 8:30 start. About 3,000 people came for fish in 1915. The state also sent lake fish to the county infirmary, the state prison, the state mental hospital and struggling coal miners in Scofield.
The paying market, meanwhile, moved west. In 1922 the Deseret News reported fishermen taking 10,000 pounds of carp a day from the lake. About 8,000 pounds went to chicken farmers as feed, and the rest rode the rails to Los Angeles, where Chinese, Japanese and Mexican buyers wanted them. George Madsen, who carried on the family business, was selling 4,000 pounds a week in Los Angeles before the Depression. When hard times came, he and Henry Loy caught several tons of carp and gave them to struggling Provo families. A Provo man who grew up near the lake later recalled how the fish was sold to California: "Carp was called Utah Tuna and it went to California."
Winter did not stop the work. Utah Valley families drove their automobiles onto the frozen lake to watch the Madsen brothers seine beneath the ice. By the middle of the century the state was using prisoners from the Utah State Penitentiary to seine carp near the mouth of the Spanish Fork River, as feed for trout in the state's hatcheries.
The Loys and the long haul
The Loy family entered the trade in the late nineteenth century through a marriage into the Christofferson family, and four generations have fished the lake since. Henry Loy was the grandfather of Bill Loy Jr., who began harvesting carp in the mid 1980s. When the historian D. Robert Carter profiled him for Utah Lake: Legacy, Loy was taking about 30,000 pounds on a normal day and had once landed 128,000 pounds in a single haul. His carp sold for as little as 40 cents a pound in Compton, California, and as much as $18 a pound in Beverly Hills. In the 1980s a hunger program at Salt Lake City's Crossroads Urban Center bought his carp in bulk, about half a ton a week, to sell cheaply to families who wanted fresh fish.
By then carp had become the lake's central problem. They made up about 90 percent of its fish by weight, and their rooting stripped the bottom of the plants that sheltered young June suckers. In February 2010 the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program began paying to haul them out, and Loy's crews did the hauling. In 2012 officials estimated 40 million pounds of adult carp in the lake and figured at least 5 million pounds a year had to come out to stay ahead of spawning. The crews worked a net about the length of three football fields from custom flat bottomed boats, took about 3,500 carp a day and were paid 20 cents a pound, split between state and federal agencies. In winter they cut holes in the ice and steered a remote controlled submarine to thread net ropes beneath it.
Most of the catch went to compost and fertilizer, and some fed mink on a farm near Payson. About a decade into the effort, more than 29 million pounds had come out, at an average approaching 4 million pounds a year, and monitoring showed carp density down 78 percent since 2012. Underwater plants have begun returning to parts of the lake, and the June sucker has been downlisted from endangered to threatened. The family business that once shipped Utah Lake carp to Los Angeles is now paid to take them out of the lake for good.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-carp-fishermen/
