In America, eight edible species of the family Ictaluridae. Three species (Ictalurus melas, natalis, and nebulosis) are called “bullheads.” They are the most common and prevalent catfish on the North American continent. Bullhead fishing with improvised gear and bait is a childhood tradition over much of North America. More important in traditional culture are four species called simply “catfish,” or “cats.” They are the channel cat (I. punctatus), the blue cat (I. furcatus), the white cat (I. catus), and the flathead, yellow, or mudcat (Pylodicits olivaris). All are common in the South and (excepting the white cat) the Midwest. Local taxonomies include additional “folk” species, such as the “coalbolter” and the “boneless cat.” Catfish never achieved the importance to Native Americans that they later reached among some Whites and African Americans. Only the Arikara of the northern Plains and the Cherokee of the Southeast made them an important part of their diet. A’yunini, or Swimmer’s, mid-19th-century North Carolina Cherokee manuscript includes a prayer to induce large blue cats to the hook. Catfish are associated with popular stereotypes of lazy or relaxing rural Southerners or Midwesterners sitting by a riverbank or pond with a pole. Cats are popularly believed to be scavengers and are, therefore, not considered fit food by many people, especially farm families. However, the barefoot kid fishing for catfish or bullhead in the old swimming hole is also part of rural Southern and Midwestern nostalgia. Another sentimental image is the poor man catching catfish on his trotline. Riverbank tramp characters in literature and popular culture, such as Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and “Catfish John” in the bluegrass song by Bob McDill and Allen Reynolds, are closely associated with catfish. Catfish’s reputation as a bottom feeder has made it a despised food fish for some, especially those who revere clear-coldwater game fish. Captain Frederick Marryat’s 19thcentury description of the Mississippi River declared that “it con-tains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as the catfish,” to which Mark Twain replied, “the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody.” The paramount commercial fish in Southern and Mid-western rivers are young channel cats, known as “fiddlers,” when under about fifteen inches. Fully grown, they can reach over sixty pounds and four feet, but such large ones are extremely rare today. Fiddlers are easy to distinguish from other young catfish because of their spotted skin. At the eight- to ten-inch range, they have the best flavor and texture. Fiddlers are reputed to be the most delicious fish in the rivers. Fiddlers are also the chief crop of both the commercial catfish farms and the “pay-andfish” ponds that have proliferated in the American South. Mississippi is the leading catfish-farming state. Most commercially sold catfish, retailed in supermarkets and eaten in restaurants, are fiddlers, but connoisseurs consider farm- and pond-raised fiddlers inferior. They claim that commercial feed “makes them taste like alfalfa” and that they are soft and mushy due to lack of the muscle tone that they would have, were they fighting current in a river.
Flatheads (yellow cats, mudcats) are called goujon by Cajuns and “cushawn” by Lower Mississippi Anglos. They grow large, up to six feet and more than 120 pounds. Three-and four-footers are still caught. Combined with its habit of hiding in hollow logs and old tiles and culverts, the flathead’s unsavory looks have caused it to be maligned. Thus the use of the term “flatheads” to describe bottomland bandits and riverbank squatters, and Huckleberry Finn’s description of his father as of “no more breeding than a mudcat.” Channels, flatheads, and especially blues can achieve enormous size, and this quality has helped make catfish an important part of local folklore in many areas where the fish are native. Monster and horror legends about extremely large catfish abound, usually concerning flatheads or blue cats. Monstrous flatheads are reputed to inhabit oxbows, cutoffs, or backwaters, tempting anglers for years. A number of cut-offs and oxbows in river country have their legendary monster cats, often bearing a name. One is “CutOffJohn,” who has defied anglers for generations, hiding in the Ribeyre Island Cutoff, an oxbow lake across the Wabash River from New Harmony, Indiana. The flathead’s large mouth and its habit of hiding, with its mouth open, ready to swallow anything swimming past, has made it the typical “monster catfish” of legend, despite the fact that blue cats run larger. Big flatheads have reputedly been caught with various contents in their stomachs, including outboard motors, cats, dogs, and piglets. There are a number of legends of them swallowing humans, or at least pulling unsuspecting humans into the river where they then drown. A Moravian missionary reported such an incident on the Ohio River in 1780. Others are quite current, including the persistent rumor of a large flathead caught at the mouth of the Tradewater River on the Ohio, by Caseyville, Kentucky, which contained a human baby. This supposedly occurred during the 1970s. In Troy, Indiana, local fishermen tell of a ten-year-old boy who was pulled under and eaten by a giant catfish while wading for mussels. A flsherman near Metropolis, Illinois, reportedly drowned after being dragged underwater by the hooks of his own trotline, trying to unhook a giant catfish. Many river folk believe that very large catfish, hardly ever encountered by fishermen, live in deep holes in the river for decades. There are also legends of huge catfish living at the bases of dams, who prey on divers inspecting or performing maintenance. By way of comparison, it is worth noting that the giant catfish of legend is not only a creature of North America. The Eurasian catfish, or wels (Siluris glanis), which has reached fifteen feet and over 600 pounds, has been documented to swallow humans, livestock, and small watercraft. Part of the lore of the giant flathead includes the practice of catching them by “tickling,” “noodling,” or “hogging.” This practice, which is a traditional display of machismo among young men who live near the river, consists of reaching into hollow logs or under floating debris or overhanging banks to locate a hiding catfish. In some accounts, the tickler strokes the fish, causing it to relax, before grabbing it. Often it is immediately seized, by the lip or gill cover, and hauled ashore. Some ticklers will even thrust a hand down the fish’s throat and grab the gill cover from inside. Flatheads have no teeth, but they do have an abrasive surface on the inside of their lips. A Tolu, Kentucky, man proudly displayed a bracelet-like callus on his wrist from his many tickling adventures. Needless to say, tickling is a risky sport in waters where snapping turdes live.
The flathead’s hiding habits help some fishermen trap it by setting out culvert pipes with one end beaten shut. A line with a float is attached to the open end and the fisherman need only pull up the rope every few days to discover and remove what may be hiding inside. Big cats are also caught on largehooked lines baited with everything from bologna to liver to squirrel guts. The most common techniques for catching all species of catfish commercially are the trotline, the hoop net, and the box trap, baited with a strongsmelling bait, such as waste cheese. Fish poachers have used dynamite, fireworks (such as “cherry bombs” and M80s), and telephone magnetos to catch large quantities of catfish illegally. Despite its negative image, the flathead is a high-quality table flsh. Many consider it superior to the more popular channel cat. Its better quality is ascribed to its purely carnivorous diet, which presumably makes it less subject to off-flavors found in more omnivorous species. A minstrel song once popular in Illinois, “The Darkey and the Catfish,” sings its praises: Don’t talk to me o’ bacon fat Or taters, coon, or possum, For when I’se hooked a yaller cat, I’se got a meal to boss ‘em. The blue cat is the largest species in the river. During aboriginal times, blue cats ran to six feet in length and probably more than 200 pounds. Native Americans told Fathers Joliet and Marquette stories of man- and canoe-eating monsters that lived in the Midwestern rivers. Marquette’s own canoe encountered a fish that struck it with such force that he first thought the fish was a tree trunk. Huck and Jim caught one over 200 pounds. One of the largest ever recorded was a 150-pound behemoth shipped to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, firom the Missouri River in 1879, and there were claims that river had produced a 315-pounder earlier in that century. Legends and tall tales about blues sometimes describe them weighed down with tackle from previous encounters. A Wabash River fisherman claims to have landed on a trotline a big blue cat with so many hooks and sinkers stuck in it that it was sold to a scrap-metal dealer. A look through family photo albums of river folk often reveals many photos of people, frequendy fishermen’s children, standing beside a large blue cat hanging on an overhead hook. A somewhat confusing catfish is the “coalbolter” or “niggerlipper.” Midwestern fishermen consider it a separate species, as did biologists until the 1940s. (They called it I. anguilla, the “eel or willow cat.”) Now it is considered a variant of the channel cat. “Niggerlippers,” as they are commonly called, at least by Whites, are a late spawn run of channel cat, with distinctive genetic characteristics. They have no spots, and a more massive head than ordinary channel cats. People with litde experience with catfish often erroneously believe that the barbels, the whisker-like feelers around the fish’s snout, are venomous. The three spines that extend from a catfish’s dorsal fin and gill covers can injure, and they do contain a slighdy venomous, or at least irritating, substance to which some people react very painfully. The folk cure is to rub the wound with slime from elsewhere on the fishs body. The Arikara used a local sagebrush species as an antidote for catfish venom. Fishermen sometimes encounter the tiny catfish called the tadpole madtom or “polliwog” (Noturus gyrinus) whose dorsal spine contains a painful venom. The importance of catfish in the Kentuckian pioneer diet is noted in the writings of Harriet Simpson Arnow. Catfish are usually breaded with a spiced cornmeal-and-flour mixture and deep-fat fried, the smaller ones whole, the larger ones as steaks. Some individuals living near the rivers are reputed to be especially fond of eating big catfish. Sometimes large cats are barbecued in the fashion typical of the Upper South and Lower Midwest, which consists of slow roasting over a charcoal fire to which green hickory blocks have been added. The spoonbill, paddlefish, or spooney (Polyodon spathula) are no relation to the catfish family, but they count as a catfish in the markets of the lower Midwest and Upper South. They have catfish-like flesh and no bones and are sold as “boneless cat.” They are a very unusual looking fish, with a shark-like body and an oar-like snout one-third the length of the entire fish. Rare enough to be endangered in most localities, spoonbill are still commercially fished in a few areas. They also have their place in local legend. Called a “living fossil,” they have teeth only when very young. The toothless adults are plankton feeders and are almost never caught by anglers, except when accidentally snagged. They can grow to six feet and 200 pounds, but even eighty-pounders are rare today. Commercial flshermen regularly catch four-footers in the fifty-pound range. Their large size, shark-like shape, and bizarrely formed head have also been a source of monster-fish legends. Perhaps because of their odd appearance and unfamiliarity to the casual angler, spoonbill are thought by many to be inedible. A Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, fish, market customer expressed loud revulsion as a fisherman hauled in a tub of freshly caught spoonbill. “You’ll never catch me eating one of those!” he exclaimed with disgust, and promptly purchased thirty pounds of frozen, dressed, packaged boneless cat for a family reunion. The spoonbill fishery industry in the 1940s wasted many fish in the quest for spoonbill caviar. Caspian caviar was then unavailable due to World War II, and New York restaurants bought caviar from Midwestern and Southern rivers. Boneless cat are filleted and deep-fried and served as fish sandwiches. Catfish are also the focus of local boosterism in a number of Southern and Midwestern communities. “Catfish Capitals of the World,” complete with annual catfish festivals, include Belzoni, Mississippi; Paris, Tennessee; Petersburg, Indiana; and Toad Suck, Arkansas.