The common bullhead catfish on the northern plains is the black bullhead. The state record for North Dakota is 4 pounds, 9 ounces, taken from Devils Lake by a lad from Fort Totten. I’ve never seen a bullhead even half that size.
Bullheads have their faults, of course: spines, particularly on the dorsal fin, that really hurt; their tendency to swallow the hook, which slows down the logistics of catching a batch for the pan; but most of all, their reputation as bottom feeders in muddy waters, which affects their culinary reputation.
Plenty of people catch and eat bullheads, although I haven’t in years. Generally bullhead fishing is consigned to the realm of boyhood. This consignation goes back to early settlement, as in June 1887 one territorial editor mused, “Now is the time the small boy hies himself away to the artesian lake, with his pants rolled up and a spool of thread and a bent pin, searching for the festive bullhead.”
Farming, business, and professional people all fished for bullheads in those days. A report from Elk Point in 1886 noted that a local attorney named Ericson, a “champion bull-head fisherman,” had brought in “twenty-seven of these lizardly-looking water animals.”
It seems, though, that in the first generation of white settlement, in the southern parts of Dakota Territory, the catching and eating of bullheads emerged for a decade or more as not merely a subsistence activity but also as a social phenomenon. A country correspondent wrote the editor in Yankton in August 1885,
A party of ladies and gentlemen is in the neighborhood of the Kauscher farm today, the ladies fishing for bullheads and the gentlemen hunting prairie chickens.
My question about this affair is, Who skinned the bullheads the ladies caught? Consider, too, this social affair out of Custer in June 1886, when the friends of Miss Agnes Bloodguard celebrated her 18th birthday.
In consequence quite a quantity of bullheads were yanked out of their natural element into the frying pan. The croquet set was kept busy by those who did not choose to fish.
By 1888 the editor at Yankton declared, “The bullhead craze has taken almost unanimous possession of the community, regardless of age or sex.” This was particularly evident in the community of Kimball, which boasted a nearby artesian lake. At least by 1886 and probably earlier, boys had introduced bullheads from other waters. The mud pouts proliferated. By 1889 the local editor wrote with some contempt, “Fishing for bullheads is pot fishing, there is no more sport in it than hauling so many bricks out of the water.”
One Kimball correspondent, however, observed a natural phenomenon that Chuck Lura recently remarked upon here on Prairie Public: fingerling bullheads gathering in swirling, swarming schools, an amazing display. “It is a novel sight sometimes to see the schools of little bullheads hovering at the mouth of the creek which empties into the artesian lake,” recounts this correspondent. “A hundred and fifty thousand million or so of the little fellows can frequently be seen at one time.”
I have observed such wondrous schools in backwaters of Lake Ashtabula, and so am not inclined to sing along with those who say the bullhead is an ugly fish.