Topeka, Kansas.—Many Kansas streams fell so low during the dry spell of the summer that catching fish by hand was one of the favorite occupations in many towns for those who had nothing else to do. Thousands of large fish were caught in that way, but the record catch was made by Grant Cunstable, a trapper and fisherman, who lives near Bennington on the Solomon river. His catch was a catfish that weighed 141 pounds, duly sworn to and acknowledged. When the fish was brought to Bennington by Cunstable to be weighed, some of the younger element in the town began to brag about the catch, saying that it was the biggest fish ever caught in Kansas, but Cunstable silenced them.
    “Why,” he said, “you kids ain't never seen no fish. Lou Geisert caught a catfish here In ’73 that weighed 211 pounds. He was the pappy of all the catfish in the Solomon an’ he jest naturally looked like a whale.”
    The Solomon always has been noted for its large catfish and the Solomon Valley resident would turn up his nose at a mountain trout any time for a steak off a Solomon river catfish of 40 to 60 pounds weight. In dry weather most of the tributaries of the Solomon dry up and the Solomon becomes so low that it is only a succession of pools separated by sandbars through which the water oozes slowly. Some of these pools are deep, and it is in these pools that the big fish are found. Under such circumstances the true professional fisherman scorns to use a net or trotline. He just wades in the pools and catches the big fish with his hands.
    “When you find a fish,” explained Cunstable, “you work your hands up along his sides, slowly. This sort o’ tickles ’em, and if your ears is good you can hear ’em purr jest like a cat when you rub his fur. You jest keep moving your hands along and ticklin’ until you slip your fingers in his gills and h’ist him out on the bank. Sometimes there’s two together in the spawnin’ season, and you want to be careful that you don’t make a mistake and ram your fist down the throat of one of ’em, because if you do he’ll clamp his jaws down and peel all the skin off the back of your hand. But they sure like to be tickled, just like a hog when you scratch his back.
    “Now, that little feller I caught was layin’ low under a big log and jest as quick as I touched him he sort o’ squinched up and quiggled but when I kind o’ scraped his hide a little with my finger nails he laid still and purred. Never hear ’em purr? Son, you ain’t done much cat fishin’, have you?
    “Well, as I was saying, he just, purred and me a scratchin’ slowly along until my fingers reached his gills. They was flapping back am forth just like an elephant’s ears when the flies is bad. I gets a good footing an’, jest like that, I slips my hand in under his gills and heaves But say, that feller was a bull. He jest naturally thrun me off my feet and we rolled over and over in the water, him a flappin’ his tail and me a sputterin’ water like a busted hose. He finned me a couple o’ times, but gradually I works him up close to a sandbar, and jest while he was trying to get his second wind I makes a run and slides him clear out on the sand. He never made no effort to git back into the water again, but jest lay there rollln’ his eyes at me, sort o’ sorrowful like.
    “When we weighed him he tipped off 141 pounds and his head alone weighed 46.”

From— The Mahoning Dispatch. (Canfield, Mahoning County, Ohio), 31 May 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.