Montanans find there’s gold in them there fish : City reels in cash by cracking open the paddlefish, calling it caviar--and hooking some city slickers.

GLENDIVE, Mont. —  And now for an original twist on that age-old challenge of civic fund raising in tight times.

The problem here in tiny Glendive was the same as in big cities such as New York or Detroit or Los Angeles. How do the civic leaders raise money for Little League, youth camps, park and arts projects and all the rest when Main Street businesses are struggling to survive?

A rural Montana inventor named Joseph Frank Crisafulli figured all one had to do was take into account the different tastes of people who live in eastern Montana on the edge of the Badlands and those who live in New York. That is, what do Montanans throw away that people in New York pay a small fortune for?

Fish eggs.

Well, fish eggs in Montana. In New York, the squishy little gray things that look like BBs are called caviar. And people will pay all sorts of outrageous amounts of money for them, danged if they won’t.

Enter Kathy Jackson, the fireball executive director of the Chamber of Commerce here in greater Glendive, population 5,000 or so.

Jackson has proved herself already. She was one of the early pioneers in toy duck races as a fund-raising device. This is a sort-of race, sort-of lottery game in which citizens pay $10 to rent a toy bathtub duck. Numbers are written on the bottom. On event day, about 600 of the ducks are tossed into the Yellowstone River outside of town and the first duck across a downstream finish line wins its sponsor $1,000.

So for someone with Jackson’s record, how difficult could fish eggs be?

Everyone in Glendive knew that each spring fishermen went out and snagged hundreds, thousands of prehistoric paddlefish from the area where the agricultural diversion dam created a spawning ground. Paddlefish eat only microorganisms, so they cannot be caught except by snagging them with a sharpened treble hook when they congregate to reproduce.

Some have likened the sensation of snagging a paddlefish, which can weigh up to 100 pounds, to that of lifting an old tire off the river bottom. But it has become an amazingly popular local “sport” in the last 25 years or so.

A relative of the river sturgeon, paddlefish are ugly brutes that are a sportsman’s nightmare to clean. In the past, most fishermen washed their hands of the job and paid local workers at the dam $10 per fish for cleaning. The entrails and eggs were tossed out.

For Jackson, it was just a matter of getting the eggs out of the bottom of Glendive’s garbage cans and into the hungry mouths of city folks.

First, state law had to be changed to permit a nonprofit organization to trade in paddlefish. The slow-growing, ancient creatures have been heavily overfished elsewhere in the big rivers of the U.S. and can be taken in Montana only with the purchase of special game tags to limit harvest.

The Legislature bought the argument that selling eggs would not further harm the stocks of these river monsters, and wrote a requirement that half the proceeds from egg sales had to be returned to the state for paddlefish research, just to make sure.

That was three years ago.

Right away, the Chamber of Commerce changed life down at the fish cleaning dock. Instead of charging a fisherman $10 to clean a paddlefish, the chamber offered to do it free and, in addition, to wrap up the edible meat (10 pounds on a 70-pound fish). This in exchange for the eggs.

To local fishermen, that was like having someone offer to wash their pickups if he could keep the dirt.

In 1990, 1,600 paddlefish were cleaned by Chamber of Commerce workers. A Soviet caviar expert was called in to help transform an abandoned local dairy into a plant where the eggs could be processed by soaking them in brine. The gross proceeds totaled $100,000. In 1991, 3,000 fish were cleaned, resulting in 10,000 pounds of caviar and a gross of $300,000-plus.

The 1992 season opens in May and runs for six weeks. Another good season and Glendive will maintain its position as the No. 1 caviar producer in America, right in the heart of cattle country.

Jackson says the Yellowstone River paddlefish eggs, marketed as American caviar, rank with an assortment of other caviars as only slightly behind Russian Beluga in quality. They wholesale for about $32 a pound and retail for about $25 an ounce. A Florida middleman buys all the eggs produced in Glendive, and Jackson says they end up for sale in New York and are served on some cruise ship lines.

Here in Glendive, a railroad town where people still say hello to strangers on the street, you cannot buy the city’s most famous export. Just as well, too. Even Jackson admits as much.

“If you’re a Montana girl born and raised, it’s kind of hard to choke that stuff down. . . . But I’ve found that the more vodka you drink, the better it tastes.”