Bear Lake Monster

The Shoshone held that a great serpent — a water devil — lived in Bear Lake, and they kept a careful distance from its waters. That older tradition was waiting when, in the summer of 1868, a young Latter-day Saint settler and newspaper correspondent named Joseph C. Rich began filing reports to the Deseret News describing terrified locals who had seen an enormous, fast-moving creature in the lake. The articles landed in living rooms across the territory and lit the legend on fire.

Rich's monster had everything a frontier reader wanted: brown hide, a serpent's body, a horse-beating turn of speed, and witnesses who swore by it. Decades later Rich would cheerfully confess that his original accounts had been, in his own phrase, a 'first-class lie' — embroidered to fill a column and sell a story. But by then the creature had slipped his grip entirely. The lake had its monster, the confession changed nothing, and the sightings did not stop.

Even after Rich's admission, Bear Lake kept producing witnesses. A 1907 letter in a Logan, Utah paper told of two men whose lakeside camp was attacked by the creature, which they said killed one of their horses. A boy reported it in the 1930s; a Boy Scout leader spoke of an encounter in the 1940s; and through the twentieth century anglers and boaters kept logging the same brown hump and the same impossible wake on the turquoise water.

The reports cluster, as lake-monster reports do, on calm mornings and quiet evenings when a long dark shape against bright water is easiest to see and hardest to explain. Skeptics point to swimming elk, wind-driven waves, and the lake's strange light playing tricks. The believers point back at two hundred feet of cold blue water and ask, reasonably enough, what exactly is down there to rule it out.

Scientists offer the usual lineup: oversized fish, a stray elk or moose swimming the channel, optical mischief from the lake's mineral-bright surface, and the simple gravity of a good story repeated for a hundred and fifty years. None has ever closed the case, in part because the case began as half-tradition and half-tall-tale and refused to behave like either one.

Garden City, on the Utah shore, long ago stopped fighting the legend and started selling it. The town throws a monster festival, and a creature-shaped tour boat — a great serpentine craft built to look like the beast itself — carries visitors out across that astonishing turquoise water in search of a hump and a wake. Joseph Rich may have made part of it up, but the lake has been making the rest of it real ever since. It is deep enough to keep doing so.