Bear Lake Monster

Every popular retelling ends the same way: Joseph C. Rich confessed. The confession is usually dated twenty-six years later, to 1894, and quoted as a "wonderful first-class lie". We could not anchor that quotation to a document. The Bear Lake Valley visitor bureau dates the admission twenty-six years after 1868; the Deseret News, reporting on the legend on 12 July 2004, dates it to 1888 instead. Two incompatible years and no page reference between them, so the quotation does not appear in this article. Something better does. Rich died on 18 October 1908, and the paper that had published him printed this the following day, on page one: "He was gifted and known as a natural wit, having originated the 'Bear Lake Monster' and other stories." The Montpelier Examiner, published in Bear Lake County among the people who had lived through it, ran the same sentence on 23 October. The year after, Solomon F. Kimball's memoir Thrilling Experiences, in a chapter running under the head "Bear Lake Yarns", introduced him to a party of visiting missionaries as "the great humorist and author of the 'Bear Lake Monster' yarn, Joseph Colton Rich". His neighbours did not need a confession; they knew who wrote it. They also stopped believing it early. On 25 June 1900 the Deseret Evening News printed a letter from its correspondent in St. Charles, Idaho, a village on the lake itself: "There is no fear now of the famous Bear Lake monster... which was a superstitious delusion existing mainly in the minds of some of our southern neighbors and the Indians, which has become extinct. Students of natural history who would know more of him... may for an accurate description of him apply to Judge Joe Rich who has made the monster famous both in song and story." Eleven years earlier, a Salt Lake Herald writer touring the valley had asked a shop clerk at Cook Brothers' store in Garden City about the creature and printed her answer: "Oh no, I haven't seen the monster for some time — the only one I ever saw was a string of ducks or some boys or girls in bathing." The clause that keeps the legend respectable is the one about Indigenous tradition, and it should be treated as the claim it is. It appears in the settler press, unsourced, in the same paragraphs that were promoting the monster. The published ethnography does not support it. Robert H. Lowie's monograph The Northern Shoshone (1909) runs to some 420,000 characters of Shoshone and Bannock belief and narrative, with 459 occurrences of "Coyote" and 48 of "snake" — and not one occurrence of "Bear Lake". Julian H. Steward's Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 120, 1938) does mention Bear Lake eleven times, every one of them geographical or economic, and contains the word "monster" zero times. Both searches were repeated to guard against an intermittent zero. Lowie did record Northern Shoshone water beings — Pa-n-dzo'avits the water giant, Pa'gutc the water buffalo, Pa'ona the water baby that is heard crying and never seen — so the absence is not for want of looking. None of them is a serpent in Bear Lake. Worse for the 1868 clause, Steward's evidence points the other way. Bear Lake, he writes, "was a common meeting place for Shoshoni from various regions, including Wyoming"; families from Fort Hall went "to the region of Bear Lake for roots, berries, mountain sheep, and other game"; and Powell and Ingalls, surveying in 1874, counted a group of seventeen people living at Bear Lake under a headman named Tay-i-wun-shear. The people who supposedly would not camp by the lake had a camp there. We cannot prove that no Shoshone or Bannock water story was ever attached to Bear Lake; we can say that the only witnesses to it are the settlers who were selling the monster, and that the specialist literature describes the lake as a gathering place rather than a shunned one. Then there is the arithmetic, which is the fastest way to see the animal being written rather than seen. On 24 May 1870 the Deseret News, printing its most detailed eyewitness, gave "about twenty feet" of body. On 1 June the Washington Evening Star made it sixty. By 23 September 1880 the Salt Lake Herald put the field at "fifty to 500 feet". In 1889 the Herald's own correspondent, in a piece he openly framed as a tall tale, watched a 300-foot creature with eyes a foot across tear birch trees out of the shore and swallow them. In September 1907 two men described a twenty-foot animal with a bear's tracks and a kangaroo's hind legs; three days later a second witness in the same newspaper made it "easily fifty feet long, fifteen feet high, and covered with scales like armor plate" with eyes that lit the whole valley. The size of the Bear Lake monster is a function of the writer, not of the lake. The 1907 exchange also shows the newspaper doing the work in plain sight. The Logan Republican printed the Mooney-Horne letter on 18 September 1907 and closed the column with a single line of its own: "The Republican would like to know who these men are and the brand they use." Three days later it published the confirmation of Aquilla "Quil" Nebeker under a straight headline — and inside, misnamed the original witnesses "Messrs. Looney and Corn", corrected the creature's eyes from wagon wheels to something "mistaken for the headlights used on Logan automobiles", called it a "mastodonaflshicus", and had it eat eight of Nebeker's shoats and a small haystack. This was comic writing, published as news, in the paper of a university town. Nothing in the lake will fill the role. Bear Lake is oligotrophic and cold, and its published species list runs to the four endemics plus cutthroat, lake trout, brown and rainbow trout, carp, perch, chub, sucker, dace, shiner, sunfish and bullhead. Sturgeon are sometimes offered as an explanation; as of August 2026 no sturgeon appears on any published species list for Bear Lake, and none is recorded in the Bonneville basin fish fauna catalogued by Steward in 1938 or by the lake's own conservation group today. What the lake does have is a long fetch, sudden wind, and water so clear that distance is hard to judge — which is roughly what the Cook Brothers clerk said in 1889, in fewer words. Finally, the incentive. The monster is worth money and always has been. The last widely reported sighting was announced by Brian Hirschi, who owned a fleet of watercraft rentals on the lake and a large pontoon boat built to look like a green sea serpent; he placed his 2002 sighting in the press over Memorial Day weekend 2004, the start of the tourist season, and then ran forty-five-minute monster cruises. Steve Siporin, a folklorist at Utah State University, told reporters at the time: "The way I interpret it, it's got more to do with tourism than belief." Garden City now holds the Bear Lake Monster Winterfest every January, the county sells the creature on merchandise, and the Legends & Lore roadside marker dedicated on 25 April 2025 is itself the product of a university folklore programme. That is the honest shape of the thing: not a hidden animal, but the most successful piece of copy a Utah newspaper correspondent ever filed.