In summer 1868, Joseph C. Rich sent a newspaper a collection of stories about enormous animals in Bear Lake. His letter combined named witnesses, incompatible estimates, assurances about their character and conspicuous jokes. It helped establish a durable Utah–Idaho legend. The surviving record supports a history of reported sightings and their circulation; it does not establish that the lake contained an unknown giant animal.
A regional case with a Utah reference point
The map pin is an approximate Garden City area reference, rounded from the published position of the public Bear Lake Monster folklore marker. It identifies a place where the tradition is commemorated, not an encounter site. Rich’s South Eden account concerns the Utah shore; his Fish Haven–St Charles group account concerns the northern, Idaho side. Neither that northern report nor the whole lake should be relocated to the Garden City point.
Utah State Parks places South Eden on the lake’s east side, north of Laketown. This provides an identifiable Utah setting for one of the earliest accounts, without inventing an exact observer position. This article treats the linked regional reports as one historical case rather than counting the two states as separate monsters.
What the 1868 letter actually records
The original weekly Deseret News issue examined for this article is dated 5 August 1868, page 3. Its correspondence is headed “Monsters of Bear Lake” and carries a Paris dateline of 27 July. These are different dates: the dateline belongs to the letter, while 5 August belongs to this surviving newspaper issue. Neither supplies a precise date for every observation described. Rich signed as J. C. R.; he presented other people’s experiences and expressed a wish to see the animal himself.
The surroundings matter. Before reaching the monster section, the correspondent entertained readers with local fashions, destructive grasshoppers and mishaps involving wagons and ferries. The monster narrative itself moves between confidence in witnesses and extravagant possibilities. Reading only its animal descriptions removes the humour that accompanied their first circulation.
One account named S. M. Johnson of South Eden. Travelling towards Round Valley, he reportedly noticed what he first thought was a drowned person. Rich described a head and neck projecting two or three feet above rough water, with small ear-like protrusions. The apparent creature turned its head; water was said to spout when waves struck it. Crucially, Johnson did not report seeing its body. The suggestion that a large body rested on the lake bottom was an interpretation, not something exposed to view.
A second, briefly described episode involved an unnamed man and three women the following day. The absence of names and detailed conditions makes it harder to assess independently. Its presence establishes another story within Rich’s letter, not a separately examined specimen or a controlled observation.
The more elaborate northern account concerned N. C. Davis and Allen Davis of St Charles, Thomas Slight and J. Collings of Paris, and six women returning from Fish Haven. They noticed an unusual disturbance at an estimated distance of three miles. Slight reportedly thought he could see the sides of an animal at least ninety feet long. Davis, by contrast, did not think he had seen any body: he inferred a minimum length of forty feet from the wave and wake. These are materially different kinds of estimate, not two measurements confirming the same length.
More disturbances were interpreted as additional animals, eventually four large and six small. The report attributed extraordinary speed to them and described estimating movement against known places across the lake. At that range, the record cannot turn a wake into a reliable anatomical measurement. It provides neither a surveyed distance to an identified animal nor a recovered object against which the estimates can be checked.
Rich vouched for the witnesses’ reputations, contemplated capture and played with the possibility that the creature might be fabulous or a fib. His reference to Barnum and a proposed capture enterprise also belongs to the original account. A postscript by Charles C. Rich supported the report after conversations with the people concerned. That endorsement should not be counted as another firsthand sighting by Charles.
Belief, newspaper support and later witnesses
A Deseret Evening News discussion of 27 August 1868 defended the credibility of the people involved. In the public transcription, the writers described conversations with Charles Rich and others from the valley. They argued that multiple trustworthy observers made simple dismissal difficult, yet ended with uncertainty about what had actually been seen. They also said that proposed capture schemes had not yet been attempted. This is evidence of contemporary support for the accounts, not the result of a zoological investigation.
A family-history transcription of the Deseret News for 3 August 1870 preserves a report involving Milando Pratt and Thomas Rich south of Fish Haven. It describes an apparent head resembling a walrus without tusks, roughly ten feet exposed and an estimated total length of forty feet. The men reportedly watched for about fifteen minutes and fired shots which missed. The article also mentioned a baited hook attached to a rope and tree: a capture proposal, not a successful capture. Its relative dating does not justify inventing an exact encounter date, and its broad locality does not fix the observers on one side of the modern state boundary.
The Church History Library identifies another documentary strand. Archivist Jay G. Burrup’s 2018 discussion describes William Budge’s 1874 letter to Brigham Young, naming Budge, William Broomhead and Milando Pratt as witnesses. Burrup reads its tone as serious rather than facetious and states that it was published in the weekly Deseret News on 27 May 1874. The full original letter was not examined for this article; the claim and publication history here are attributed to the archivist. The existence of a sincerely written letter does not, by itself, identify the animal described.
Folklore, recantation and limits
The 2024 Legends & Lore marker, supported through Utah State University’s folklore programme and the William G. Pomeroy Foundation, explicitly presents the monster as a regional legend promoted by Joseph C. Rich in 1868. The foundation’s accompanying account says he later withdrew his stories and described a marketing purpose. That modern institutional interpretation is relevant, but no original recantation was examined here; this article therefore assigns neither an exact date nor a verbatim confession to it.
The early newspapers also attributed threatening lake-creature traditions to Indigenous people. Those passages are settler writers’ descriptions, without an identified Indigenous narrator or a directly recorded community account. They cannot establish the age, wording or meaning of Shoshone traditions. Treating them as independent confirmation of Rich’s animal would collapse distinct sources and viewpoints into one reassuring story.
The strongest conclusion is documentary: a humorous but locally influential correspondence helped a lake-monster story spread; endorsements and further reports followed; the tradition later became public folklore. The examined material supplies no captured animal, diagnostic remains or independently testable anatomical record. It also does not support assigning one specific ordinary cause to every reported disturbance. Preserving the differences between a sight, a wake, a calculation, an endorsement and a later retelling makes the case more informative than a single supposedly settled monster description.
Sources and further reading
Deseret News, 5 August 1868, page 3: original weekly scan, letter dated 27 July; relevant monster-report portions visually examined. Mike O’Brien’s complete published transcription was also consulted for the letter’s context and names. B. H. Roberts Foundation transcription of the 27 August 1868 discussion: the original scan was not examined.
“The ‘Monster’ Again,” Deseret News, 3 August 1870: David Grow’s 2006 transcription, rather than an independently checked newspaper scan. Jay G. Burrup, “Gems from the Brigham Young Office Files,” 19 April 2018: archival description of Budge’s letter. Pomeroy Foundation / Utah State University marker record: folklore classification and the geographical reference. Utah State Parks’ Bear Lake geography: South Eden’s Utah east-shore setting.
For another distinct western lake tradition, see Sharlie at Payette Lake. The two cases should not be treated as independent evidence for the same animal.