- First report
- 1864, Isaac Fox
- Biggest sighting
- June 1880, near Provo
- The skull
- Found 1870, probably a mastodon
- Length claimed
- About 60 feet (1871)
Bear Lake had the more famous monster. But in the 1860s and 1870s, the families settling around Utah Lake had one of their own, and the newspapers took it seriously enough to print every sighting.
The first story on record belongs to a settler named Isaac Fox, who said in 1864 that a large animal with a head like a hound and dark, menacing eyes chased him to the shore.
In September 1870 the Dallin family, commercial fishermen from Springville, found part of a huge skull on the beach. The tooth sockets were as big as an ox's, and a five inch tusk stuck out of the back of the jaw. The Springville correspondent for the Deseret News kept the skull and invited readers to come see it. Historians now think it was most likely a fossil mastodon.
In the spring of 1871, Goshen Bishop William Price and two other men were driving south on the road west of the lake when they saw something moving about a mile out, traveling the same direction they were. Price said it rose several feet out of the water "like a section of a large stove pipe" and guessed it was about 60 feet long. The Corinne Reporter, a paper that liked to poke at the Latter-day Saints, called the story a fabrication.
In 1877 a report from Lehi ran in the Deseret News under the headline "Monstrous." That same year the Corinne Record suggested the creature might be swimming back and forth to the Great Salt Lake through channels underground.
The most detailed sighting came in June 1880. Two boys, Willie Roberts and George Scott, were swimming near Provo when they saw what looked at first like a dog or a beaver. Then it roared like a lion. They said it had four legs about as long as a man's arm, a head two or three feet long, and a mouth like an alligator's, about 18 inches wide. It chased them out of the water.
Two weeks later David T. LeBaron, who had fished Utah Lake from Spring Lake for 25 years, wrote to the paper to say he had never seen any monster. What people saw, he said, was rushes, floating moss, pelicans and ordinary things that look bigger on open water.
The reports faded after that, with a few stragglers: a seal shaped animal near Mosida in 1921, and talk of a serpent near Saratoga Springs in 2006. Nobody has caught it yet.