- Ute name
- Pawapicts
- Known for
- A cry like a baby
- Where
- Utah Lake, the Provo River, Great Basin springs
- First written by settlers
- November 29, 1849
The Utes who lived around Utah Lake told of Pawapicts, the Water Babies, beings who lived in the lake, the Provo River and other waters of the Great Basin.
In one telling, preserved by the Ute Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Stories of Our Ancestors, the Water Babies began with a wrestling match. Wildcat threw Pahahpooch into a lake and told him he would stay in the water from then on as a Water Indian. Pahahpooch then pulled others in to become Water Indians too.
Most accounts describe them with long black hair and a cry like an infant's. Some were as small as a hand, some the size of a young child, and some took the shape of a beautiful woman. The cry was the danger. It drew people to the water's edge.
A Ute man named John Duncan, also called Red Sunrise, remembered fishing in Utah Valley as a boy and seeing Water Babies drying their hair on a flat rock in the Provo River. When he and a friend crept closer, the creatures dove in and the river rose toward the boys. They ran, and he never saw one again.
The settlers heard these stories early. On November 29, 1849, an exploring party led by Parley P. Pratt camped at a spring in Juab Valley, just south of Utah Valley. Their interpreter, Dimick B. Huntington, told them the Utes said the spring had no bottom, and that a hairy being like a small child came up at night, croaked like a frog, and tried to pull people in. Historians think stories like this helped give birth to the pioneers' own monster tales a few years later.