WALKER LAKE MONSTER

by Skylaire Alfvegren

Cecil, the mechanical serpent who does double duty as Hawthorne’s goodwill ambassador and high school mascot is no PR pipe dream. Indian legend says that when Lake Lohontan began to dry up, a pair of serpents were forced apart. The male made his way to what became Walker Lake, while the female burrowed north into the land, creating Sand Mountain. 600 feet high, the shifting sands sing: it’s said the music is simply the serpent whimpering for her beloved.

Historically, the Walker Lake monster has Nevada’s strongest record of sightings, and we don’t mean Cecil’s patriotic lumber down Main Street in Hawthorne’s annual Armed Forces Day parade.

When white settlers founded the town on the south end of Walker Lake in 1881, they noted a strange absence of fishing boats--the local Paiutes refused to traverse its waters. According to the Hawthorne Arsenal, it was “believed to be have been the only lake in the country near which resident Indians had no boats, and they had no desire for any.” Traditional teachings said one or more huge serpents lived in the lake.

According to legendary Fortean John Keel, “Early Indian settlers around the lake became annoyed because the monster occasionally dined on members of the tribe. They decided to launch a major effort to trap and kill the creature. But, somehow, the swimming sneak overheard the plot, surfaced, and held a pow wow with his persuers. A bargain was struck. If the Indians promised not to kill him and turn his hide into moccassins, he would promise to eat only white men.” When a small steamer was launched by whites in the summer of 1876 and quickly decommissioned, the natives weren’t surprised.

The Walker Lake Bulletin reported in August 1883 that settlers near the lake were “awakened by a horrible, soul-shrinking screech” when a pair of monster pythons, writhing in battle, took it ashore. The Paiutes made a peace offering of the loser’s corpse, which was measured at exactly “seventy-nine feet, seven inches and a quarter in length.” The victor slithered back into the lake—but, like many of his brethren, was fond of sunning himself lakeside. A quarter century later, local businessman E. J. Reynolds told the Goldfield Daily Tribune the uncoiled beast was seen “wallowing” on the sand, and estimated its length at as least 70 feet.

Walker’s giant water snake piqued the curiosity of professor David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. In the summer of 1907, newspapers reported Jordan, “generally conceded to be the foremost icthyologist in the United States,” and his colleague planned to high-tail it to Nevada upon the next sighting, capture the beast and send the dissected remains to that most reviled of institutions—the Smithsonian.

Samuel Pugh, superintendent of the Walker River Indian Agency, apparently rethought what he had chocked up as Indian superstition after “several white men claimed similar visions” of the serpent. In 1909, it was sighted by a Reno police captain; two years later, miners made a fuss of the monstrous “serpent-like fish” which disturbed their work. After a highway was built around the lake, “respectable” tourists and locals reported seeing “a huge monster, wholly unlike any fish inhabiting the waters of the lake, swimming about.” One hermit even asked the district attorney how much he would be paid in exchange for its scalp. A 1930s account in the Hawthorne News claimed it was sighted in a cave at the base of Mount Grant. The witness went to retrieve his gun—but by the time he returned, it had vanished.

As recently as 1956, a couple from Babbit, Nevada wrote to the editor of Hawthorne’s newspaper, claiming to have seen “something moving in Walker Lake at a terrific speed” which actually outpaced their automobile. It performed an aquabatic 100 yard dash before plummeting below the surface. The fall 1969 issue of non-fiction magazine Old West reprinted their letter, which continued, “It must’ve been 45 to 55 feet long and its back stuck up above the water at least four or five feet when it was swimming fast.”

Lake monsters are perennial newspaper fodder; nicknamed Sarah in the early 1900s, the Walker Lake monster was exploited for Hawthorne’s 1964 centennial celebration. One old coot claimed May 15 as Serpent’s Night at Walker Lake. He told the Nevada State Journal that every 100 years on the dot the serpent surfaces and seeks his prey. “He never fails, the old timers say he is as regular as the Capistrano swallows and far more dangerous.” As part of the celebration, local Paiutes attempted to lure the beast ashore with “an hours-long serpent dance,” even halting Naval frogmen from their exercises for fear it would be disturbed. Luckily the creature continues to elude capture.