With summer right around the corner, thousands of Canadians are gearing up for long-awaited vacations at their favourite lakeside retreats. In beautiful British Columbia, Shuswap Lake will soon abound with houseboaters. The walkway encircling Alberta’s Lake Louise will be crawling with international tourists. Fishing lines will be cast in Saskatchewan’s Lake Diefenbaker. Motorboats will ply the rough waters of Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg, and canoes will dot the pristine surface of Ontario’s Lake Muskoka.
As they waterski, paddleboard, or float under the summer sun, some recreationists will be struck by the unnerving notion that something huge is lurking in the water beneath them, observing them from concealment in the shadows – a formless wariness which perhaps harkens back to a primitive age when indiscretion in open water could carry lethal consequences. Most of those who experience this uncanny sensation will shrug it off as soon as it arises, primeval prudence giving way to the comforting logic that there is nothing to be afraid of in Canadian lakes. This reassuring sentiment might carry less water, however, for those familiar with local native legend.
For centuries, Canada’s First Nations have told stories about monsters that haunt lakes and rivers across the Great White North. Some of these creatures, like the terrific amphibian which the Syilx say dwells in BC’s Okanagan Lake, have gained international renown. Others are more obscure, their tales enduring only in forgotten ethnologies and in hazy oral traditions bandied about remote reserves on cold winter nights. In this video, we will explore forgotten native legends of lake monsters in Canada.
The Monster of Shawnigan Lake
At the southwestern end of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, about twenty kilometres south of the city of Duncan, lies beautiful, pristine Shawnigan Lake. Crowned by a quaint town of the same name, which boasts one of the tallest railway trestle bridges in the world, Shawnigan Lake is the site of the historic Last Spike of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, hammered home by Prime Minster Sir John A. Macdonald himself, and an island which encompasses a provincial park commemorated in honour of two local casualties of the Second World War.
This beautiful body of water was referenced briefly in the 1876 book The Races of Mankind, written by Scots-Canadian botanist and explorer Robert Brown, who led the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition of 1864. In his book, Brown alluded to a strange legend common to Southern Coast Salish of Washington; the Carrier of Stuart Lake, British Columbia; and the Dunne-za of Peace River, Alberta – native peoples, as Brown put it, “widely separated… [of] different races, speaking most dissimilar languages.” According to this oddly universal legend, great monsters once terrorized locals in the ancient past, destroying their villages and compelling them to “erect… scaffolds to sleep on, or even houses on platforms in shallow lakes, like the old lake-dwellers in Switzerland and other parts of Europe… It is curious enough,” Brown wrote, “that in [all three] regions, bones of the mastodon are found in abundance; and though possibly the tradition may have originated in a desire to account for the presence of these remains, yet I think it is more than probable that both these traditions are only the fragmentary remembrance, handed down from generation to generation, to a time when this animal was contemporary with man, as recent discoveries have left little doubt that it was.”
Brown went on to write, “The Indians are unwilling to approach Shawnigan Lake in the southern section of Vancouver Island, declaring that it is haunted by some great animal.”
Any taboo surrounding Shawnigan Lake, and any local belief that a monster might haunt its depths, seems to have long since evaporated like the smoke of a Cowichan campfire. Today, Shawnigan lake is a popular destination for swimmers and boaters blissfully unaware of legendary monster once believed to haunt their favourite summer retreat.
The Monster of Kamloops Lake
More than 300 kilometres northwest of Shawnigan Lake, in the heart of British Columbia’s Interior Plateau, sprawls Kamloops Lake, an augmentation of the Thompson River which lies a few miles west of the city of Kamloops. Surrounded by arid hills sprinkled with stands of ponderosa pine, this 29-kilometre-long body of water is a favourite haunt of kayakers and paddleboarders, whose beaches teem with swimmers and sunbathers in the warm summer months.
According to celebrated Canadian geologist and surveyor Dr. George Mercer Dawson, the Shuswap Indians who call Kamloops Lake home once believed that a monster lurked in the lake’s western end. In an 1892 ethnology on the Shuswap people, Dawson wrote, “At the outlet of Kamloops Lake there was an elk monster, which lived in the middle of the river and killed and ate men.” Dawson went on to detail the legendary exploits of a Shuswap cultural hero called Kwil-i-elt, who took it upon himself to bring an end to the monster’s existence. Kwil-i-elt built a raft and floated down Kamloops Lake towards the monster’s fluvial lair. Predictably, the giant elk attacked the raft and swallowed Kwil-i-elt whole. Prepared for this eventuality, the hero drew his knife and stabbed the monster’s heart from inside its gullet. That accomplished, he cut his way out of the dying animal, tied the carcass to his raft, and towed it to shore. His friends proceeded to butcher the giant cervid, and that night, an enormous feast was held on the banks of the Thompson River. Following Kwil-i-elt’s extraordinary feat, elk became the regular-sized animals they are today, which are hunted by men rather than the other way around.
While there does not seem to be a general modern belief that Kamloops Lake is home to a creature absent from regional fishing brochures, the lake was the site of at least one bizarre incident hinting at the possibility that the old Shuswap legend might have a kernel of truth to it. In his 1998 book In the Domain of Lake Monsters, Canadian cryptozoologist John Kirk briefly alluded a strange sighting made by Gord Anderson of New Westminster and Mike Tarchuk of North Kamloops on August 14th, 1966. “In a report published in the Kamloops Daily Sentinel,” Kirk wrote, “the men claimed they witnessed a muddy-colored, eight-to-ten-foot-long animal with three humps swimming a mere 100 feet from their position on shore. The humps would emerge and remain above the surface for three-to-four-second intervals before sinking and repeating the whole exercise a number of times.” The witnesses, who claimed to have watched the animal through binoculars, described the creature as being eel-like in appearance.
Kirk likely drew this information from the writings of Mary Moon, an early authority on Okanagan Lake’s legendary Ogopogo. In her 1977 book Ogopogo: The Okanagan Mystery, Moon made it clear that Anderson and Tarchuk’s sighting took place near the eastern end of Kamloops Lake, opposite the watery haunts of the mythic elk monster of Shuswap legend. “We couldn’t see it too well because we were looking directly into the sun’s reflection on the lake’s smooth surface…” Moon quoted Anderson as having said. “As it went by, it left a trail or wake just like a boat. But there were no boats on the area, and it wasn’t a tree floating in the water, either. Whatever it was, it must have been huge, because as it passed, waves about six inches high splashed up on the shore. The rest of the lake was calm.”
The Horned Monster of Buffalo Lake
Nearly 700 kilometres northeast of Kamloops Lake, at the edge of Alberta’s boreal forest, in the desolate centre of a rough triangle bounded by the towns of Athabasca, Lac La Biche, and Smoky Lake, lies a nondescript body of water called Buffalo Lake, not to be confused with a better-known lake of the same name northeast of Red Deer, Alberta. Since 1951, this remote 5 kilometre-long stretch of water, which remains unnamed on all current digital maps, has served as the home of the Buffalo Lake Metis Settlement, one of eight Metis settlements in the province.
American ethnographer and photographer Edward S. Curtis, in his posthumous 1970 book The North American Indian, identified this “Buffalo Lake northeast of Edmonton” as the site of an alarming event by which the Sarcee or Tsuut’ina Indians of central Alberta marked their historic split from the more northerly Beaver Indians, of which they were once a part.
The Sarcee Nation, whose ancestral homeland lies in the Alberta parkland region between Calgary and Edmonton, are a Dene people who separated from their northern kinsmen long ago to pursue the horse-riding, buffalo-hunting lifestyle of the Plains Indians. Once members of the Beaver or Dunne-za Nation, whose traditional haunts lie in Alberta and British Columbia’s Peace River Valley, the Sarcee are believed to have fractured from the larger tribe sometime in the early 1700s and travelled south onto the Canadian prairies. Although historian Hugh Dempsey, in a 1978 article, attributed this divide to the westward migration of Woodland Cree newly armed with muskets obtained from their white trading partners, Sarcee oral tradition traces the split to a strange event which occurred on a cold winter day generations past.
According to Curtis’s Sarcee informant, the story begins with a lone hunter who headed out to hunt buffalo on horseback. The hunter came to a large northerly lake, on the shores of which he found a herd of buffalo running in the direction of a hill. The man intercepted the herd, selected the fattest cow he could find, and brought it down with his flintlock musket. He proceeded to skin and dismember the carcass for transport to his camp.
“Just as he was ready to pack the horse,” the informant said, “he looked up and observed a small cloud. He was stopping to tie the bundle when something moved between his legs. He saw a monster from the lake. A horn was in the centre of its head. It coiled about his feet. Its head was between his legs.”
The monster proceeded to speak to the hunter, telling him that he was afraid of the Thunder beings that came with the approaching cloud, and beseeching his protection from them. No sooner had he made his request than the Thunder beings spoke from the clouds, asking the hunter to move aside so that they could kill and eat the water monster. The lake creature quickly offered to bestow special powers upon the hunter and his children if he helped him survive, and warned him that if he refused to assist him, his life would end one day by drowning. Heedless of the remonstrances of the Thunder beings, who vaguely promised a richer reward, the hunter implored the aerial predators to leave the water creature alone and take his bison meat instead. With a flash of lightning, the Thunder beings took the meat and left the man and the water monster in peace.
As promised, the water monster gifted the man a medicine bundle endowed with special powers and then retreated to the lake, sending up a column of water as he plunged beneath the surface.
Years later, one bitter winter day, a party of Dunne-za Indians in search of buffalo set out across this very same lake, its surface now frozen solid in the cold. “Half the people got across,” Curtis’s informant said. “Some were still on the ice, and some had not yet started across.”
One young boy who had ventured out onto the frozen lake saw a large horn protruding from the ice and asked his mother to retrieve it for him. The woman produced a hatchet and began chipping away at the ice in order to liberate the strange artifact from its frozen prison. Just as the horn seemed to be on the verge of breaking free, it jerked to the side with shocking violence, forming a gaping crack in the ice which rapidly spread across the length of the lake. The horn, the natives learned, belonged to the monster of the lake, which they had awakened from its winter slumber. The fissure rapidly grew into a gaping chasm separating the two halves of the band. Shaken by this strange turn of events, the band members who had yet to cross the ice decided to remain in the north, returning to the Peace River area and remaining the Dunne-za. The natives who had already crossed the lake, however, proceeded south onto the prairies, becoming the Sarcee.
Although Curtis’s informant described the monster of Buffalo Lake as a coiling serpentine creature with a single horn protruding from the centre of its head, Anglican missionary Reverend Edward Francis Wilson, in an 1888 report for the British Association for the Advancement of Science, characterized it as an enormous elk, not unlike the legendary monster which the Shuswap claimed haunted the western end of Kamloops Lake.
The Devils of Last Mountain Lake
Six hundred and twenty kilometres southeast of Buffalo Lake, just north of the historic Qu’Appelle Valley, lies Last Mountain Lake, also known as Long Lake – the second-largest natural body of water in Saskatchewan. This charming prairie oasis is a favourite fishing destination for residents of the Land of the Living Skies, and a popular weekend retreat for Reginans itching to escape the Queen City.
While anglers might apply the term “monster” to some of the carp and pike the lake has known to yield, which tend to grow larger with every retelling of the tales in which they appear, few who fish there are aware that creatures altogether more abominable were once believed to lurk beneath the surface of Last Mountain Lake. In his 1860 narrative of his Red River, Assiniboine, and Saskatchewan exploring expeditions, Canadian-backed explorer Henry Youle Hind, the unsung rival of the more famous British-backed surveyor John Palliser, briefly alluded to an eerie legend related by his Plains Cree guides.
“Sacrifices and offerings are of very frequent occurrence among the Indians of the Saskatchewan Valley,” Hind wrote. “The customary offering consists of two, three, and sometimes five dogs. At the mouth of the Qu’Appelle River, an Indian, in June 1858, set his net and caught a large fish of a kind different to any with which he was familiar; he immediately pronounced it to be a Manitou, and carefully restoring it to the water again, at once sacrificed five valuable dogs to appease the anger of the supposed fairy.
“On approaching Long Lake, an arm of the Qu’Appelle River Valley, the Crees warned us not to visit the lake by night, as it was full of devils. They told me very extraordinary tales, which are too absurd to be worth relating, of the dimensions and power of these devils, and they appeared to live in awe and terror of them.”
The Snake Sturgeon of Lake Hanna
Nearly 1,200 kilometres east of Long Lake, in the Canadian Shield north of Lake Superior, lies Lake Nipigon, a sprawling freshwater sea sometimes referred to as the Sixth Great Lake. That this vast, lonely body of water might harbour terrible denizens unrecognized by the Department of Fisheries is a notion perhaps not incredible to those familiar the remoteness of the region and the immensity of the water. Indeed, the local Ojibwa believed that that Lake Nipigon was once home to huge red sturgeon with bright shining eyes, to whom passing travellers once offered gifts of propitiation. The lake was also supposed to have been the one-time residence of Mishepeshu, the giant underwater lynx more frequently associated with Lake Superior, to whom sacrifices were also made on a large rock bearing a red ochre rendering of that great aquatic wildcat.
Just south of Lake Nipigon is a smaller reservoir called Forgan Lake, artificially formed in 1950 when the Pine Portage Dam was built across the Nipigon River. The reservoir connected two smaller lakes that existed before the dam’s construction – augmentations of the upper Nipigon River called Lake Emma and Lake Hanna.
According to the celebrated Anishinaabe artist Noval Morriseau in his 1965 book Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway, the Ojibwa of Lake Nipigon regarded Lake Hanna as an especially sacred place, which they called Mesinama Sahegun. “At each end of the lake,” he wrote, “were erected offering rocks to the evil snake sturgeons, and Indians travelling through this lake placed offerings of tobacco there so that no harm would come to them. The Ojibway did not travel in one part of this lake that was believed to be the place where these sturgeons lived, but the other side of the lake was fit for travel. But the Ojibway still left offerings of tobacco for them there, in order not to offend them.”
Morriseau went on to explain how the Ojibwa believed the snake sturgeons arrived in Lake Hanna after plummeting from the heavens one night – an event which oral tradition says was accompanied by a tremendous roar. Local natives soon observed these peculiar fish spawning among regular sturgeon, which were distinguished from the latter by their serpentine bodies and box-shaped heads. After ten years of cautious observation, a collection of Ojibwa bands gathered on the shores of Lake Hanna decided to add these strange fish to their summer feast. About two hundred families consumed the mysterious flesh and promptly perished.
Today, most Canadians dip their toes into waters like these fearing nothing more than the pinch of a crayfish or the attention of a leech, happily ignorant of the menacing mystery once supposed to lurk beneath their feet. The next time you find yourself atop your favourite Canadian lake and feel the hairs stir on the back of your neck, take heed. Your reflection might not be the only thing that’s watching you.
Sources
The Races of Mankind: Being a Popular Description of the Characteristics, Mannerisms, and Customs of the Principal Varieties of the Human Family (1876), by Robert Brown
Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia (1892), by Dr. George Mercer Dawson
In the Domain of the Lake Monsters (1998), by John Kirk
Ogopogo: The Okanagan Mystery (1970), by Mary Moon
Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology (2000), by George M. Eberhart
The North American Indian, Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska (1970), by Edward S. Curtis
“Sarcee,” by Hugh Dempsey, in Volume 13 of the Handbook of North American Indians (1978)
“Report on the Sarcee Indians,” by Reverend E.F. Wilson, from the Report of the Committee for Investigating and Publishing Reports of the Physical Character, Languages, and Industrial and Social Conditions of the North-Western Tribes of the Dominion of Canada, from the Report of the Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1888)
Narrative of the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expeditions of 1858 (1860), by Henry Youle Hind
Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway (1965), by Norval Morrisseau
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