The Salton Lake Sea Serpent, 1891

This is part one of a two-part case. Part two is the Tucson seven-headed serpent, the spoof this story produced six weeks later.

A real lake

The lake was real. In late June 1891, water from the Colorado River began running into the Salton Sink, a dry basin in the California desert well below sea level, where a salt works and a Southern Pacific station stood. On 3 July the Salt Lake Herald carried a Los Angeles dispatch: the water was “now within 2000 feet of the main track,” fed by a break in the river below El Rio, and the salt works superintendent wanted the railroad to fix it. Papers as far off as New Zealand followed the story. The Auckland Star (14 Aug 1891) said the water began to creep in “about June 27th” and that whether it came “from the Colorado river or the sea is still in doubt.” The Timaru Herald (19 Aug) relayed a New York World correspondent who blamed earthquakes.

The 1891 flooding was a forerunner of the much bigger 1905–07 break that created today’s Salton Sea.

The serpent

On 7 July 1891 the Phoenix Arizona Republican ran a front-page “special” dated Salton, July 6, under the headline “An Immense Sea Serpent in Salton Lake,” with the subhead “An Indian Runner Reports the Wonder.” The dispatch said an Indian runner had brought word of a large marine animal floundering at the lower end of the new lake. As the dispatch told it, the creature was about fifty feet long, with a head “as large around as a mescal plant,” scales, and flippers rather than legs. A railroad party had set out in a small boat to look. A second paragraph reported a body found near Pilot Knob, though the paper added that nothing definite had been heard.

About the runner. Everything we have about him comes through the reporter. He isn’t named, and his own words aren’t quoted. The dispatch adds that he wouldn’t go back to the spot, and gives a reason the reporter put down to the beliefs of the Yuma (Quechan) people. We can’t tell whether a real man reported seeing something in the floodwater, or whether “an Indian runner” was a stock device used to make a fake dispatch sound authentic. The ledger treats him as a relayed informant whose account is unknown, not as the joke.

How the papers played it

The serpent then went on tour.

• 14 July: the Republican noted that “the El Paso Herald furnishes the latest reliable account of the Salton sea serpent.” The story had reached Texas.
• 16 July: the Republican defended its own scoop, tongue in cheek, complaining that the “doubting manner” of other papers was “discouraging to enterprises.”
• 24 July: the Lordsburg, New Mexico, Western Liberal reported that Supervisor Cutter had taken “a pasear to the Salton inland sea and now verifies the story of the sea monster.” There’s no detail at all. Read in context, it looks like one more paper joining in.
• 22 August: the Arizona Weekly Citizen in Tucson answered with a full-length parody, a seven-headed serpent rising from the Santa Cruz flood and preaching (part two). It named the Salton dispatch as a Republican “special dispatch… from Yuma.”
• 5 September: the Yuma Arizona Sentinel compared the “Sea Serpent,” “Seven Headed Monster” story to the work of known fake-news correspondents and told its author to “write no more such trash.” The target was the Tucson parody, but the scorn covered the whole serpent cycle.

The New Zealand papers that covered the lake didn’t carry the monster, so the serpent seems to have stayed a western American joke.

Weighing it

Explanation	For	Against
Correspondent fakery: a “special” written to sell papers	Single origin text; no named witness; the Tucson parody points straight at the Republican’s Yuma dispatch	No confession has been found
A running newspaper joke	The Republican’s own mock-wounded tone on 16 July; the Lordsburg paper’s one-line “verifies”	Doesn’t tell us who started it
A misidentified real animal or carcass	A new lake fed by river water could carry fish and debris; a “body” was reported near Pilot Knob	Fifty feet with flippers matches no local animal, and no specimen was reported

Ledger status

Hoax / press satire. The lake was real and well documented. The serpent rests on one second-hand dispatch, and the papers around it treated it as a joke, a booster stunt or “trash.” Continue to part two: the Tucson seven-headed serpent.

Visiting

The ledger doesn’t place a map pin. The 1891 lake dried up; today’s Salton Sea, which formed in 1905–07, is in California. The state recreation area there is the public place to see it.

Sources

• Salt Lake Herald, 3 Jul 1891, p.2, “The Salton Lake Not a New Thing” (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Republican (Phoenix), 7 Jul 1891, p.1, “An Immense Sea Serpent in Salton Lake” (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Republican, 14 Jul 1891, p.3 (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Republican, 16 Jul 1891, p.2 (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Western Liberal (Lordsburg, N.M.), 24 Jul 1891, p.3 (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Weekly Citizen (Tucson), 22 Aug 1891, p.3 (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), 5 Sep 1891, p.1 (OCR checked) — loc.gov
• Auckland Star, 14 Aug 1891, “Remarkable Unknown” — Papers Past
• Timaru Herald, 19 Aug 1891, “Formation of a Salt Lake in Arizona” — Papers Past