The White River Monster: Newport, Arkansas, 1937

Every lake-monster town needs a founding summer. Newport, Arkansas, got its in July 1937. Time noted dryly that it had been “a dull year for monsters.”

Who saw it first

The first witnesses weren’t the ones the newspapers built the story around. According to Time, it was the wife of Dee Wyatt, a Black sharecropper living on the White River about six miles from Newport. She looked across the river from her backyard pump one morning in early July, screamed, and fetched her husband. Dee Wyatt looked, then went to the nearest white farmer, Bramlett Bateman, and told him they’d seen a monster. Bateman went down to the river, saw it too, and hurried into Newport.

From then on the coverage made it Bateman’s monster. The Wyatts’ names appear, if at all, as an aside. That’s worth noting, because it’s a pattern in how 1930s papers handled who counted as a witness. The ledger names them first. Period coverage uses racial terms that the ledger doesn’t reproduce.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas dates Bateman’s sighting to 1 July 1937 and quotes him describing gray skin, “as wide as a car and three cars long.” Time quotes him saying “as big as a box car and as slick as a slimy elephant without legs.”

How the town ran with it

The wire services loved the story. AP and United Press dispatches that the ledger’s research desk checked in the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive, along with Time’s account, describe the scene:

• Bateman and the Newport chamber of commerce fenced off the viewing spot and charged 25 cents admission. Signs went up on the roads: “This Way to the White River Monster.”
• The chamber hired Charles B. Brown, a Memphis diver whom UP described as employed by the U.S. Engineers. Before going down, he said the monster was probably “a large fish—maybe a catfish.” He had an eight-foot harpoon made anyway.
• Newport declared an unofficial holiday. Hundreds of visitors lined the bank eating Bateman’s barbecued-goat sandwiches. There was a loudspeaker, and that night a “Monster Dance.”
• Brown went down into water muddied by rain, reported three inches of visibility, and came up after 75 minutes with nothing. Another dive found nothing. On the next one an air valve jammed in his helmet and he shot to the surface. By then, Time said, the crowds had gone. An AP caption on 26 July summed it up: “Officially, the search is off.”

The candidates

Theories in 1937, from Time and the wire stories:

• A big fish. That was Brown’s guess (catfish), and the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries suggested an alligator gar, a huge native river fish that surfaces to breathe. Witnesses’ sizes are far beyond any real fish, but distance and excitement inflate sizes.
• Something floating. A waterlogged tree trunk or a sunken barge rising and sinking again.
• Gas from the river bottom bringing up mats of leaves.
• Promotion. The chamber of commerce clearly made money from it, but that doesn’t mean the Wyatts or Bateman invented what they saw.

The sequel

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says sightings came back in 1971: a gray creature with a horn on its forehead, a spiny back twenty feet long, and a trail of three-toed, fourteen-inch tracks with crushed vegetation. One later writer, Roy Mackal, floated a stray elephant seal. The encyclopedia lists that idea; the ledger hasn’t read Mackal’s book.

Then in 1973, according to the encyclopedia (citing the Arkansas Gazette of 16 February 1973), the Arkansas Senate passed Senate Resolution 23, sponsored by Sen. Bob Harvey. It created a White River Monster Refuge between “Old Grand Glaize” and “Rosie,” where it’s illegal to harm the monster. The ledger hasn’t read the resolution text itself.

Ledger status

Folklore. It started with real witnesses, but no specimen, photograph or verified track has ever turned up. The leading explanation is a big river fish, seen badly. The best-documented part of the story is the economy that grew up around it, which is a familiar shape for anyone who’s read the ledger’s Loch Ness files.

No map pin. The 1937 eddy was on private plantation land and isn’t precisely located in any source. The refuge’s endpoints are old local names, not mappable points. If you visit, Newport and the public riverfront are the place. Don’t cross private land to reach the bank.

Sources

• “Science: Newport’s Monster,” Time, 1937. time.com archive. The archive page doesn’t show the issue date.
• AP and UP dispatches, July 1937, checked by the ledger’s research desk through the Library of Congress OCR. This page doesn’t reproduce any 1937 page images.
  • San Antonio Light: 19 Jul, p.1, 22 Jul, p.11, 23 Jul, p.1.
  • Washington Daily News: 19 Jul, p.26, 23 Jul, p.9.
  • Evening Star (Washington): 26 Jul, p.3.
• Conor J. Hennelly, “White River Monster,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (last updated 19 Jul 2024). encyclopediaofarkansas.net.