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The White River Monster

A monster hoax becomes Arkansas legend

By the time we got up to the Big House, I was panting and wheezing, and I had torn my britches and my arms was scratched up. The rest of the fellas were heaving and wheezing right behind me and appeared to be in the same condition. We'd run clear across the cotton field, and when I saw him sitting on the porch, I started hollering, "Mr. Bateman, Mr. Bateman," and he come down off the porch holding a glass of something cold, and he said, "What is it, Phelps? You fellas look a mess. Why aren't you down at the dock?"

And I said, "Mr. Bateman, we cain't go down there again. No, sir. No, sir."

He looked at me suspicious-like and said, "What the hell is wrong with you? You know the Muskogee'll be here come mid-afternoon, and those bales got to be stacked for loading."

"Mr. Bateman, I don't know. We saw . . . a terrible thing. In the river. It was… I swear to God, which ain't something I tend to do since I got baptized—I swear to God we saw something! I don't never swear by the Lord's name, unless it's God's own truth; I swear to God I don't."

"Phelps," he said, "you got to stop swearing and get around to what you're saying. What did you see?"

"Well, sir, we was downloading the bales from the wagons, when Johnson over there"—Allie Johnson was breathing hard and holding his hat in his hands—"says in a low voice, 'Whoa, sweet baby Jesus. Look at the river, boys.' So we turned, and there was some kind of big critter floating up out of the water. It was long as two cotton wagons hitched end to end and as wide. It was a kind of whitish color—"

Then Allie piped up and said, "Beggin' your pardon, Boss Phelps, it was more grayish, kinda the color of a bull snake or, uh, like a hellbender. Yeah, mo' like that. A hellbender."

So, I said, "That's right, like a hellbender but monstrous big! And it had a fin on its back, you know, with spines, and suddenly it lifted up its head and looked right at us and opened its mouth! Its teeth, Mr. Bateman, they must've been a foot long! I never saw teeth like that, not even on a panther. And the inside of the mouth was red as blood, and it just stared at us and kept gnashing its teeth! I yelled to the fellas, I yelled, 'It's a monster! Run! Run!' and that's what we done all the way here."

Mr. Bateman took his hat off and scratched his head awhile.

"So you say you saw a monster?"

"I don't know what else to call it. It wasn't like nothing I ever seen before."

"Down by the dock?"

"Yessir, in the eddy just south."

"In the eddy?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you ripped your britches hightailing it here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, then, I think we should go look for it."

"Please, Mr. Bateman. We just done got away! Don't make us go back!"

"We'll be all right. I'll fetch my daddy's Springfield from over the mantle. It hasn't missed a mark yet."

So, we watched Bateman go in the house, and Allie Johnson says, "You think he bought it?"

"He's getting his gun, ain't he?"

Barnyard said, "He's going to be aiming that gun at us if he don't see something."

I said, "Don't worry. Little Dave's waiting. Bateman'll see something, for sure."

"Yeah, but is he gonna see it like we want him to?"

About that time, Mr. Bateman came out the front door with his flintlock, and he said, "All right. I want to see this monster of yours. Let's go."

I said real low, "Reckon we're about to find out."

So, we headed back across the cotton field, down the riverbank, and took the trail along the water to the dock. I said, "It come up in the eddy down there." I pointed down the river.

Mr. Bateman said, "I know where the eddy is. I don't see a thing."

I said, "Let's get in the cane brake and see if it comes back."

A tall cane brake grew some ten or twenty feet from the water, so we pushed our way inside, and looked through the cane at the river. The water was still as a piece of glass. Mr. Bateman, he said, "I think you boys are just trying to get out of work. There's not a damned— Wait a minute. I think I see something,"

One thing about Little Dave is he knows how to play a hand. Always keep a joker up your sleeve, he says. Some of the ropes he had pullied to bricks he dropped in the river, and other ropes he run along behind logs sticking out, but wherever he run the ropes, you couldn't see them. Anyhow, he heard us thrashing around in the cane brake, so he waited a good minute and then began tugging on the ropes and the water rippled a little and went still. Then he tugged again, and we could see something long and gray come up to maybe a foot under the water. Bateman said, "I'll be goddamned." Then Little Dave gave a big pull, and up it rose: a upside down scow covered with a sail cloth that Little Dave'd tacked all around the gunnels. He'd even drilled some holes down the middle of the back and stuck in willow branches. When Bateman sees it breach the water, he says, "This'll do you for you, you son of a bitch," and he raises his flintlock, takes aim, and pulls the trigger. In the half-second it takes the powder in the pan to light the powder in the chamber, Little Dave turns loose of the rope, and the scow bloops down, and a little spurt of water leaps up where the ball hit the river.

"I think I got it," said Bateman.

"I ain't so sure, Mr. Bateman. It done gone down fast."

"No, I got it."

But then Little Dave pulls on the ropes again, and we see the thing moving beneath the water again, and Bateman says, "Shit. I reckon I didn't get it. Let's get out of here. I've had enough of monsters."

And that's how we got the rest of the day off and went down to the juke joint and drank whiskey like it was Saturday night but it was really Wednesday. That's also how the story of the White River Monster got started.

Now you need some back story to make sense of all this. What happened is that Little Dave had been fishing when he found himself a mussel bed in the shoals on the far side of the eddy. He had been bagging the mussels and selling the shells to a button maker in Newport for good money. He was afraid if somebody else found them, they might get stole right out from under him. So, he decides to rig up a monster to keep folks away. How we found out about Little Dave's trick is we was downloading the cotton bales from the wagons when we heard a rope snap, and a limb break, and somebody yell, "Ow! Sonuvabitch!" We looked across the river and there was Little Dave rigging up a busted boat. Barnyard hollers to him, "You all right, Davey?" and Little Dave said, "Yeah. Damn rope broke."

Barnyard yells back, "What you doing tying up a busted boat anyhow?"

Little Dave hollers, "You ain't gonna tell nobody er you?"

Barnyard hollers, "Why would I tell somebody you tying up a busted boat?"

That's when Little Dave told us the whole story, so we said to him, look, we won't tell nobody about your mussel shells, but you got to help us get a day off from time to time. Little Dave smiled and said, Okee-doke, and that's how me and the boys got tangled up in the whole thing.

Oh, we had a us a good time with that busted boat and the White River Monster and fooling old man Bateman, who thought he was smart but wasn't really nothing but lucky. Whenever we needed a Whiskey Wednesday—that's what we called it—we'd tell Mr. Bateman the monster was uneasy, and he'd say, "All right, boys, but when tomorrow comes you get down to the river and get to work." Oh, we had a real good time. And we kept our end of the bargain, too, and didn't mess with Little Dave's mussel bed. A deal's a deal.

Come to find out that when Bateman got to drinking, he would tell the story about the monster, and pretty soon folks began coming down to the river to see it. Little Dave wasn't no idiot, so he'd wait till dusk before he started tugging on his ropes. By that time, he was like a fella with a string puppet, and he could make the monster rise and wallow and roll over and act like some kind of trained whale or something. We used to go down to watch the show, and once I heard a idiot with a walking cane and striped trousers talking loud: "I say, Butler, the creature appears to be a manatee." Me and the boys still say that from time to time: "I say, Butler, the creature appears to be a manatee."

Little Dave even tied a waterlogged timber to the bow, and when the day drew nigh to dark, he'd make the head rear up, and you could see people skittering off through the woods and hear them screaming all the way to town. Of course, that only made people more curious, and before long, hundreds of people were coming to the river to see the monster, and they damn near ruined Mr. Bateman's cotton crop. He had to cut a kind of road around his field to keep folks out of the furrows.

One time a traveling evangelist come to town, and he put in the paper he was going to "cast out the monster and send it back to hell." The preacher was a big fellow with a fine head of hair, and when it got dusky, a big crowd of people whooping and praising the Lord followed him down to the riverbank. He stood ankle deep in the water with his Bible over his head, and he kept hollering at the water, "Come out! Come out, you beast of Satan!" Of course, Little Dave couldn't help hisself when he heard that, and he jerked the rope so hard, the head timber come loose from the boat and swung over the river and clobbered the preacher so he fell backward into the water. It didn't knock him out though because he came scrambling out so fast you'd've thought the devil hisself was clawing at his backside. Little Dave turned loose of the rope, so the timber fell in the river with the rope still tied to it and floated away, and no one ever did figure out what it was that happened.

Folks got so excited that the city fathers of Newport got together a committee and decided to make a net to "catch the monster. " I was fearing for Little Dave that they might drag it through the eddy and find the boat, and he'd get in some sort of trouble, though I couldn't imagine exactly what the charge would be. I was even more afraid that Mr. Bateman would find out that me and the boys was using a fake monster to get out of work. Lucky for everyone, the city ran out of money, and the net never did get made. By that time, it didn't matter much because Little Dave had dredged out most of the mussels, and he decided to get rid of the monster. He cut the ropes free and slung them in the river, and then he dragged the boat out and chopped it up and used it for kindling after it dried.

What's crazy is that people still came in packs to see the White River Monster. They was even "explorers" come to look for it. The funniest thing I ever saw was when one of them fellows put on what he called a "diving suit" with a long air hose, and he eased off a barge and down into the eddy. Problem was that some kind of valve on his air hose got stuck and his suit got pumped up with air and he come shooting up like a cork. It was even written up in the papers.

DIVER CONTINUES SEARCH FOR WHITE RIVER MONSTER

Newport. July 24 Search for the White River monster came to a sudden halt yesterday afternoon when, at 50 feet below the surface, the air valve in diver Charles B. Brown's helmet closed, his rubber suit inflated to balloon-like proportions, and he shot to the top of the water like a cork.

That's the first sentence, but you'll want to read the whole thing.

Paragould Soliphone, Paragould, AR, Mon. July 26, 1937, p. 4.
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What was almost as funny as that fellow popping out of the river was what Little Dave did next. He was watching the whole flummadiddle taking place, so he decided to make a little fun of his own. He fastened on his diving helmet and hose and walked out of the woods stark naked and into the river. Then he picked up a good sized rock big enough to sink him to the bottom and proceeded to do just that. The hose was plenty long enough for him to breathe, and he was down there for fifteen maybe twenty minutes while balloon man and his crew watched from the barge. When Little Dave came up, he had a sack half-full of mussel shells, maybe the last batch he would ever gather, and he says to the diver, "Lookahere what that old monster gave me: a sack of wampum! A lot of folks think he's mean, but it ain't so. He's gentle as a beagle pup, if you speak nice to him." And with that he walked butt naked out of the river and went to his cabin singing, "Oh, the monster of the River White / Leaves the river every night / And brings me crappie, trout, and bass / If you don't like him, kiss my ass!" and other such nonsense.

And that's the story of the White River Monster. Well, almost. I think it was around 1940 that some writer put it in the paper the whole thing was a joke. I heard Little Dave's cousin spilled the beans. You can read about it if you want to. You just gotta have the patience to read through a bunch of old papers.

Thanks for recording my story. I'm an old man now and like to die, and I'm glad somebody might still hear it.

© Otis Bulfinch - Original retelling based on oral history

Historical References:

1. Encyclopedia of Arkansas: White River Monster

2. Huddleston, Duane, Sammie Rose, and Pat Wood. Steamboats and Ferries on White River. Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995. 176.

3-6. Various historical newspaper articles from the Paragould Soliphone and other Arkansas newspapers (1937-1940)

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