Skunk River Monster

ELNOR, GORRELL

Posted By: JCGS Volunteer
Date: 9/16/2014 at 11:10:31

Skunk River Monster
Excitement swept southern Iowa.
A sea monster 81 feet long and more than seven feet high had been killed in the Skunk River near Oskaloosa, a 1884 newspaper story said.
The creature had made its way up the river 100 miles from the Mississippi, the story said. A 300-pound hog made only a mouthful for the monster.
Rifle and revolver bullets bounced off its hide. Only a cannon loaded with railroad spikes finally succeeded in slaying it.
The story appeared in the old Newton Herald and was picked up by many other papers, including the Oskaloosa Saturday Herald. The yarn reached Vicksburg, Miss., where a newspaper told of a “wild rumor” upriver that such a creature had swallowed two children. And a Cairo, Ill., paper said a river monster 150 feet long had attacked and almost capsized a ferry boat on the Mississippi.
Only after the Skunk River story had appeared in papers around the country was it learned that the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by Dr. J. R. Gorrell, a practical joker of Newton, Ia. Dr. Gorrell served as a Union Army surgeon in the Civil War. He got the hoax going with the help of a few newspaper editors.
Hoaxes have excited, frightened, entertained and sometimes victimized Iowans in the last century or more. Among them were the first hobo “convention” at Britt; the “Drake Estate” hocus-pocus foisted upon thousands of unsuspecting investors; the “Cardiff Giant” of Fort Dodge; and the “Sergeant O’Leary” fake at Eldora.
No hoax was wilder than the account of the Skunk River monster. The story said farmer James Wright near Oskaloosa lost 10 or 12 hogs weighing 250 to 400 pounds each during a 20-day period.
Wright hid out one night with his dog and gun. At dawn he saw “a gigantic animal or reptile large enough and hideous enough to appall the strongest man” emerge from the river.
The monster had legs “three feet long and thick as a man’s body” and a body “four to five feet in diameter.”
Work spread quickly around the countryside. More than 40 armed men on horseback and several hundred on foot converged on the Wright farm. William Smith got too close, the story said. The monster grabbed the horse he was riding. Smith barely escaped with his life.
By noon 2,000 men were following the creature’s movements, the story continued. Gunfire was so great. “It sounded like a battlefield.”
“Up to 3 p.m.,” the yarn added, “10,000 shots had been fired without eve4n having infuriated” the monster.
At 5:20 p.m. a Civil War artilleryman fired a cannon loaded with railroad spikes. The spikes penetrated the hide and the creature died “with a piteous wail or groan.” The story said it took a team of 12 yoke of oxen to pull the body from the water.
What motivated Dr. Gorrell to concoct such a yarn is not known. Whether he was any good as a physician was not known either. But he certainly had a rich imagination.
(Source: Apparently from The Des Moines Register (date unknown) because a note said, “Iowa historian George Mills is a retired Register reporter”. Edwin Elnor of Denver, CO who found it in his father’s things sent it. His father was a Newton author who wrote “Tall Tales.”