Wallowa Lake Monster

Wallowa Lake fills a deep glacial trough at the foot of the Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon, a mile south of the town of Joseph. The lake is roughly three and a half miles long and about 300 feet deep at its lowest point, and the cold, clear water has the sort of dark middle that invites stories. Its local monster, nicknamed “Wally” in modern retellings, is one of Oregon’s oldest recorded lake legends.

The earliest dated report comes from the Chieftain, a newspaper then published at Joseph, which on November 5, 1885 printed the account of an unnamed prospector. Rowing north across the lake one autumn evening, he said, a huge creature rose some fifty yards to one side of his skiff with a long neck lifted ten or twelve feet out of the water, then dived and came up on the other side, bellowing like a cow. He judged the body to be about a hundred feet long and the head broad and flat, rather like a hippopotamus. The paper’s writer was frank that the tale might be an invention, though he noted that the man seemed sincere and that the lake had been sounded to some 270 feet, deep enough to hide almost anything.

The same article mentions an older tradition of local Native people: a great creature in the lake once rose one evening and swallowed a young warrior and his bride as they paddled a canoe, and members of the tribes who lived along the shore were said to refuse to go onto the water. The 1902 Histories of Union and Wallowa Counties records a different version, in which a horned monster disturbed in the mountains fled into the lake, a brave followed it out to the middle, and both sank for good, so that anyone going near the center was thought to be doomed. A longer, more romantic telling appeared in the Wallowa Sun in 1934 from a local minister, the Rev. E. A. Pollock, who presented it as a story told around Nez Perce campfires: a peace marriage between the daughter of a Nez Perce chief and the son of a Blackfeet chief ends when a monstrous serpent rises and destroys their canoe, and both peoples take it as a sign of the Great Spirit’s anger. The Wallowa band of the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) made this valley their homeland, so these should be read as non-Native writers’ retellings of a living tradition, not as settled fact; the versions differ and their Nez Perce sources are not independently documented.

Later sighting claims, mostly collected by folklore websites and local storytellers, describe humped backs, a long neck and a dark body in the decades since, but few have named witnesses or contemporary newspaper coverage. The monster today is mainly a piece of lake-country lore for summer visitors at the south end of the lake.

In the 1885 account, a flat, broad head like a hippopotamus on a neck as thick as a man’s body, rising ten to twelve feet from the water, with a body estimated at 100 feet. Later retellings add humps along the back and horns on the head.

The deep middle of Wallowa Lake, especially around dusk, and the surface of the lake in the warm summer months when boaters are out. The lake lies at about 4,370 feet and is ringed by moraines and snow-capped peaks.

The lake is part of the homeland of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce, and a memorial to Chief Joseph overlooks the water. Since the 1880s it has been a summer resort, with a state park at its south end and a gondola tramway, built in 1968, that climbs Mount Howard for views of the lake. The monster is a minor attraction beside the scenery, but it appears regularly in Wallowa County history pages, blogs and campfire stories.