The Father of Indiana History and the Lake Monster

On August 8, 1838, readers of the Indiana Democrat in Indianapolis were greeted by a special correspondence from the northern Indiana community of Logansport, which had been originally printed in the Logansport Telegraph. 

 

The article, signed “A Visiter to the Lake,” reported on the sighting of a sixty-foot-long creature sliding through the once quiet waters of Lake Manitou, located near Rochester in what is now Fulton County. One eyewitness, who viewed the monster from the safety of the shoreline, described the beast’s head as “being about three feet across the frontal bone . . . but the neck tapering, and having the character of the serpent; color dingy, with large bright yellow spots.”

  

This was not the first time such a creature had made an appearance. The behemoth had loomed large in the legend of the Potawatomi Indians of the area, who called it “Meshekenabek.” The Potawatomi’s belief in the monster was so great that one local historian noted that “they would not hunt upon its borders, nor fish in its waters for fear of incurring the anger of the Evil spirit that made its home in this little woodland lake.” In fact, the Potawatomis later cautioned white settlers against building a mill on the lake, predicting that the monster would “rush forth from his watery dominions and take indiscriminate vengeance on all those who resided near the sacred lake.” The power of the tale was such that several men who worked in surveying the lake for the mill reported seeing the monster—making it difficult to find men willing to finish the job.

The monster inhabiting what came to be celebrated as “Devil’s Lake” soon received the attention of newspapers not only in Indiana’s capital city, but also in such far-flung locales as Buffalo, Boston, and New York. The creature’s existence became hotly debated by Logansport’s two newspapers—the Telegraph, which printed the first report of the monster in its July 21, 1838, edition, and its rival publication, the Herald, which lambasted the Telegraph’s story and touted instead the existence of another monster in Bass Lake. Other doubters scoffed at those who claimed to have seen the creature, saying that the “men saw the monster through glass, the glass of a whiskey jug.”

  

The man responsible for the Telegraph’s publication of this unlikely story was a person who, in all other respects, seemed to be the least likely to come up with such a whopper of a tale—John Brown Dillon, who became known as the “Father of Indiana History” for his much respected History of Indiana, which went through four editions between 1843 and 1859, and helped save future the state’s past for future generations through his work with a number of early Hoosier historical organizations. His writings won praise from Indiana historians who came after him, with one, Emma Lou Thornbrough, commending Dillon for being the “only person in the state in this period whose writings deserved to be called history by modern standards of historical scholarship.” 

Dillon had help in his “Devil’s Lake” escapade, as noted pioneer Hoosier artist George Winter contributed several of the articles about the monster printed in the Telegraph and an illustration featuring a method of possibly capturing the creature.

  

Details about Dillon’s early life are sketchy at best. Born sometime in 1808 in Wellsburg, Brooke County, in what is now West Virginia, Dillon and his family soon moved to Belmont County, Ohio. After the death of his father, nine-year-old Dillon was apprenticed to a printer in Charleston. At the age of seventeen Dillon moved to Cincinnati, where he displayed literary skill, having his poems published in several local newspapers. 

Sometime in his life Dillon had suffered a visual malformity, and always could be seen wearing dark-green eyeglasses equipped with side mirrors. His friend, Logansport attorney and later Indiana supreme court judge Horace P. Biddle, recalled that “familiar as we were for so many years, meeting at all hours of the day, under all circumstances—even to bathing in the river—I never saw his face without his glasses on, which he always wore fastened by a little cord around the back of his head.” After Dillon’s death, when his body was being prepared for burial, Biddle investigated and discovered that his friend’s “left eye had been broken, apparently by a blow of some kind, and partially wasted away.”

  

By 1834 Dillon had settled in Logansport, where he studied law and was admitted to the Cass County bar in 1840. He never, however, established a law practice, preferring instead, noted Biddle, to spend his time on “hoary border legends, traditional story, but more especially local history.” Dillon pursued these interests through a career in pioneer journalism, starting work as an editor for the Logansport Canal Telegraph in August 1834. A year later he purchased an interest in the newspaper, which, by 1836, had changed its name to the Logansport Telegraph.

  

Described by his friends as shy, serious, and intellectual in nature, Dillon exhibited another side to his character in an incident during his time as the Telegraph’s editor. Biddle recalled that he, Dillon, and Winter were in his law office on April 1, 1840, when someone mentioned that it was April Fool’s Day. Dillion was keen on the idea of fooling somebody and wrote out a notice and tacked it on a billboard in the office of the hotel where he lived. The notice read: “There will be exhibited at the court house this evening a living manthorp, from 8 to 10 o’clock. Sir Roger De Coverly, Manager.”

  

Dillion’s notice had an immediate effect. At dinner that night, Biddle recalled, clergymen, lawyers, and other learned men of the community were searching every book they could find to learn what a manthorp was. “The word manthorp is really a compound of two Anglo-Saxon words,” Biddle noted, “meaning ‘the man of the village.’ For a long time afterwards Mr. Dillon’s ‘April Fool’ was locally a popular anecdote.”

  

If the Lake Manitou monster is but a legend, then the “living manthrop” was not Dillon’s first practical joke on the citizens of Logansport. The bespectacled editor, however, did not herald the monster’s existence by himself. He had the assistance of the English-born Winter, who came to Logansport from Indianapolis in May 1837, as he later wrote, “for the purpose . . . of seeing and learning something of the Indians and exercising the pencil in that direction.” Winter obviously had learned something of the Indians’ “Devil’s Lake” legend—knowledge he used for his articles in Dillon’s Telegraph.

  

Later in life, Winter confirmed his authorship of some of the newspaper articles about the monster and expressed his surprise at the reception they had received. In a December 16, 1871, letter to B. J. Lossing, Winter wrote: “I felt a deep interest in this inland lake as I had gathered up the facts in relation to the Indian story associated with it. . . . From the peculiarity of the tradition and from its emanating from a ‘Wild Region’ of [the] country, it won the attention of the press and went ‘the rounds’ unexpectedly to my anticipation or aspirations.”

Although Winter may have expressed astonishment over the response to his article years after the fact, initially he did try to stir up some reaction through the newspaper. The week following the first article on the creature, the Telegraph printed a second story titled “The Monster.” The story proposed calling a meeting to discuss the possibility of an expedition to the lake to “capture the Leviathan that inhabits its mysterious depths.” Written by Winter, the article went on to sound a battle cry to the local citizenry:

 

“It would be well, probably to suggest the propriety of those holding a meeting who are favorable, and willing to support the effort to ascertain with certainty, whether the mysterious, old and cherished tradition of the Indians, is based upon a KNOWN species of fish, or serpent, or whether the field of science shall be extended by the discovery of a new species of animal, peculiar to this beautiful and not oft visited Lake Mani-i-too.

 

It is truly astonishing that such a small inland lake, so remote too from the seas, should be as mysterious in its depths as it is in its legendary associations. But so it is. Boys! Up with your harpoons and to the Lake Man-i-too. The weather, the season, the forest in all its leafy beauties offer you inducements to leave the turmoil of every day life for a week, and seek relaxation in the exciting expedition to the Devil’s Lake.”

 

Although a meeting was organized on August 11, 1838, at the Eel River and Cass County Seminary to discuss methods of capturing the monster, no expedition to the lake was ever mounted by Logansport residents. According to a local historian, a “sickly season, combined with other circumstances,” prevented the investigation from happening. The creature remained safe and hidden.

  

Articles on the monster inhabiting Lake Manitou died out from the Telegraph’s pages by September 1838. Interest in the creature was resurrected, however, in 1849 when Winter wrote an article for the Logansport Journal on “The Monster Caught at Last.” The story reported the capture of a fish weighing “several hundred weight—the head alone weighs upward of 30 pounds and its capacity for swallowing may be imagined when we state the mouth measures three feet in circumference.” Also, in 1888, according to a history of Fulton County, a 116-pound spoonbill catfish was pulled from the lake by four men, who placed the fish in a horse trough by the courthouse in Rochester and charged people ten cents for a peek at the great beast. They later took their catch exhibit in Logansport. Eventually, they butchered the catfish and sold it at ten cents per pound.

  

Dillon’s work as a historian soon usurped his journalism career. He started his research on a history of Indiana in 1838, receiving assistance from U.S. Senator John Tipton, a close friend. Dillon left Logansport in 1842, moving to Indianapolis to pursue his historical studies and find funding for his history. Although he could rely on materials from the state library and private collections, Dillon lamented that “many interesting facts, connected with the early settlement of Indiana, have been perverted, or lost forever, because they were never recorded, and the stream of tradition seldom bears to the present, faithfully, the history of the past.” Still, his Historical Notes on the Discovery and Settlement of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio, appeared in 1843, and was followed sixteen years later by his History of Indiana. His posthumously published Oddities of Colonial Legislation in America came out in 1879. 

  

Fellow Hoosier historian George S. Cottman, founder of the Indiana Magazine of History, dubbed Dillon as the “Father of Indiana History” and praised him as the first in the state to enter the field “with any seriousness of purpose, and his contributions exceed in value any that have come after.” In his writing Dillon displayed “immense industry, unflagging perseverance and an ever-present purpose to find and state the truth,” said Cottman.

  

Dillon himself wrote that in his work he was striving to give an “impartial” recording of history. He noted in his preface to his History of Indiana that in writing the book he attempted to keep his mind free from such influences as “ambitious contentions between distinguished men, or from false traditions, or from national partialities and antipathies, or from excited conflicts between the partisans of antagonistic political systems, or from dissensions among uncharitable teachers of different creeds of religion.”

  

In 1845 the state legislature elected Dillon as state librarian, a post he held until 1851, when a Democratic legislature replaced him with Nathaniel Bolton. Dillon later served as, assistant secretary of state, secretary to the State Board of Agriculture and held numerous offices with the Indiana Historical Society, including secretary and librarian. He proved indefatigable at adding books and manuscripts to the Society’s early collection. In addition to state offices, Dillon served on a variety of Indianapolis governmental bodies, including being a member of the Marion County Library Board and a school trustee.

  

In 1862 Dillon left Indianapolis for Washington, D.C., where he received a position as clerk to the Department of the Interior, later moving to a job as clerk with the House Military Affairs Committee. Civic leaders in Indianapolis remembered Dillon’s contributions to the state, with noted attorney Calvin Fletcher calling upon the state legislature to bring the historian back to Indiana to write a history of the state’s contribution to the Civil War. Dillon finally returned to Indianapolis in 1875, living in a room at Johnson’s Building on Washington Street. He struggled to make a living, even having to sell his beloved library to make ends meet. Dillon died on January 27, 1879, and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery.