19th Century’s Vermillon Beast
Posted by: Loren Coleman on January 8th, 2009
Daily Huronite [Huron, South Dakota] October 20, 1892
Another Calamityite.
Rapid City [South Dakota] Journal.
The following from a South Dakota exchange revives the Missouri sea serpent story of 1875-6 near Vermillion when many people really were frightened at its appearance: “There is a genuine ‘sea serpent’ or more properly a river serpent has its home in the Missouri [River], not far from Sioux City. It was seen by Mr. Edwin Philbrook and two others a few days ago. It was seen to emerge from the water in a slough, crawl across a sand bar and plunge into the river. It was over thirty feet long, had several fins, and was scaley and ugly in appearance. It plowed a furrow in the sand where it crossed the bar that looked like a trough.”
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This is thanks to Jerome Clark. Theo Paijmans notes he has been trying to track down specifics for ages on the “Vermillon Beast” that allegedly terrorized the area. Clark first heard of the story from a short reference in John Keel’s Strange Creatures from Time and Space. This news item fills in the picture a bit more.
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sounds either like a large eel or (something I know is more prevalent down there) a large catfish. There are some catfish known to leave a dying water hole and literally walk on their fins to look for a better one. That is why they are having a hard time keeping this one from taking over. Although are eels scaly?
Sounds like a highly exaggerated alligator to me. Behavior-wise, the crawling over a sand bar and leaving a furrow seems a good indicator. The appearance sounds exaggerated, but a large alligator would definitely serve as a good palette for a nineteenth-century newspaper man to have fun with.
Why don’t they check the sand bar? It’s going to have some clues.
I agree with semillama; probably most people living that far up the Mississippi River system had never seen a gator. And I think it is a little to late to check the sandbar.
I have heard of river critters before and wonder if things don’t wander up from other bodies of water…the White River is another one of those places where there were a rash of sightings in a river for a period of time, but no one ever got too much information on things.
The eel idea is good, but does not fit with the scaly skin…and while it talks of lots of fins, it does not mention limbs which would knock down the alligator idea (though a 30 ft alligator would be cool too…and disconcerting). And as was said, catfish while big, they don’t really look that scaly either.
Sounds like something really odd was seen, but not something familiar. And from the description I would say whoever it was got a decent enough look at it to say whether it would have been a fish or a gator. Should look at places up and down the Missouri in the surrounding years for other paper clippings of odd sightings along that river…like maybe the 1-2 years prior and after…
I live in this general area, actually my hometown is situated right on the Missouri River, I have never heard of this story before. Maybe it was a paddlefish, they’re rare but they are in the Missouri up this way and they do get pretty big. Or how about a gar or sturgeon, they both get pretty big also and are ugly, weird looking fish. There is a type of fish here that are called eelots(?) that somewhat appear eel like, although I’ve never heard of one more than a foot or two. As far as a river “beast” I highly doubt it.
sturgeons can certainly get large and long however i’ve never heard of one pushing itself overland with it’s fins, especially if it was a 30 ft sturgeon it would be a very heavy fish and i think it would be somewhat of a beached whale on shore.